My long time friend John Holschen died last Thursday morning. He was one of the rare intellectuals in the firearms/self defense training world. I never missed an opportunity to take one of John’s classes or listen to one of his podcast appearances. John was one of the few people on the cutting edge, developing truly innovative new firearms training techniques.
I was absolutely stunned when I got the phone call from a friend informing me of John’s death. The family requested that no one go public with the information of John’s death until all of his friends/family had been notified in person. That’s both unusual and tremendously respectful in today’s “breaking news” always- connected world. I respected his wife Martha’s wishes and have held off posting this reflection of John’s life until now.
I first became aware of John Holschen and his training when he was working with Greg Hamilton as part of Insights Training Center. A couple of my friends had been to some of John’s training classes and raved about them. I joined Insights Training’s Yahoo email discussion list (remember those?) in the late 1990s. John’s advice on that list was extremely insightful and guided a lot of my perspectives as a young firearms instructor.
I met John in person the first time when I competed in the National Tactical Invitational way back in 2004. John had recently come home from Iraq and did a class at the conference debriefing Al Qaeda’s plans for attacks on US soil. It was an impressive class and John was a very impressive instructor.
John also designed one of the match stages that mirrored intercepted Islamic terrorist plans to attack a major golf event in the USA. The match stage took place on a rifle range and involved taking fire from several terrorists armed with rifles from 50-100 yards away. Participants were only armed with concealed handguns as if they were playing golf on the course.
As the blank gunfire started and I began to shoot at the long range falling silhouette targets, I moved to a nearby golf cart placed on the range with plans to use it as cover (students were evaluated not only on their marksmanship ability but tactics as well). I noticed some smoke coming from one of the distant targets and in a couple seconds I saw a rocket flying right towards my “cover.”
I had never thought that I might be engaged by rocket fire and had no plans to deal with it. I hunkered down behind the golf cart as the smoking rocket destroyed my “cover” and I was ruled “dead.”
The range staff had placed a model rocket on a thin piece of wire that stretched from a target to the golf cart that they knew students would use for cover. They triggered the model rocket remotely to simulate an RPG attack plan that was discovered during intelligence gathering efforts in Iraq.
That was the first time that John “blew my mind” but it wouldn’t be the last.
Many tribute articles like this one often recount the departed’s biography and accolades. I’m not going to do that here. John wasn’t one to talk about his achievements. His own website doesn’t even contain a biography. He was a career special forces soldier who spent a lot of time overseas in a security contracting, intelligence gathering, and training capacity for various branches of the government as well as big name contracting entities that you would recognize. His resume was more extensive than anyone’s in the business, but he never bragged about it.
I saw John most often at the Rangemaster Tactical Conference where we both taught annually for more than a decade. If John was giving a lecture at TacCon, I never missed it. I was also honored to share the range with him teaching at a unique training event at Tactical Response organized by my friend Andy Stanford. I can honestly say that I learned something new in every single conversation I had with John. He was one of the most curious and analytical trainers I ever met.
I’m not very good at taking photos. I think this may be the only pic I have of both John and I together. It’s from the 2022 Surgical Speed Shooting conference I mentioned above.
John is standing in the back row next to James Yeager. Neither is with us any longer.
Early in his training career, John was known for being one of the few trainers to actually integrate firearms training with physical defense tactics back in the late 1990s and early 2000s. What now is commonplace was virtually unheard of 25+ years ago. As both an amazing shooter and accomplished martial artist, he was uniquely situated to integrate firearms and combatives (as well as knives and medical skills) into his training classes.
In more recent years, he has been building curriculum around training with Dustin Solomon‘s Nuro device that projects visible start and stop signals on shooters’ targets. John was one of the few trainers in the industry to advocate that students learn how to STOP SHOOTING as soon as the threat ends rather than just focusing on how quickly and accurately people can put rounds down range. He was the epitome of the thinking gunfighter.
This type of training using visual stop and start shooting signals is still in its infancy. John was leading the charge to make it more commonplace in our “go fast” shooting world. Right now only a few other nationally-known trainers (namely John Hearne, Brian Hill, and John Murphy) are trying to advance the work the John Holschen advocated so well. This stuff is cutting edge and will represent the next big “era” in firearms training history.
To keep John’s memory alive, I’m sharing my favorite interviews and podcast appearances with him. If you didn’t know or never trained with John, you owe it to yourself to study these resources. If any of you readers have other solid references containing John’s thoughts or teachings, please feel free to contact me and I’ll add them to the list below.
I’ll miss our conversations and hope that John knows that he did a lot of good things and saved a lot of lives in our contentious and dangerous world. I’m proud to have called him a friend.
The Gas Station Clerk
Braintrust Assembled: Dustin Salomon, John Hearne, and John Holschen
John Holschen: Aligning Training with Reality
What a Training Program Should Be
