Citizens Defense Research - Contextual Handgun: The Armed Parent/Guardian

Contextual Handgun: The Armed Parent/Guardian

Class review by Gabe White

I was fortunate to attend the Citizens Defense Research class titled Contextual Handgun: The Armed Parent/Guardian in July of 2022 at the Skagit Shooting Range in Burlington, Washington. This particular iteration of the class was taught by John Johnston due to scheduling demands, though it usually has both Melody Lauer and John Johnston.

TAPG was a very interesting niche class and I had a number of takeaways from it. The training experience was entirely worthwhile, was very well-conducted, and contributed to filling in a gap in my larger body of defensive, tactical, and handgun training.

A lot of the class content was in the category of: items that I’ve given some consideration to, but remained poorly or unresearched on my part, and were generally undeveloped. The class gave me a lot better understanding of some of the considerations of self-defense in the presence of our children, or defending those children directly from an assault or abduction attempt, such as general defensive strategies for children, likelihood outcomes from stranger kidnapping, common behavior on the part of hostage-takers, etc. I thought my understanding of those issues improved a lot as a result of this training, and the training on the range was well-framed with those contexts in mind.

An additional takeaway that was less expected was a little different arm/upper body positioning in single handed shooting that may work out better for me. I’ll need to explore that more, but I think it is potentially better.

A decisionmaking exercise on the range was very good, especially for the newer folks in class. And that brings me to this last point: I look at TAPG as a specialized niche class, and it functioned that way for me, but I can see that is far from universally the case. We also had very new shooters in the class, and frankly it makes sense. A person who gets a handgun and training and addresses the subject with a discerning mind could very easily look at armed defense in the presence of the children they got the gun and training very specifically to defend, and see an extremely central subject to their interest. Hence, we had an interesting mixture on the range of people with a huge amount of training experience, and people with very little time in training. I came out of the class feeling like it was well-conceived and planned just to have range activity that was germane to the subject and worked for both the new and very experienced shooters. CDR/John Johnston did a very fine job striking that balance.

I would definitely recommend TAPG to anyone who is into defensive handgun training and has kids. And I’d certainly recommend it to otherwise well-trained folks with kids whose plan is ‘I’m going to get between my kid and the threat and shoot strong hand only.’ There is considerably more refinement to be had there and CDR can help very well with that.