Where: Birchwood Public Shooting Range in Chigiak AK
What: Redback One Basic Handgun
When: October 8th and 9th
Who: Instructed by Jason Falla
Why: Because my pistol skills are seriously lacking
Day 1:
Saturday started out partly cloudy with temps in the high 20’s in the morning and rising to almost 40 throughout the day. The course started with the obligatory introductions and safety brief. From here we rolled right into some of the basic’s of Jason’s philosphy of handgun usage. The first thing I noticed is he is very big on press checks. He got a short bit on mindset by referncing Clausewitz’s Frrctions of War (will of the enemy, uncertainty, and chance). He would continually refrence mindset throughout both days but did state they he could change someone’s mindset in a 2 day class.
Jason spent a lot of time focusing on recoil management and accuracy. He taught that recoil management is a factor of stance and grip. For stance he advocates isocoles with a lowered center of gravity and your feet in more of a boxers stance like you were about to punch something. When it came to grip he says to try and crush your grip with your support hand which in theory will allow you to not grip as much with your firing hand leading to you being able to have more control of your trigger finger. I struggled with my grip throughout the course and did seem to perform better when I mentally told myself to crush with the support hand and relax my firing hand. When it comes to accuracy he teaches that it is a function of sight alignment and trigger control. Sight alignment is so simple in theory, line up your sights on the target, get equal height and equal light, but in real life that becomes challenging for some reason. Trigger control is also easy in theory, hard in practice. Jason teaches taking out the “combat slack” in your trigger to prep the shot along with shooting from reset. It’s funny how when you put the front sight on the target and press the trigger correctly you hit where you are aimming but then when the timer comes out and people are watching el snatcho always sneaks up on you.
When it comes to manipulating the gun he teaches a palm neutral/palm up/palm down system of weapons manipulation. When you draw the gun you go to palm neutral which is basically the high ready position where you are looking over your front sight and at your target. Any time you need to insert a magazine or tap it to ensure that it was seated we would just rotate our hand until our palm was facing up allowing us to see the magwell and still have the gun up in our workspace. Along with this anytime we needed manipulate the slide we were taught similarly rotate our hand into a palm up position and slingshot the slide with our thumb and pointer finger. This was hard for me to get used to because I have been training for a few years to always rack the slide by doing the thumb pointing back towards your body overhand grip powerstroke thing. He did mention some of the limitations of this technique when using firearms with slide mounted safeties like the M9 and how to mitigate these limitations. I am still practicing this palm up/palm down technique but so far have found it to be slightly faster and feel more natural.
Next we went over tactical and combat reloads. The most interesting section here was that jason teaches three different methods for sending the slide home after a combat reload. First is using your firing hand thumb to hit the slide release (fastest), next would be hitting the slide release with your support hand thumb, and finally would be sling shotting the slide with your support hand(slowest). He teaches all three just so you have options, some folks in our class had a hard time reaching the slide release with there firing hand thumb. He also stressed taking the time to restablish your grip coming out of a reload to ensure that you don’t get a missed shot. Most likely if the day comes that you need to reload your pistol on “the day” that will be receiving fire and it might be a really bad time to miss because your grip sucks.
We did several drills including just pressing out from high ready and trying to be able to break the shot as you reached extension. This gave us the oprtunity to work on prepping the trigger and acquiring our sights as we pressed out. We also did draw and fire drills to work on getting the gun out fast and then taking the time to get the sight picture you needed to make the shot. Even if you were going to be taking a long range precise shot from the holster you still want not waste time on the draw, get the gun out fast, acquire your sight package, and refine as neccasary to make the shot.
To work on accuracy we did a walk back drill firing at 5, 10, 15, 20, and 25 yards at about a 7" circle. This helped us learn what our sight picture needed to look like to get the hits at different distances, it also helped me learn that I’m not worth much when I get passed the 15 yard line.
We ended day one by learning about changing speeds by shooting drills at the body of our targets and at the head of our targets. We would draw and fire a shot at the body as fast as we could gurantee a hit and then slow down slightly to make a more accurate hit to the head. Or switch it up by making a slow precise shot to the head followed by a quick shot to the body. It was all about getting us to go as fast as we could but slow down when the shot dictated it.
Day 2:
Sunday started a little cooler with temps in the low 20’s and some patches of fog moving through the area but by noon we warmed into the mid 30’s with a clear sky. Not bad since the weather folks were intially calling for cloudy with some snow. Jason gave us a quick refresher by quizing us about the things we had learned the previous day. He explained that if you can’t explain a concept like managing recoil through your grip and your stance how could you expect your subconcious mind to do it in a split second on demand.
We started our shooting with a draw and fire 5 round 5/10/15/20/25 yard walk back drill to get warmed up and make sure our trigger fingers were working. This served to once again remind me that I suck past 15 yards but helped me indentify an area where I have lots of room for improvement. Next we did the same drill but this time the timer came out and we had par times. Started with 10 seconds to draw and fire 5 rounds at 5 yards and progrssed all the way up to 1 minute to draw and fire 5 rounds at 25 yards. Most of the folks in the class had never shot with a par time and were slightly intimadated by the buzzer and finihsed with an eternity to spare before the buzzer went off and there accuracy suffered accordingly.
Next we put on a cover garment to work on drawing from concealment but most alreayd had jackets on because of the near freezing temps. Jason talked us through drawing from both open and closed front concealment garments. With the open front ones he simply teaches to grab your coat/shirt with your firing hand and violently throw it behind you and then go for the gun. With the closed front stuff he taught to grab as low and as close to the gun as you could with Mr Support Hand and attempt to pull your hand up to your chin allowing you the space to draw the gun. A lot fot he folks were wearing tighter fitting hoodies and jackets that didn’t open in the front and had a hard time with the grab and pull method.
After this we started to learn about what Jason calls a CQB front sight picture. It is used when due to the circumstances you have a high hit probabilty and want to get a hit in a hurry. It basically entailed learning how bad your sight picture could be (maintaining good trigger control) for you to still get an effective hit when you are behind the power curve and trying to react to something. He demonstrated this by having us shoot a “Compass Drill.” We intentionally took a sight picture with the front sight way to high in the rear, followed by barely havig the top of the front sight visible in the bottom of the rear sight. We also did two shots with the edge of front sight actually lined up with the side of our rear sight creating light on only one side of our front sight. This drill was to show us that even with a horrible sight picture we could still hit a shiloutte target at 5 yards as long as we could see our front sight somewhere in our rear sight. When you are up close you don’t need a perfect equal height/equal light sight picture to get hits on target. I feel like I’m not doing a great job explaining this so if it’s confusing or doesn’t sound right just ask and I’ll try to clarify.
We followed this up by shooting cadence drills, starting by trying to fire a shot every 2 seconds and moving up to trying to get a shot off every quarter of a second. This mainly helps when you are shooting against the timer and know that you need to get “x” amounts of shots of in “y” amount of time. The real world application of it was that it got some of us pushing ourselves to shoot faster and avoid having our brain outrun our trigger finger leading to trigger freeze.
No for some really fun stuff, position shooting. We started by going to kneeling while drawing. Jason teaches to shoot from kneeling unsupported, with kneeling used more as a way to get behind cover or make a smaller target as opposed to way to get more stable for a more accurate shot. We also practiced dropping to prone to simulate shooting under a peice of concealment/cover like a car. Finally we did some shooting from supine which I had never done before. It was a strange experince feleing the percussion of the gun going off between my knees.
We also did some shooting from retention. We put our support hand up creat space and index our target, drew and fired with the pistol in close. This seems simple but was a big eye opener for most of the class. Every time I pressed the trigger from this position it felt like I was getting punched in the face and it really ripped up the targets we were using.
The last event of the second day was firing the Redback One pistol standards. Jason has these standards listed on the web so I won’t bother to retype them out here but this is a 75 round timed assesment from 7 to 25 yards that you are expected to shoot cold at the begining of the Redback One Advanced Pistol class. It was a greta way for us to see where we all stood individually with out skills. Jason doesn’t set the bar low, no one in our class managed to get what Jason considers an acceptable score though 2 folks were damn close.
Lessons Learned:
-I really liked Jason’s palm up/palm down system and think that it is going to be the way I go from here on out.
-I really need to work on my accuracy past 15 yards, I think I’m going to spend a lot of this winter shooting at the 25 yard line.
-My grip still needs work.
-One thing that I learned I was pretty good was when it came to weapons manipulation and stoppage clearance. During the timed drills I could always get ahead with drawing and reloading but none of that matters if I can’t get my hits.
Gear:
I shot my daily carry Glock 19 with a Surefire X300 in a Raven holster. I shot around 900 rounds over the two days and the only malfunction came from either a bad primer or a light primer strike on a peice of ammo. My ammo was 124gr FMJ’s that I reloaded, I know the prevailing thought is to not shoot reloads in a training course but at this time that was the only way for me to afford the class. I figured training with reloads was better than no training. Luckily I only had that one issue but I am slowly going to start stockpiling some fancy store bought ammo for my next class while continuing to train with my reloads. One peice of kit that I took and was a thumb saver was an UPLULA, after folks seeing me use it the first day 6 brand new ones showed up on the second. Also everyone seemed to really enjoy my purple magazine base pads for some reason…
Fun stuff:
Jason had two really good quotes that I hope are just as funny to folks who weren’t there
"Don’t shoot a hole in your Gucci fuckin puffy jacket!” when we were shooting from retention
“Spray some M-A-N on it!” when our token female in the class was working a double feed
Well if you’ve made it this far I’d like to say thanks for reading my first AAR here and hope to take some more training and post some more of these in the future. This was my first formal shooting class outside of the military and I really enjoyed it. I learned a lot and identified areas where I can improve.
