I'm new to taking professional dedicated handgun training, I saw this as a personal lack that should be corrected, so when the opportunity to train under Mr. Givens was presented I took it, the fact that it was also a 3 day course with an included vehicle module only made it that much better. This isn’t an AAR so much as it’s a skim of the points that I found most valuable, other shooters who wish to add please do so.
First, to understand my perspective and where I am coming from,
- NRA High Power, held M classification my last season shooting.
- Appleseed Instructor, several years.
- 6 years GAANG, 11B
- Trained under Eric Lund for a scattergun class, I still hate shotguns
- Southnarc ECQC, EWO grad.
- Various gun games, USPSA, Bowling pin, action pistol, 3 Gun, 2 gun, whatever
The host for the class was Mr Lee Weems, who made the OCSO range and classroom facility available for the course. Mr. Weems hospitality and support for the shooting industry is excellent. The fact that the range entrance is where the story material for Deliverance came from is irrelevant.
The class began in the air conditioned classroom with a long talk on safety. What the rules mean, why we follow them. This included talk on why we only ever use the 4 rules and the limits of human ability. More than the 4 rules allows people to forget or otherwise break the important ones, i.e. every gun is always loaded and dont point the gun at anything you arent willing to destroy. We finished the safety talk with 2 absolutes, muzzle awareness and trigger discipline.
We also covered marksmanship, tempo, shooting position, grip and sight alignment and focus.
Two things that were new to me, Givens teaches a high thumbs grip, not the thumbs forward grip seen elsewhere. He has good reasons for doing so, I will be working on keeping a high thumbs grip.
He also teaches that the elbows should not be locked, that with flex recoil can be better absorbed.
The Executive summary, Front sight focus, trigger control.
The rest of the morning and afternoon we spent on the range working on the things covered in class. That with larger close targets we can be more accepting of poor sight alignment and of movement. That as targets get smaller we must shoot more carefully to insure hits.
We do not shoot at Targets, we shoot targets. Period.