Executive Summary/ TLDR version

The class was the consistent with the other excellent ITTS offerings. Note the design of this class is to be tailored to the students in the class, so I suspect you could go to this class 4 different times and feel like you went to 4 different classes. There were only 6 students in this particular class, so we got a lot of individual attention. The class had one primary instructor, one assistant/armorer, and an additional assistant for the first part of the class. The first day ran from 2pm-10pm, and it was a dark night. The 2nd day went from 9am-5pm. Due to the small class size we shot a lot; 600-700 rounds I think.

The biggest takeaways I personally got from this class were in the following areas, which were all brand new to me:
  • practice of safe gun handling when moving with a drawn pistol in an unstructured / unscripted manner in close proximity to others
  • communication when working with others on a problem potentially requiring shooting
  • one handed manipulations (reloads, off hand draws from a primary hand holster, etc.)
  • shooting from retention


Day 1:
The day began with the standard (and always interesting) ITTS Safety briefing. There was absolutely zero review of any of the basics other than safety.

We started off our active participation in the ITTS shoot house, with a basic lesson and practice on room clearing. The room clearing work immediately highlighted a training scar. I did fine on the searching / slicing the pie part, but when it was time to shoot I kept wanting to go to my "standard range idealized isosceles posture" instead of keeping my dang self as much behind cover as possible. After unarmed practice, we then were given simunitions pistols and had practice clearing rooms that included one of the instructors serving as the bad guy. That was enlightening for me; I kept shooting the bad guy right in the hands. It really drove home the need for one-handed competence for me.

After the room clearing exercises, we focused on pure draw speed with live fire, working the draw from 3 yards.

Then we moved in even closer and worked on shooting from retention (shooting from position 2, close enough that you could touch the target)

After all that close in speed work, they back us up to 17 yds, were we pushed the speed on head shots both from low ready and from the draw.

Next we did a "Skoal drill" relay competition with 2 teams of 3:
At the buzzer, the first person had to run 50 yards, then shoot 5 rounds to 3" circle from 8 yds. At the 5th round fired, the next person took off on their 50 yard run-and-shoot leg; then the third person. The event was scored on a "total time" basis, but the team received a 30 second penalty for each miss. That was a ton of fun.

After that we did a bunch of shooting on the move, going forward, oblique, and at right angles.

Next was a "Trail problem". Shoot and no-shoot targets were placed at various points along / close to a trail through a gully. You had no prior knowledge of either the trail or the targets beforehand. Targets were mostly partially obstructed by brush, making it hard to identify what was a shoot vs no shoot.
Then that was extended to "Trail problem with partner". Same drill except worked it with a team of 2. Trail was 2-people wide in some spots and 1-person wide in others; the focus was primarily on safe weapon handling and communication.

Following the trail problems were car drills. First we shot poppers from a moving car, seated in the passenger seat. It got dark during this exercise, so most of it included use of a flashlight. Lots of ribbing during this part from the LEO guys in class that the instructor was teaching us civilians how to do drive-bys
We then proceed to using a stopped car as cover. We did seated in the car, standing using the door as cover, kneeling, and prone ; shooting both poppers and hostage targets from 12-15 yards, all in the dark with flashlights. This was my first time shooting from prone in the dark, so I got to experience the localized dust storm you kick up with each shot.
We concluded with more nighttime drills:
-shooting with no light (only night sights): walkback drill from low ready back to 15 yards
-shooting from harries: walkback drill back to 20 yards

Day 2:
We started the day with more shooting from retention, both as additional practice and as a warmup

"Charging knife attack system" was the first new drill of the day. This involved shooting at a target moving directly toward you at sprinting speed. First we went from low ready, then from holster. Starting position of the target was initially 21 ft away, then moved up 15 feet away. We were required to give instructions (shouting "drop the knife" etc.) to get us comfortable with reacting quickly when things start to happen while you are verbalizing.
Finally we attempted 2R1 drills starting from 21 feet away, but with the system slowed down to a fast walk.
The instructor made a lot of effort to highlight the point of this drill was not tactics, but of drawing and shooting under pressure, and of truly understanding the danger you are in at even the 5+ yard distances from attackers. He talked about how helpful getting even a little obstruction (table, chair, etc.) between you and the bad guy can be to give you an extra half a second.

Next were "Bounding drills".
working in a team of two, we practiced moving from cover to cover while your partner provided covering fire against 6 poppers. We started with the poppers about 30 yards away and worked up to about 10 yards away. We ran through these drills quite a few times, re-positioning the cover and targets whenever everyone had run through the drill twice.

We then did essentially the same bounding drills again working as two teams of two (4 students at once), where each team would provide the other team cover as the other team was moving. This required a *lot* more communication effort, since you had to make sure you and your partner were on the same page before communicating to the other team.

Next we did SOTM again, this time going backwards. We had a good discussion about when you might want to move backwards, and when you might want to stop and shoot vs move and shoot. Somewhere around this time one person had a semi-catastrophic failure, where his barrel split? I didn't actually get a close look at it because the guy hustled back to the armorer and was given a loaner, so he didn't anything. Apparently it was a Kimber 45 with about 10,000 rounds through it.

After that, we formed teams of 2 again and competed in a drill where we had to drag a simulated downed officer (about a person worth of heavy chain) from cover to cover. You had to shoot a popper at each cover station before you could move to the next station; there were 6 stations. I'm guessing distances were between 40 yards and 10 yards; you had to move both forward and back. Most teams tackled this by taking turns dragging the downed officer. We did that a couple of times each.

Then we did shooting from a bit longer distance. We practiced prone, kneeling, and standing shooting from 65 yards at poppers propped up so they didn't get knocked down.

After that we went back in closer and essentially ran drills very similar to the "26662" drill.

We finished up with one hand drills, where you had to do everything from a single hand. First we did strong hand, then weak hand. That exposed some issues with sights. One person had his rear sight fall off completely. Another person really struggled racking his pistol; he couldn't reach his slide stop with one hand, and his rear sight was too ramped to catch on anything reliably.

I felt like I learned a ton. It was funny because the areas where most of my learning occurred was with everything except the actual "get the gun to make a loud noise" part. I was pretty happy with my shooting, but felt like that was more of a result from what I learned in "handgun 3" and the dry fire and drills I've been working based on guidance from pistol forum, vs anything I picked up this weekend. I'm totally comfortable with that, I think it was good timing in terms of my personal growth.