Guns

How not to handle a gun

/ hsoi / 2 Comments

Seen over at Unc’s

All sorts of displays of how not to handle a gun.

2:59 – pointing gun at the lady on her left.

3:00 – her own hand in front of the muzzle, still pointing gun at the lady to her left.

3:05 – yes, your gun handling is making me very nervous

3:07 – well, you’ve got some good trigger finger discipline

3:08 – again, her hand right over the muzzle

3:09 – waving the gun at the lady to her left

3:11 – called!!

3:12 – “but it’s empty”. BULLSHIT! All guns are always loaded. Never point a gun at anything you’re not willing to destroy. ALWAYS keep the gun pointed in a safe direction. And no, I do not believe your promise, I cannot believe your promise.

3:14 – “let’s just show folks”… show them what? That now you’re pointing the muzzle at them (the camera)?

3:15 – “take the clip out”. Clip? AARRRGH!!!

3:16 – still no idea what a safe direction is. And all she did was rack it and then press the trigger. She did NOT perform any sort of visual nor tactile chamber check. Guess she doesn’t realize that extractors can fail, that rounds can be stuck in dirty chambers. Granted, she probably did confirm the state of the gun before recording this segment, but she’s still making a poor showing on how to safely handle a gun… while trying to convince us that the gun is safe and she’s a safe gun handler. *headdesk*

3:18 – again with the muzzle in the hand.

And I couldn’t watch any more.

Jan, I appreciate what you’re trying to do, but you’re doing it wrong.

Please review the rules. Now. For the sake of everyone, including yourself. And please don’t just review them, please put them into practice every time you handle a gun.

Tulsa courthouse shootout

/ hsoi / 4 Comments

Article in the UK (of all places to print it) about a recent shootout at a Tulsa, OK shootout.

Has many pictures of the incident, taken by a bystander in a nearby building.

Excellent pictures (yes, there’s blood, don’t look if that bothers you). What’s great to see about the pictures is 1. the trigger finger discipline by the police, 2. that they seem to have gotten good hits from a distance… that’s hard to tell for sure based on the pictures, but it’s reasonable to imply based upon what you see.

Training good.

Looking deeper into the findings….

/ hsoi / 16 Comments

A few days ago I saw Unc had posted a link to this article on “Self Defense Findings”.

What struck me about the article was that it came from Claude Werner. I got to train with Claude a year ago, and as I wrote in my AAR:

After we finished FoF, we went inside for a presentation by Claude. Claude maintains a database of some over 3000 incidents of “gunfights” in America. This database of incidents has provided him with a great deal of information and perspective. Furthermore, he’s read the law enforcement records, such as the annual FBI reports. All of this has enabled Claude to really understand what “gunfights” are truly like, at least here in the USA. I refuse to spoil it by talking too much about it here, you’ll have to attend a class or conference to hear it. This alone was worth the tuition.

So this new article was interesting because, after having seen how Claude collects and reviews data, I thought there could be some good tidbits to take home.

You have to go read the article to understand what follows here. But just in the off-chance the referenced website goes away (the Int3rw3bz has a habit of that), I thought the information was worth archiving in a PDF.

My Thoughts

As soon as I saw this article, I shared it with my fellow KR Training instructors because we’ve all trained with Claude and know where he’s coming from. I started to formulate this article, but Karl beat me to a response by commenting at the original blog (I’ve been busy). Still, I wanted to write my thoughts down.

Given Claude’s nature and hobby for collecting and analyzing data, I certainly read the article with interest. But upon reading it, the conclusions felt in stark contrast to other data I’ve seen on “private citizen” self-defense incidents.

Locations

Claude’s data shows 52% of incidents happening at home, 32% in a business. That’s the #1 and #2 locations.

US Department of Justice Robbery locations in 2007 have the street at 43.8%, residence at 15.2%. This comes from the April 2012 Rangemaster Newsletter

So, you are almost three times as likely to be robbed on the street than at home, and in the home only accounts for 1 robbery in 6. Similar patterns exist for rape, aggravated assaults, etc. In fact, good locks, an alarm system, and proper lighting can reduce your risk of violent crime at home to very low levels.

This also jives with data on encounters with plain-clothes FBI and DEA agents. Furthermore, looking at Tom Givens’ own student incidents, almost none of them happened in the home. I have papers with Tom’s data, but am having a hard time finding them online since Rangemaster recently redid their website: good redo, but many old links broken and getting at all the newsletter PDF’s is tough. 😦  If someone wants it that bad, I’ll go find my papers and print them here.

The upshot is Claude’s data makes it look like most violent encounters happen in the home. But is that really the case? His data set is the only one I’ve seen that draws that conclusion. Thus, it makes me want to look at the data set. Claude’s data is coming from the NRA’s American Rifleman magazine’s “Armed Citizen” column. It covers 5 years from 1997 to 2001 looking at 482 reports. That leaves out the last 10 years, and that’s rather significant when you consider the changing landscape of “Gun Culture 2.0″… concealed carry has expanded rapidly in the past 10 years. Could that mean because there are more guns in public, we’ll have more “gun incidents in public”? perhaps. But more consider the NRA. The NRA is about gun rights, not pepper spray rights or karate chop rights, so is the “Armed Citizen” column going to cover stories where someone fended off a criminal with a right-cross to the jaw? Nope. So we can’t say what’s reported is necessarily indicative of crime in general: only what the NRA chooses to report, and then only from the submissions they receive or discover. And that’s the key to mind: this isn’t a cross-section of all incidents, just the incidents printed. I’m sure the NRA gets a LOT more submissions than they can print, just due to practical issues like physical magazine space in which to print the stories. Thus there’s going to be some editorial selection, that this story will be printed but not that one. Would the NRA print a story that makes gun owners look bad? How about a story where some “Tactical Tommy” fended off the bad guy with his AR-15? Or would it be better to pick a story where “the old white man used his old Colt revolver”? (sorry to stereotype). Does it look better to the public to have stories of home defense because that’s a bit less political, than it is stories of people toting guns in public and using them in that venue? And again consider, this is 10-15 years ago and what the landscape was like then vs. now.

I’m not saying the NRA is being biased as I have no idea what sort of editorial choices they make, but they have to be making them because only so many stories can be printed every month. To me, that taints the data set and limits the conclusions one can draw from it.

Distances

Claude’s data concluded that most, if not all, incidents happened about at arm’s length. To an extent this holds with other data, whether it’s the “3 shots, 3 yards, 3 seconds” mantra, or the 0-5 yards, or the “within a car length”. It’s generally because the attacker needs to be close to you either to injure you or because if they’re mugging you because they need to be able to talk to you. But if the majority of incidents happen in the home, according to Claude’s data, why are the homeowners even allowing someone to get that close? One advantage of firearms over other self-defense tools is their ability to overcome distance and be effective at distant targets. Why aren’t people taking up a fortified position in their house and shooting from a distance? Especially if, again as Claude’s data reports, people do not have the gun on them and have to go to another room to get the gun first? Why are they then coming back to be so close to the attacker?

One possible reason: “Defenders frequently communicate with their attackers before shooting.” And so, that suggests a few things to me. They feel in order to be heard they have to be near… but you know what? find your inner drill-sergeant and yell. Or if they can’t hear you, fine! Take up your fortified position and yell, because if they do eventually get close enough to hear you yelling, that’s far enough for them to come and get the message they’ll get shot if they come any closer. And that’s probably the other aspect of this. Most likely the communication before shooting is a lot of “don’t come closer, or I’ll shoot you” or “stay back” or other such things. But still, you can communicate this over a distance. Don’t go back to where you know there’s trouble, unless the trouble could be worse if you didn’t (e.g. spouse or child in there, etc.).

But what really got me about distance was Claude’s conclusion:

The perceived need for massive quantities of ammo, reloading, and precision shooting at distance is largely a figbar of people’s imaginations. There is simply no evidence to support the contention that any of those conditions occur during armed confrontation

That might be the case from the limited data set which Claude examined, and perhaps he’s meaning it within that context. But the presentation is such that it implies such conditions NEVER happen PERIOD in any sort of private citizen self-defense encounter. Thus you should never worry about these matters, because there’s “simply no evidence” to support they ever happen. And that’s wrong, and Mr. Werner might want to check with his friend Tom Givens for some data on this topic.

Which takes me to another reason for why people might draw closer to their attacker: they can’t shoot them from far away. If all you ever do is blaze away at a cardboard target that’s 3 yards in front of you, you’ll probably be pretty good at that distance. If you never shoot your pistol at targets 25 yards away, how much confidence do you think you’ll have if now suddenly you have to make that shot? Under stress you’ll default to what you can already do, and given a drive for success you’ll work to put things more in your favor, so if that means getting closer then you will. If more of these citizens had adequate training, training that pushed them to do things like shoot at 15 or 25 yards on a regular basis, how might this data be different? And again, with the sharp rise in Gun Culture 2.0 and more private citizens seeking formal training, what would data from the last 10 years show by contrast?

Ammo/Capacity

Throughout Claude’s examination of the stories, he finds that you just don’t need much ammo. He said:

If the defender fires any shots, most likely it will be 2 rounds.

And then the above comment that you don’t need massive quantities of ammo, and saying that a snub revolver (typically holding 5 rounds) is all you’d need.

When Karl commented on the blog posting, he mentioned how Givens’ students shot from 1 to 11 rounds. The blog owner replied taking Karl’s statement to task, and he was right in doing so because Karl left out one important part of Tom’s data: the average was 3.4 rounds. The FBI/DEA data holds about the same too.

So no, it’s not THAT much different from Claude’s data, but it’s still different.

But remember what average is, statistically. There were enough incidents that required more rounds, including at least 1 incident that needed more than 2 snubs worth of ammo, more than what a 1911 traditionally holds.

What’s hard to read about Claude’s findings is again the way it is presented, that 2 shots is all you need, you’ll never need more than 5 to take care of anything. This is simply not the case. Sure that might be the average, but boy… if you opt to train to just the averages, how do you think you’ll feel when you get to be the one statistical anomaly? Look at the edge cases in Claude’s own data and piece them together. The largest group had 7 VCA’s, and you’re going to need more than a 5-shot snub to deal with that many attackers. Again, this is about playing to statistics, about assuming you’ll be alright because the averages say. Does anyone say “gee, I wish I had LESS ammo”?

Gun

Claude writes:

At this distances, even .22s and .25s are highly immediately lethal.

A revolver, even J-frame, is perfectly capable of dealing with almost all of the incidents. The ones which were beyond the capabilities of a five shot revolver would be best deal with by a shotgun, anyway.

For those who do not practice, a revolver is far preferable to the autoloader because of the revolver’s simpler manual of arms. Eighty per cent of gunshot wounds are self-inflicted. Guns are handled many times more than they are shot and so safe gunhandling qualities are much more important characteristics than its ability to be shot accurately and reloaded quickly. Revolvers are much less likely than autoloaders to AD in the hands of novices.

Yes, I don’t want to get shot by a .22. I know a .22 could kill me. It’s not my first choice, but it’s better than no choice.

A shotgun would be better than a J-frame for sure. But I can’t carry a shotgun. Oh wait… this data shows that most incidents never happen out on the street where one might need to carry a gun. Hrm. Someone reading this data could draw the conclusion that we need personal protection in the home, but that we don’t really need it outside the home because most incidents happen inside and rarely outside. Thus why carry. Not sure that’s a good conclusion to allow people to draw.

And dealing with a snub? Folks, you have to know who Claude Werner is. He’s one of the masters of the snub revolver. He shoots IDPA matches and wins them with his snub. He was chief instructor at the Rogers Shooting School for a number of years. I’d say Claude’s abilities with a snub are far superior to the average citizen. Snubs are hard to shoot, and Claude knows that (again, see my AAR of his snub class). Yes, one reason I carry a snub as a back-up gun is because of the manual of arms: it is simpler, and if I had to give my BUG to someone else because the fur was flying that badly then I know at least I can expect them to “point and click” without having to worry about levers and gizmos and malfunctions and such: just keep pointing and clicking. But they are still very difficult to manage, very difficult to shoot well, all having very long and heavy triggers. Revolvers are not my first choice nor recommendation for anyone.

If we’re worried about AD’s? My suggestion? Get training. Understand and abide by the rules. And never think you’re above having an ND happen to you.

Conclusion

I don’t take odds with the data Claude collected, in terms of what he did and the summary picture that came out of the data set. I think it’s all reasonable collection and analysis of what was there. Furthermore, it does paint an interesting picture that’s worth knowing.

What I find problem with is some of the conclusions and suggestions in here, like that a snub is sufficient, that long distance shooting never happens, that reloads don’t happen. My fear is that someone could look at this data and use it as justification for developing a training program, or to justify they don’t need any training at all. “Why should I train how to reload? they never happen, and besides it’s a pain to reload my snub because it’s so small.”  I believe this is Karl’s fear as well, tho it wasn’t perhaps expressed well enough in his comment (given the response from the blog owner). Claude may have stated at the beginning: “You decide what suits your needs best to solve this type of problem.” but to the untrained and unknowing, they’re going to look at Claude’s data, conclusions, and suggestions as authoritative and will likely use his data, conclusions, and suggestions in formulating what suits their needs best — because they’re a n00b and don’t know what their needs are and how to satisfy them! That’s the problem.

There’s something to be said for understanding all the data, and how that generates some averages and yes how that can and should influence our training both in terms of what to train and what not to train. If most self-defense incidents end up fitting that “3 shots, 3 yards, 3 seconds”, it would stand to reason that’s something to first ensure you can do (e.g. can you clean the “3 Seconds or Less Drill” consistently, constantly, and on demand). That doesn’t mean your training should only encompass that sort of work, but if you can’t do that stuff it’s best to master it before you go on to things like group shooting at 25 yards, if self-defense is your shooting goal. But you should eventually move on to being able to shoot groups at 25 yards and not be satisfied with what the data says, what the averages are, because while certain data sets may not support a need for it, who knows… you may get to be the lucky one that establishes a new data set.

From the “where are they now?” files…

/ hsoi

Some years ago I saw Tesla live here in Austin. They were touring behind their “Real to Reel” albums.

One of the opening acts was a band called “Poets & Pornstars”. Had never heard of them before, but they put on one hell of a set and really rocked. I was an instant fan, buying their album during the break after their set and before Tesla hit the stage. The music was great, they knew how to put on a show. Just fantastic.

And they had a female bass player. No question she was a big draw for the band as I could hear it in the comments said by people in the crowd around me.

Her name? Sally Hope.

Alas, the singer of P&P opted to leave the band to return to acting. While the rest of the band tried to keep going, it looks like things fell apart. Alas… it was a good band with good potential, but these things happen. I have always wondered what happened to them, if maybe they found a new project and were able to keep going.

Well… sorta.

I just saw this post on A Girl’s Guide To Guns, which was guest-authored by Sally. Started from this post on her own site.

So it does look like she’s got a new gig, just a very different one. 🙂

Glad to see she’s still rockin’.

How could the answer be “no”?

/ hsoi / 3 Comments

I read about this CSM quiz on the Second Amendment to the US Constitution.

For giggles, I started taking the quiz.

But I haven’t finished it.

I answered question #5:

5. What did the Supreme Court decide in the 2008 case?

That’s the Heller case.

After you answer each question, it of course says if you’re right or wrong and gives a blurb expanding upon the answer. #5’s blurb was this:

The Heller case left open the broader question of whether the constitutional right to possess arms for personal protection extends beyond the home to include a right to carry those arms in public places.

That is correct, the Heller case did leave that open. I read the quiz blurb, clicked forward to the next question, but then hit my browser’s Back button because something about reading that struck me.

If we make it a yes or no question: “can/should people be allowed to possess arms for personal protection outside of the home, a right to carry them in public places… yes or no?” I cannot see how someone could answer “no” to that question. That is, if you understand the realities of life and the world we live in.

I speak with a lot of people on this topic, and so far I’ve yet to encounter someone against the notion of home defense. Home is very personal to us, not just because it’s where we keep all our stuff, but because it’s our little slice of the world, our sanctuary, our refuge. It’s very personal when our homes are violated, and I don’t know of anyone that would deny others the right to protect themselves and their posessions within the grounds of their own home. But then some of those I have spoken with that are fine with protection in the home feel that doesn’t extend outside the home.

And I don’t understand that line of reasoning.

Wife was outside our home when she was sexually assaulted. Are you saying she has no right to defend herself?

When I think about the almost 60 students of Tom Givens that have been involved in personal defense incidents, just about all of them were not in the home. They were in parking lots, parking garages, sidewalks. If the majority of assaults and violent crimes against people are not in the home, how can we say personal protection doesn’t extend outside the home! That’s where most of the incidents occur and thus where you are most likely to be the victim of a violent crime. Why are we denying that to the law-abiding citizenry?

Then you say people could use something like pepper spray, or a taser/stun gun. Before you go recommending such tools, you probably should increase your understanding of those tools, their applications, and their limits. They aren’t what you think. A gun is a lot more effective. It’s like saying we should still use carrier pigeons and pony express to communicate around the world, instead of the Internet. We have better technology, we have more effective technology, and we are happy to use it. So why are we discouraging the use of better, more effective technology when it comes to personal protection?

Remember, I wasn’t always a gun guy. Once I took my fingers out of my ears and started listening to the logic, I changed my stance. Once the ugly realities of the world pressed themselves upon me and I accepted them as unavoidable fact, I changed my stance. I’m willing to be swayed, I’m willing to be persuaded, because the only thing I keep a stake in is finding Truth. If that means I have to abandon everything I know and based my life upon, then so be it. I don’t want to be right, I want to know Truth. So if someone can present me with facts and logic as to why we should be denied the right to preserve and protect our own lives, and to do so with the best technology available, I’m all ears.

Our home may be personal, but it doesn’t get any more personal than your own person. Your home being violated is bad, your body being violated is worse. Society encourages us to protect our homes: alarm systems, big dogs, adequate exterior lighting, smoke detectors, fire extinguishers. Why does society fail at encouraging us to protect ourselves?

Follow through and recovery

/ hsoi

Karl pointed me to this great article by Tom Givens: Follow Through and Recovery: The Often Neglected Fundamentals. One of the best parts about the article is a great graphic they did on the shooting cycle. Click and read and look.

All too often what happens is someone shoots, and the moment the gun goes *bang* the follow-up motion is to drop the gun and cran their head over to try to see if they hit it.

That’s not right.

Gun goes bang, and you need to watch the front sight lift (which implies you were watching the front sight before the shot), gun recoils, you reset the trigger, gun comes down out of recoil, you reacquire the sight picture. That’s follow-through.

The hole in your target will be there 5 seconds from now, 5 weeks from now, 5 years from now. You don’t need to immediately determine if you hit or not; you can and should wait to make that determination. Follow through, recover, be prepared for the next shot. After all is done, THEN you can lower or reholster the gun and check your target.

What’s even better? If you keep watching that front sight, there will come in a time in your shooting when you’ll actually see the front sight lift up and out of the rear notch. When you can start doing this, you won’t need to look at your target. The moment the shot breaks you’ll already know.

Here’s a good video that USPSA GM Roy Stedman made to explain the concept:

 

Randi Rogers @ TGR

/ hsoi

Randi Rogers is now a contributing author over at Tactical Gun Review!

If you don’t know who Randi Rogers is, if you don’t know who TGR is, then click and find out.

Very exciting stuff. Keep up the good work, Charles and Mike. TGR is growing well.

Miscellaneous thoughts on dry fire

/ hsoi

I cannot deny the glory of dry fire practice. It really does pay off.

Getting the new M&P, I really ramped up my dry fire practice because I wanted to adjust to the new gun, help break in the trigger, and so on. So I’ve done a lot more dry fire recently than I have in a long time. I strive to do it every day, but some days life has other plans. Nevertheless, it’s been paying off quite nicely. I need to change up my routine tho to focus on some weak spots.

Try to dry fire 10 minutes every day instead of 1 hour a week. You’ll get more out of it. Plus, the skills will be fresher in your mind and body. I forget exactly how Tom Givens put it, but your skills matter more about proximity to the last time you practiced. So if you practice say 3x a week, you’re never more than a couple of days away from the last time you practiced. Whereas a marathon practice session once a month, you could be 30 days away from the last time you practiced, and that’s not going to carry you when it’s time to perform.

When you dry fire, focus on being correct. You’re working to ingrain good habits, so you have to strive to make every repetition a correct repetition.

Slow down. It helps you do things correctly.

One thing dry fire lacks is recoil. Because there’s no “force to fight against”, one thing we can get lax on is our grip. Don’t. Make a conscious effort to ensure your grip is using proper technique AND grip pressure. If dry fire is all about building lots of repetitions so it becomes “automatic” when we’re really shooting, then ensuring proper grip is an important part of successful dry fire.

Vary your routine, else it gets boring. There are tons of good resources out there. Look at Steve Anderson’s book, Refinement & Repetition, Dry Fire Drills for Dramatic Improvement. I listed a bunch of others in a prior article.

Most of all, just make a conscious commitment to dry fire. I guarantee if you have a good and focused practice routine and do it 10-15 minutes every day for a month, you’ll see an improvement in your skills.

Work on the things you suck at. Yes, that means more weak-hand-only for all of us. 🙂

M&P, shooting drills

/ hsoi

It’s now been 2 weeks of carrying the M&P9 and it’s more and more comfortable every day.

As I mentioned previously, I’ve wanted to do more shooting drills with it because I just haven’t. It’s been most “utility” shooting and steel shooting.

So this past Saturday while out at KRT I shot some drills.

The first drill I shot was Karl’s “3 Seconds or Less” drill. No major problems in shooting the drill, tho weak-hand-only shooting still needs work. More on this later.

The second drill I shot wasn’t a drill per se, but was Paul Howe’s set of Pistol Instructor standards. I couldn’t shoot #9 since I didn’t have a rifle to transition from. I also forgot to do #10 because of other things going on at the range.

In general tho, all things went well. Shot well, time to spare. All is good… except weak hand.

I’ve been doing a LOT of dry fire lately. Ever since I got the M&P I’ve been striving to dry fire every day, and it’s paying off. But I can see where my dry fire has been helping and where it hasn’t. I say hasn’t because I’ve been focusing a lot on trigger press and sights, not so much on the draw and present. Some presentation, but not from draw nor under time pressure. In general I was fine, but it showed up worst with weak-hand-only. Timer goes off, I didn’t get a good grip, didn’t get the press-out well enough, and then yanked the trigger since my grip sucked. Conversely, we were over on the steel range shooting at the small hostage target plate some 20-ish yards away. First thing in the morning Tom challenged me to shoot it weak-hand-only cold. Nailed it. 🙂  Then that morning and then during the break between classes we did more, and I was shooting alright… not 100% but certainly far better than I have. But it was all slow “take your time” shots (e.g. take 3-5 seconds to get the shot off). Of course that’s alright, but when I put the pressure of the timer on me I wasn’t getting the grip firm and consequently blowing the shots. *sigh*

And so, I see what I need to work on. Not just weak hand, but weak-hand under pressure.

Unfortunately I didn’t get to shoot much more because other things were happening on the other range that were quite interesting, and I got pulled over into that. Thus I didn’t get to shoot more drills (tho I did shoot more steel, both the slow weak-hand-only and then a bunch of two-handed fast), nor shoot on paper to see how she was grouping and how POI vs POA was faring. But I’m not sweating it too much because overall everything appears to be going where I told it to go: it’s more geeky minutia interest that I have in wanting to know that information. Oh and Karl… sorry… in getting distracted I totally forgot to take down my targets.

I really like this gun. I would say I shoot it just a hair better than my XD-9.

Two classes, and what a good day it was

/ hsoi / 2 Comments

This past Saturday was a slightly different day at KR Training.

1. We held 2 Basic Pistol 1 classes. It’s common to have 2 classes in 1 day, but always different classes. We ran 2 of the same.

2. Karl Rehn (the “KR” in KR Training) wasn’t there.

Why the difference? The Rangemaster Polite Society Annual Tactical Conference was being held that weekend, so Karl was off presenting at the conference. However, demand for classes, especially Basic Pistol 1, has been extremely high. We’ve run a lot of BP1’s, it’s a pretty well-oiled machine. John (TXGunGeek), Tom, and I have things down pretty well, and we were joined by misBehavin (Mrs. TXGunGeek), the suburban dad, and Ed (the “intern”). So we took over the reigns for the day and introduced 20 new students to the world of firearms.

High number of women in the class, well over half; a fantastic thing to see. And as usual, the demographics spread from young to old, across all sorts of bounds. Sorry, but I think the only pigeonholing you can do here is people taking responsibility for themselves. I will say tho, I’m seeing more and more young women showing up in classes. I can hypothesize a number of reasons; it’s an interesting data point.

All in all, classes ran well. TXGunGeek said it best, that what’s so satisfying about these Basic classes is that “new shooter smile”. That first time they shoot, and the HUGE smile that comes over their face. I’d have to agree that while some of the “high speed low drag” classes are a lot of fun, the Basic classes are some of the most satisfying both professionally and personally.

I also enjoyed the classes because I got to do a little more direct teaching. The nature of most classes, Karl runs the show and we’re assisting. I have zero problem with that, and that’s of course how it should be. But it is nice from time to time to get to demo and show stuff. I handled the technique portion of the classes (grip, stance, trigger press, follow through, etc.), and enjoyed it. Got to play with a SIRT pistol (on loan) a little bit and I can see how it could be useful… just have to find the right places to work it in.

Students were good, asking questions, open and receptive to learning. They all seemed to enjoy themselves — lots of smiles. 🙂

And that… makes it all worth it.