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Bad Bob & Headshot Bob
Tactical Target
Training Systems
By Seth R. Nadel
The suspect was lurking just around a corner. As the officer "sliced the pie," she first saw a bit of his shirt. With the next look, she could see the gun in his hand, and responded with two shots to the edge of his chest, as the suspect was standing at an angle. The rounds penetrated to the vital zone, and the suspect fell to the ground with a metallic "clunk." A metallic clunk?
The officer was in training, and her agency, recognizing that typical "line dance" shooting is not enough, included tactical scenarios. If police officers and armed civilians are training to live, then they must train as they will fight. And in a fight, powerful repeated shots, delivered to the vital organs, will eventually cause the attackers to fall down. It makes sense to use targets that both look like people and fall down when they are hit in the vital zone.
Putting these two items together in a reasonable way has resulted in the Bad Bob Target. It is essentially a steel plate, in the shape of the vital zone of a person, with some hooks on the front. The hooks hold a foam cutout that looks like a person, and can even be dressed in appropriate clothing (size extra-large). The hinged base is designed to allow a knockdown at various power levels. Thus multiple headshots with a .380 can be "dialed in," or it may take several center-of-chest hits from a .45 or fully loaded .357 Magnum. Either reflects what can happen in real life. And just like life on the street, edge hits or hits in the center of mass with low-powered rounds does not put Bad Bob on the ground.
Bad Bob does not drop— he kind of falls in slow motion. Replicating the real world, it may take several hits after he starts to fall to really put him down. Set just right, Bad Bob may even rock back a bit, and then return to fully upright. He never did read that advertising copy about your ammo working every time, and you will have to employ plan B¾ head- shots.
There is one other nuance in the construction of Bad Bob. The vertical support can be ordered on the face of the impact plate. This means that, just as in defensive shooting, when engaging from an acute angle, the correct point of air is not the center of the chest, but on a line passing through the vital zone. On Bad Bob, an angled shot through the foam does nothing. But a shot or shots into the vital zone, properly placed, strikes the vertical support and Bad Bob bites the dust.
As with any steel target, there is a chance for backscatter toward the shooter. Fortunately, the foam and clothing of the target absorbs most of this. As long as the shooter is ten yards away, the scatter is not a problem. In testing for S.W.A.T., it was noticed that lead reloads caused far more scatter than jacketed rounds, regardless of caliber. The foam is good for hundreds of shots, and can then be inverted (Bad Bob has two heads) for hundreds more.
In response to the infamous Los Angeles bank robbery, Bad Bob is also available with a vital zone of the head only— Head-Shot Bob. Here is an excellent way to teach body-armor drills— if repeated center-of-mass hits do not work, aim for the head.
This is a viable training tool that has a place in any practical training program. It can convince those who want to carry submarginal rounds like the .22, .25 and .32 (and others) of the errors of their ways. It can force even the better shooters with high-powered ammunition to focus on the front sight and make hits that count. Every training facility will want one or more Bad Bobs mixed in with other target systems to round out training. Survivors will want to have a Bad Bob in their training background to be fully prepared for the hard times of the street.
Seth Nadel is the former head of firearms training for the U.S. Customs Academy in Arizona.
© S.W.A.T. Magazine December 1997
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