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Shotgun Skills class recap: 2-17-18, Culpeper, Va.
On February 17, I teamed up with Ashton Ray of 360 Performance Shooting to present FPF Training's inaugural Shotgun Skills course.
The purpose of the course is simple: To take someone who is competent with a shotgun and give them the skills and some of the necessary repetitions to make them proficient with the shotgun.
Shotgun Skills is a more heavily shooting intensive class. We start with live fire immediately after the safety brief and a quick rundown on hardware and technique. A significant focus is explaining the concept of "stretching" the shotgun or "push/pull" and giving the students the opportunity to play with just that concept for at least a box of rounds, and then we give them the opportunity to test how well they are doing with birdshot, buckshot, and at least a couple of slugs.
After that, we move into working on the fundamentals: Mounting the gun, firing an aimed shot, controlling the recoil, and proper follow through. Shotguns are powerful weapons, but they are not magic. We have to hit the same areas on a person that we would hit with a carbine or a rifle to reliably stop the threat. Only with a shotgun we are hitting those areas with more physiological damage than either the pistol or carbine can bring to the party. Sporting use of the shotgun leads people to believe that shotguns fire a cloud of lead that's easy to make a hit with. That's true at the 20-40 yards wing-shooters are typically shooting birds at. At those distances they are indeed firing a pattern of small pellets that is several times the size of the bird they are trying to hit.
In defensive use of a shotgun we are engaging a violent criminal at much closer distance and with a much different munition. Typical buckshot loads fire patterns of only a few inches at the kinds of distances we are realistically shooting at with a shotgun. Even birdshot fired through a cylinder bore barrel shoots a much smaller pattern than people expect at 10 yards. To this end, we spend a lot of time on getting folks to aim their shots. The reduced size silhouette targets emphasized the need to aim the gun and work the trigger properly to score an effective hit.
After that block, the class broke for a working lunch. They munched on the food I'd asked them to bring to the range while Ashton gave a primer on firearms lubrication and I covered reload techniques. I like to spend a little time on reload technique because I've found that how you approach it makes a difference in how reliably you can perform that manipulation in all conditions. It is often said that one of the flaws of the shotgun is how slow it is to reload. It is certainly slower to reload to full capacity than a carbine like the AR15, but it is most definitely not slower to reload to effectiveness than an AR. To demonstrate that I used a simple drill: From the low ready, fire one aimed shot, perform an emergency reload (reloading through the ejection port), and fire another shot. I ran this drill twice, both runs under two seconds. It's difficult to find people who can consistently reload an AR15 in under 2 seconds outside of 3 gun.
Students are then put on the line to shoot multiple target strings with reloads thrown in, combining target transitions and manipulations at speed. I use the timer and man-on-man competition to both provide a little stress and quantify where folks are at in their skillsets.
The original plan was, at this point, to transition to a discussion of slugs and then do some basic work on using a shotgun in close quarters with a simulated hallway. Unfortunately the weather had other ideas and by now it was sleeting heavily:
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Everything got coated in a heavy, watery slush.
I presented the students with options: We could try and continue with my lesson plan until the weather shut us down, or we could call an audible and work more shooting and manipulation intensive drills until the weather shut us down. They chose to work shooting and manipulation and so that's how we spent the rest of the day.
Equipment:
There were 8 semi-automatic shotguns present in this class. (Most students brought more than one gun) 6 were Beretta 1301 shotguns (three brought by the instructors) one was a fairly recent production Benelli, and one was an older Benelli pump/semi convertible. The Benelli needed a bit of lube but functioned well once it got the lubrication. One Beretta 1301...which happens to be a testing mule for a company developing 1301 accessories...needed a 1/2 turn of an allen wrench to correct a problem that manifested late in the day. Other than, the semi-autos ran well even despite the weather. Watching folks work the Benellis, it looks to me like perhaps adding a slightly larger bolt release button on them would be of some utility.
The rest of the guns were Remington 870s of one flavor or another. Consistent with my observation in previous classes, the pump guns exhibited more problems. Some due to user error. Some due to simple lack of lubrication. Some due to ammunition problems. Some due to poor quality control in the manufacture of the gun itself. (Extraction problems from rough chamber, etc)
To my surprise, there was only one bead-sighted shotgun in this class. Three guns had optics (either an Aimpoint Micro or an RMR) and the rest had rifle-style sights, either ghost rings or Remington's factory style rifle sights.
Students:
Students included average citizens, retired law enforcement, active duty law enforcement, and active duty military. Most of the students had never trained with FPF Training before. I was expecting more FPF regulars and was quite pleasantly surprised at the makeup of the class.
The students showed up ready to work and stuck it out in some of the nastiest weather I've ever experienced on the range. Kudos to them.
Observations:
I lost track of how many times the steel targets were knocked over. We stopped class to stake them down or weigh them down with sand bags and they still got knocked over repeatedly...and I mean knocked over with some authority. Behold the power of the 12 gauge payload.
Under-lubrication was common, but mostly on the pump guns. Even pump shotguns need lubrication.
A red-dot equipped 1301 in the hands of someone who has learned to take advantage of stretching the gun is something to behold.
The Aridus side saddle and the Vang Comp velcro card really are the two best options on the market for a side saddle solution.
