Taught a pistol class on Saturday

FBMG held a basic defensive pistol class out at Global One last Saturday.  The main instructor was a 20+ year SF vet, who’d been through a lot of really high-level firearms training.  I was the assistant instructor.  For me personally, it was a good opportunity to see what kind of methods somebody with a lot of experience used. 

 

We started out working on the fundamentals during the morning.  Grip, stance, sight alignment, trigger-pull, etc.  Then we moved into lots and lots of presentations from the holster.  Then we went into a presentation with single shots. 

 

At one point, we were a couple of hours in, and somebody asked if we were going to use all of the 300 rounds that they had been asked to bring.  Oh yeah, but fundamentals come first.  Advanced stuff is just doing the fundamentals faster and at weird angles. 

 

We worked on magazine changes, both with retention, and speed reloads. 

 

We did dummy drills, where a partner loads your magazines with a few random dummy rounds, that way he could then watch to see if you were flinching or had other bad habits hidden by recoil.

 

Next was flash sight pictures, then we moved into controlled pairs.  There was some discussion about “double taps” vs. controlled pairs.  Double tap equals one sight picture, bang, bang, and on anything past conversational distance, I’m not laying any bets on where the 2nd bang landed.  A controlled pair is flash sight picture, bang, flash sight picture, bang.  Almost as fast, a whole lot more accurate.

 

Once everybody had the hang of that, we went into engaging multiple targets.  Then shooting on the move, both forward, back, laterally, and diagonal, all while using the same basic fundamental presentation.  By this point, the round count was really going up quick. 

 

Finally we shot from various positions of cover, standing lean, kneeling, squatting, etc.

 

We closed the day by going back to fundamental dummy drills. 

 

Overall, everyone in the class did a great job.  They were great students.  Some struggled, but they were real troopers, hung in there, and by the end of the class I could see serious improvement in every single shooter.  I was impressed with the students we had, and would look forward to having any of them in a class again. 

 

The only downside of class was when Uncle Barbie took my truck down to the Maverick to pick up lunch and then crashed into a police car on the way back.    Nobody was hurt though, and it wasn’t Uncle Barbie’s fault, which made my insurance company really happy. 

Mandatory Training for CCW
Curse you Order Of The Stick

4 thoughts on “Taught a pistol class on Saturday”

  1. Did you include malfunction clearances? I took a similar class over the weekend, and that’s the only thing from our syllabus I don’t see on your list.

  2. We did some basic malfunction clearance drills, but didn’t get into a lot of it. There’s so many things to teach, and so little time.

  3. Malfunction clearance drills are just pull out the magazine really hard, then rack the slide 3 or 4 times, right? Having a dummy bullet in the chamber was kind of like that, cause you had to rack it in order to get to shoot again.

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