With the shortages and hellacious pricing of most ammunition, and interest from several students, July 21 was 914 Consulting’s first Defensive Shotgun class offering at the C2 Shooting Center. A reliable 12g scattergun is almost overlooked today due to several factors and the offerings on training with them are far outnumbered by the plethora of handgun/carbine classes throughout the country. That said, due to the availability of ammunition and the fact that it is part of most folks skillsets this class was more than worth the time.
Chris can’t speak highly enough of Rob Haught, whose classes he has attended and urged us if we were to have the opportunity to train under to take it. We started off with the seemingly simple task of loading a single shell into the ejection port, chambering it and firing on target. This is absolutely one of those overlooked but HIGHLY perishable skills IMO. We kept on with the loading/firing drills on steel, one round became two, then it went from birdshot to loading a buckshot shell and firing and into firing bird/buck at steel then a slug at the cardboard targets and “Don’t freelance and hit my steel!”
Chris did explain the “push-pull” technique and how it does reduce felt recoil and how self-correcting it is. He was absolutely right as it was painfully noticeable when doing it wrong whilst launching slugs at targets. I can say that after shooting 175-200 rounds my shoulder is nowhere nearly as sore as I thought it would have been. He also went over working a scattergun in confined quarters which doesn’t look difficult but the hard part is finding that index point to put lead on target. One student in the class was able to use his TLR1 as a makeshift sight and nail targets consistently.
We went over patterning of everyone’s various 00 buck loads and how superbly tight the Federal Flitecontrol buck patterns. I think I can speak for everyone that it is the buck load of choice for putting badguys down if ever needed. The differences and trade-offs of beads VS ghost rings VS rifle sights were presented to us as well (I don’t recall anyone running an optic). Along with the buck patterning we did shoot our slugs at 25/50/100 to get an idea of where we were holding VS hitting. Always good to know.
The end of the day was devoted to running the steel rack whilst reloading mid-evolution and on the move. Definitely has the economy of motion and time management aspects turned up to 11. By this point everyone was doing pretty well considering where we all started, some of us having barely used a shotgun. One topic we discussed was the grey-man aspect of a shotgun with regards to how it’s percieved by people as opposed to an “evil black rifle”. Not only that but a shotgun can be used to fill a variety of roles depending on barrel/choke/ammo selections.
My biggest takeaways from the class were flitecontrol is awesome stuff, if I’m hurting myself shooting I’m doing it wrong, a sling for me works better as a neck loop rather than how I run it on a carbine, you absolutely positively have to keep feeding your magazine tube and I need to work on the confined quarters technique with regards to finding a solid index point. If you need instruction on running a shotgun due to living in a non-free state OR just want to see what it’s all about and round out your skillset/toolbox then Chris is the man to talk too. Had a fantastic weekend shooting and learning from him and as usual, I will attend more classes and do my best to spread the word.
