Cumberland Tactics
Intermediate Handgun
17-19 November 2016
Southern Exposure Training Facility, Kathleen, Florida
Instructor: Randy Cain
Class Size: 17
Instructor to Student Ratio: 1:17
Ammunition Requirement: 1,500 rounds
Actual Rounds Fired: 1,579 (Federal AE9FP 147gr)
Tuition: $550
Introduction & Training Background
This was my eighth class with Randy Cain, and my fourth Intermediate Handgun. I started my training journey with Randy in 2012, and have also taken his Handgun 101 three times, as well as his Carbine 1. I’ve also attended Mike Pannone’s Covert Carry class and SouthNarc’s ECQC. Since 2011, my training regimen has consisted of hitting the range two to three times each month, shooting 5,000-10,000 rounds annually, and dry firing far less often than I should. Due to a change in position at work earlier this year, I spent very little time at the range during the first half of 2016, but I started getting back on track within the past few months.
Location
As are the majority of Randy’s classes in Florida, this one was hosted at Southern Exposure, just outside of Lakeland. Southern is a great facility, open only for training classes taught by vetted instructors—there are no other shooters there to distract from the class. With a pair of 25 yard pistol bays, a 200+ yard rifle range, and a shoothouse, Southern is well-equipped to handle a variety of classes. Irv Lehman serves as class coordinator along with his wife, Watfa. Anyone who’s ever trained at Southern should be very familiar with the color commentary provided by the two. Unfortunately, Irv didn’t come up for this class, which resulted in a markedly quieter covered area during breaks. Having trained at a few different ranges in the state, I can state with certainty that Southern is my favorite place to take a class.
Gear
I shot this class from concealment, as I do most pistol classes. I shot my daily carry, an HK VP9 + SureFire XC1. This particular gun is my dedicated training beater, which has an aggressive stipple job by Chad at Sweaty Muddy Bloody and a 10-8 .115 fiber front and .140 U-notch rear sight, though the internals are completely stock. At the start of class, this gun had approximately 6,168 rounds fired. I should mention that the gun had not been maintained in almost 3,000 rounds other than the addition of some lube.
Support gear consisted of the same stuff I wear daily: JM Custom Kydex IWB v1 holster and two v2 Single Pistol Mag Pouches on an Ares Gear Aegis Enhanced or Ranger Enhanced belt. Eye/ear protection consisted of Rudy Project Rydon glasses and Sordin Supreme Pro-X muffs over SureFire EP3 plugs. Concealment clothing was a mix of fishing-style button front shirts (great camouflage for those who live in South Florida).
Course Description
From the Cumberland Tactics website, “The content of this course presumes that the student is already familiar with everything taught in our entry level class (TH101). The student will probably not have mastered everything, but should not need much explanation as to terminology or how, what, when, and where. The class is about repetition. It gives the student a chance to polish while under a watchful eye, but without long-winded explanations or redundant verbiage from the instructor.”
Day 1
0800-1600
Weather: Low 55°, high 87°, slightly breezy with cotton ball clouds floating across an impossibly blue sky.
559 rounds fired
As with every CT class, this one started with a safety brief, albeit abbreviated. Every single student in an Intermediate class has already taken at least one of Randy’s classes, and most of us can repeat Cooper’s rules verbatim. The majority of us have taken multiple classes (one of the nice things about training at Southern—you get to know the repeat students pretty well, which breeds confidence in each other’s safety and gunhandling proficiency).
As a quick skills assessment, we started off cold with two rounds to an IPSC target from 5 yards, then moved on to Randy’s dry fire routine to get our drawstrokes tuned up. After working through the routine of body shots, head shots, and failure drills, we got into shooting on the move. Randy slowly amped up the pressure by running us through failure drills, failure drills on two targets, then box drills, all while moving across the same distance, forcing faster and faster transitions. We moved over to the plate rack for more SOTM, then back to paper targets for freestyle slow fire, rapid fire, and Chapman rollover prone from 20 yards. After a refresher on shooting from retention and tactical movement to the rear, it was back to the plate rack for more shooting on the move and tactical rearward movement. Hitting the plates on the move while stepping and sliding backward is definitely a challenge—if you don’t get your hits between ten and fifteen yards, things get markedly more difficult the closer you get to twenty yards.
Day 2
0830-1630
Wx: Low 55°, high 81°, slightly breezy and partly cloudy.
540 rounds fired
The second day started with Randy’s dry fire routine, then immediately moved on to shooting on the move and tactical movement forward and rear, now using Cumberland Tactics paper targets (which means small scoring zones: a 3x5” box around the heart (and a 4x6” outer ring for SOTM) plus an outline around the orbital and nasal cavities for brain shots. After another trip to the plate rack for more SOTM and tactical rearward movement, we returned to the paper targets for multiple repetitions of body shots, failure drills, and non-standard responses from five to fifteen yards.
Upon realizing that we had burned through around 600 rounds on the first day, Randy was a little concerned that we were shooting too much. After polling the class and discovering that almost all of us had brought 3,000 rounds each, and thanks to a few students being very vocal about their desire to continue burning it down, Randy sighed in resignation, shook his head, and let us keep running through NSR after NSR. After some strong hand and support hand only shooting, including practice at the support hand draw, we did a pickup drill where everyone got to shoot every gun on the line. This was a somewhat eclectic mix, with five G19s (two with RMRs), a G30S, an XDm, a pair of 1911s in .45, three 9mm 1911s, a Sig P320 and Legion P226 SAO, and an HK USP-C in .40 with heavy LEM trigger (arguable the least-shootable gun on the line—seriously, fuck that thing, but kudos to the pilot and FFDO who managed to shoot it well in spite of the trigger). While one of the 9mm 1911s had the tightest group (and the lightest trigger), most of the class agreed that my VP9 was the most comfortable in the hand. I can’t argue with that.
Before lunch, we ran through a five by five drill. Not to be confused with Bill Wilson’s drill, this one consists of five strings of five rounds at five yards into a five inch circle with a five second par. Pretty much everyone in the class shot this drill clean. After lunch, it was back over to the plate rack for more SOTM, this time while moving laterally at a 45° angle. For right handed shooters, moving from left to right is fairly easy as one can shift into a Weaveresque stance rather than over-torque the torso to stay on target. When moving from right to left, it’s easier to simply shoot strong hand only. Then it was back to the paper targets for more fast and furious NSRs, then a refresher on quick kneel and braced kneel, plus quick assumption of Chapman prone. We closed out the day with rapid body shots from 20 yards.
Day 3
0830-1630
Wx: Low 48°, high 67°, sunny and breezy
468 rounds fired
Day three started with more repetitions of body shots, failure drills, NSRs, and SOTM. Next came support-hand only malfunction clearance, then a few runs through El Prez. After lunch, we moved over to the rifle range for a 50 yard shoot-off on 10” steel. Then it was back to paper for more fast and furious failure drills and NSRs.
Next up was Randy’s square movement drill, which involves moving forward, backward, and laterally while engaging three targets in a specified order. To increase the difficulty, two shooters did this in side by side boxes, then switched positions, turning it into a figure eight movement. If you don’t have your gunhandling skills figured out, this can be a real challenge, as the mental burden of having to remember what order to shoot targets in plus moving in your assigned pattern while maintaining good muzzle awareness can quickly become overwhelming. This is not a particularly complicated drill, but it makes it painfully obvious that shooting paper from a static position alone is not enough to prepare someone for a real-world engagement in which the shooter and target are both moving and there is no designated safe direction.
The day closed out with more shooting from retention, tactical movement rearward while shooting the plate rack, and rapid body shots from 20 yards. Finally, we wrapped up with some stress fire: alternating head and body shots in between sprints, pushups, sit-ups, and jumping jacks.
Takeaways
- Competition can drive performance. In the 101 class I took the weekend prior, although there were a couple of good shooters, most of the class was average or below average. That meant I didn’t feel a whole lot of pressure to shoot at a high level. This class, though, was chock full of solid shooters. The stiff competition forced me to bring my A-game, whether consciously or not. While I still consider myself to be an average shooter, I consistently shot more accurately this weekend than I ever have in class before.
- Automaticity is awesome. A couple of times during the class, when I shot to slide-lock, while I was consciously aware that my support hand was reaching for a fresh magazine, I realized that I had already automatically ejected the empty mag without being aware that I did so. That’s never happened to me before, but it’s pretty damn cool. Now, if only I could extend that unconscious competency to every other aspect of shooting…
- Fiber is fast, but can be a distraction when trying to hit low percentage targets. I love how quickly I can pick up an FO front on the draw, and how easy it is to track during recoil. But when trying to make good hits at distance, when I should be bisecting my target with the top edge of the front sight, it’s often difficult to ignore the fiber. This led to me shooting high with some regularity. I’m still very happy with fiber, and I’m getting to the point where I’m almost comfortable enough with it to get rid of those horribly wide Trijicon HD fronts on my carry guns and switch to a fiber setup. But there is more mental discipline required to ignore that brilliant glowing red orb and use a traditional sight picture if the shot warrants it.
- Fundamentals are everything. This isn’t news to anyone, but this class really reinforced it. It doesn’t matter if you’re shooting on the move, with one hand, up close, at distance, while standing, prone, etc. An acceptable sight picture and proper trigger manipulation will guarantee hits. Randy remarked that it is typical of his novice students to be the first ones to ask about an advanced class, while in an intermediate class comprised of skilled shooters, all we wanted to do was repetition after repetition of standard drills to iron out all the flaws with our fundamentals.
- It is possible to have too much grip. The VP9 I used in this class has a rather aggressive stipple job. I also frequently use liquid chalk to keep my hands dry during extended range sessions. Once my grip is established, the two work well together, but having unnaturally dry hands can sometimes make it a challenge to establish a firing grip at speed. Having just a little bit of sweat on my hands allows me to shift my grip ever so slightly before I come out of the holster. While dry hands and a stock VP9 grip work well together, I may be better off shooting the stippled VP9 without artificially drying my hands.
- Know your body. It’s taken a few years, but I’ve finally got a good handle on fluid intake and snacking to stay hydrated and mentally engaged all day long. For me, that means a hearty breakfast, every other bottle of water I drink gets a Nuun tablet dropped in it, a light lunch, and at least once an hour throughout the day I’m snacking on something (Lara bars are a recent discovery, and they are fantastic). No longer am I dragging ass and headachy at the end of each training day.
Conclusion
It’s been almost two years since I switched from Glock to HK, and I firmly believe I made a good decision. I’ve gotten to shoot some nice guns in class, but I wouldn’t trade my VP9 for any one of them. Out of the box, the gun has a very workable trigger, is fully ambidextrous, has more grip configuration options than anything else on the market (P30 excepted), is acceptably accurate, and flat out runs when fed quality ammo. I mentioned at the start of this AAR that the gun was at a round count of 6,168. After class, it’s up to 7,735, and I still haven’t cleaned it in 4,558 rounds, nor have I added lube in 2,280 rounds. The gun continues to run like a top. (Full disclosure: I did experience three failures to eject in this class, but those were shooter-induced as a result of my thumb retarding the slide while shooting support hand only.) I still wish HK would come out with a P2000-sized compact version of the VP9 to make concealment a little easier, but having a full size grip is a nice thing.
The SureFire XC1 has become of questionable reliability. The one currently mounted to my training gun had worked fine for just over a year, but during this class, the light started to intermittently turn on without its activation levers being depressed. It’ll be going back to SureFire shortly.
This was another great class, and has proven to be one of my favorites for getting tons of reps at the basics. While I’m going to continue to seek out other instructors to expand my knowledge and hear diverse opinions, Intermediate Handgun is a blast, and something I plant to continue taking annually. Going to Southern is like going home, and it’s by far my favorite training venue. The group of guys who usually show up for the Intermediate class are not only dedicated pistol shooters, but they’re damn funny, and bring a healthy dose of levity to an otherwise serious subject. I keep investing in this because I believe in self-reliance, but it helps that it’s also fun. This class was populated by average folks: dentists, a pilot, a couple business owners, a welder, a gun store owner, and even a florist. It’s encouraging and refreshing to be surrounded by a group of serious shooters from all walks of life. Once you’ve gotten at least a single 101 class under your belt for a firm grounding in the fundamentals, I highly encourage you to get into an Intermediate class. Randy is one of the last of the great instructors from the Pat Rogers generation, and one of the most underrated guys out there today.
Reply With Quote
Originally Posted by Al T.
