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Thread: AAR: Justified Defensive Concepts Defensive Shotgun Skills I - 4/27/19

  1. #1
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    Northern Virginia

    AAR: Justified Defensive Concepts Defensive Shotgun Skills I - 4/27/19

    As announced in this thread, Justified Defensive Concepts held their first Defensive Shotgun Skills course this past weekend.

    This class, developed by @TCinVA, picks up where FPF Training's excellent Shotgun Skills class leaves off and explores decision making, speed, accuracy, and total accountability for all pellets sent down range. Where Shotgun Skills focuses on learning to manipulate the gun under pressure, Defensive Shotgun Skills takes it a step further and adds the element of "what do I shoot?" and "should I shoot?" to the mix.

    We started off with a bit of classroom presentation regarding armed self defense, the role of the shotgun, etc. If you've had "armed lifestyle" classes before, there will be nothing shockingly new here. From there we moved to the range and got a short refresher on some of the elements of Shotgun Skills (recoil mitigation, loading, etc) as well as an opportunity to verify patterning of the gun. After that, it was all new material for me.

    One note on class size. This first class was tiny. There were 4 of us students, with a 5th showing up later. I was the only "civilian" out of the 4, with the others being involved with law enforcement as trainers or active LEO. With 4-5 students, we had 3 full-time instructors and a photographer who step in with instruction/guidance from time to time. That's a hell of a ratio! It was practically like having a private 1-on-1 session.

    We spent the rest of the day working on drills that forced you to think and operate outside your comfort zone. Nothing after that point was "see a target, shoot a target". Most of the time we had to interact with the target in some way as a role-playing exercise. For example, the target could be "the drunk party-goer looking for a party then turning violent". You had to interact with the guy until the buzzer went off signifying him resorting to violence in some manner. Other drills enforced total accountability for pellets by giving us small targets close to "no shoot" targets, such as a hostage situation (5" steel plate above the "shoulder" of a 3/4-size silhouette plate), a dice-based drill where you had to take the number off a thrown dice, add or subtract three, shoot the resulting number on a dueling tree, then shoot the original number. In both those scenarios, hits on steel other than the intended target were considered shots on innocents. Another drill had us not knowing our target(s) out of 8 or so possibilities until just before the buzzer went off, but with an added twist that you had to take the gun "off target" with finger off the trigger while you transitioned to the next permissible target.

    Everything focused on thinking while shooting, total accountability, accuracy, and general problem solving while simultaneously keeping the gun going by reloading as you went (tactical and combat reloads as part of the stages).

    Things I learned (about myself and about shooting):
    1. I need to work on speed. I've actually gotten slower on between shot action manipulation (compared to when I used this gun for wobble trap and sporting clays).
    2. Combat reloads where I go below the gun don't work for me, my hands are too small to do so efficiently. At the suggestion of one of the instructors, I started going over the top, but I'm in an awkward place where my technique is a mishmash of the two. I need more cycles to iron things out.
    3. I need more time shooting from my off shoulder. I'm barely competent at that and it showed on the qual.
    4. A 12g with rifle sights (or red dot) and Flight Control shot is damn near rifle-accurate at "home defense" distances as borne out by the "hostage drill". Unless you need to penetrate barriers, slugs aren't really necessary.
    5. Shooting steel with a shotgun is FUN, especially when the targets move.
    6. Adding stress via time and decision-making is, well, stressful but lots of fun too.

    This is definitely not a beginner's class. You need to be fairly experienced with the shotgun as a defensive tool before coming to class, preferably having something similar to Shotgun Skills under your belt first. However, it gives you an opportunity to try things most normal ranges wouldn't allow and highlights just how accurate a shotgun with buckshot can be at typical home defense distances. I could see myself taking this class again just to get more opportunity with the drills we ran through.

    This class costs less than an 870 Express and is certainly more useful than yet another gun in the safe.

    Chris

  2. #2
    Murder Machine, Harmless Fuzzball TCinVA's Avatar
    Join Date
    Feb 2011
    Location
    Virginia
    It was great to have you in class again, sir!
    3/15/2016

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