Kenny Robertson of Wex Training Group joins me this week to talk about a new emergency medical training program aimed at concealed carriers.
Robertson spent 22 years in the Army Green Berets as part of the 5th Special Forces Group. He served in Afghanistan, Iraq, Syrian, and Lebanon as a medic. After that, he spent years training others to do the same thing as director of the Tactical Casualty Combat Care and Prolonged Field Care programs at the Joint Special Operations Medical Training Center in Fort Bragg, NC.
Now, he’s teamed up with Brandon Wexler and Charrie Derosa of Wex Gunworks in Delray Beach, Florida to bring that same level of training to the civilian world. The high-profile gun shop, which has been featured everywhere from NBC News to The Washington Post to The Washington Free Beacon, hopes to bring that same caliber of training to those who carry guns.
Robertson was nice enough to give me a demo of the class recently. I was lucky enough to go through a Stop the Bleed course when I trained with FASTER Colorado a few years ago. The principles in the Wex class are much the same, but the experience is elevated.
For one, it’s much more visceral. More realistic. Ultimately, more impactful.
Lots of training courses have training tourniquets and CPR dummies. Wex takes that to the next level by adding detailed training dummies, including ones that actually bleed.
It’s far more memorable to try and apply a tourniquet high and tight when blood is literally spurting out onto your hands. When the skin feels natural and the flesh compresses like the real thing, it hits differently in your mind. The added feedback of actually witnessing the bleeding stop instead of just imagining it is game-changing.
On top of that, Robertson’s real-life stories of how he has applied these techniques to save lives in the field make it all that much more memorable.
It’s the kind of training I’m convinced people who concealed carry should invest in. After all, we spend thousands to carry a gun in the unlikely case we’ll be in a deadly force incident. Well, if you’re preparing for what might happen in a shootout, you should probably prepare for what you’ll do if you or somebody else actually gets shot.
All the same principles apply here. You can’t count on a medic getting to you before you bleed out. So, you better learn to help yourself.
Besides, you’re more likely to run into some sort of medical emergency in your daily life than you are to run into a deadly force attack. Better to be prepared than sorry.
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