AAR - One Day Pistol Refresher, 26 June 2010, Ravensdale WA

This is not going to be a "typical" AAR where everything is listed out in a nice orderly fashion explaining the drills we performed and my thoughts on them with some humorous asides thrown in.

Quite frankly, I do not remember everything we did and aside from some new things that have been added to the mix since my last Pistol class with Kevin W (less than a year ago), the individual drills are not being remembered from individual courses anymore. I guess I am just getting old.

Ah well, on to the AAR.

I live 250ish miles from where the Pac NW chapter of LMSD hold the majority of their courses. In an effort to try to keep the travel costs down (my wife and kids spent the day destroying my last paycheck at the Super Mall while I was out shooting), I elected to leave the house at 0400 in order to get to the range on time rather than heading to Ravensdale the day before and getting a room in a hotel somewhere.

Financially it was the right thing to do.

Not the ideal way to set myself up for success in training.

That said, it very well may be a more realistic way to train to get into a gunfight. Stay up for the 24 hours before a class, then drive 250 miles and pretend to be fresh, ready to go and not a complete dick to everyone just because you are tired.

There were three students total that attended the course with Kevin W taking the reins as the instructor for the course. All of us had trained with Kevin before and one of us had never had any pistol training to speak of.

As part of the introductions and orientation, we discussed why we had each signed up for the class.

My main reasons were-

-I have been focusing on rifle work lately and needed to get some focused pistol training in
-My new duty pistol is a Gen 4 Glock-17 with a Trijicon RMR 8 MOA LED RDS on it and I need to get some serious trigger time with it in order to evaluate the setup and to get rid some training scars associated with normal pistol sights.
-I have not taken a pistol class with Kevin since Oct 09 and in speaking with him, there was new material to cover.

There are other reasons as well. IE, I have been on vacation for the last week and used the trip as an excuse to get out of the house. The listed reasons were the main ones.

We started out the day focusing on pure accuracy and as the day progressed moved on to more combat type shooting.

The Gen 4 Glock-17 performed flawlessly. Including this class, I have about 1500 rounds through her so far. A mix of WWB FMJ from Wal-Mart, Blazer AL FMJ, Speer Lawman FMJ, Mag-Tech FMJ and Speer Gold Dot. All in either 115gr or 124gr bullet weights.

Not a single malfunction that was not intentionally induced in training.

This includes a few magazines of TRYING to limp wrist the pistol into a malfunction. I did this by shooting full magazines of the most anemic ammo I could find while holding the pistol with nothing but my thumb and trigger finger and firing as fast as I could. Multiple magazines worth of this and I was not able to get a single malfunction.

Some random thoughts from throughout the day.

BVAC ammo is no beuno. Multiple squib loads with other peoples G-17’s. Lots of issues getting multiple S&W M&P .45’s to feed. I will pay the extra few bucks a case for ammo that is not going to blow up my hand after I fire again into a squib round.

When clearing a squib load, MAKE SURE that the item you are using to hammer into the barrel has an OUTER diameter that is SMALLER than the INNER diameter of your barrel. You may get the bullet out, but then get a drift punch stuck even worse than the bullet. This may or may not have actually happened. Just sayin’.

Red dots on pistols rock. Maybe even more then on long guns. I have had the Glock/RMR setup for a month and change now and here are the big advantages that I have found so far-

-With dry fire, two things immediately stick out that are much more difficult to notice when shooting with traditional sights.

The first is that I found out that on my draw stroke, I was bringing the pistol out muzzle high in an effort to ID the front sight in my field of view as I munched out the pistol. This left me with having to take time at the end of my draw stroke to get the sights lined up vertically when I should have been putting lead on target. It was something that I was not even aware I was doing, but that popped out to me within the first 10 or so draw strokes I had with the pistol.

The second is that with the RMR, you can see the TINYEST amount of movement when squeezing the trigger. Seriously, if you have a jacked up trigger pull, watching your dot jump all over the place when you think you have pulled off a good shot is a bit humbling.

-Threat focused shooting is exponentially improved. With traditional pistol sights, threat focused shooting is talked about at closer ranges. Past 15 yards or so, the need to shift back to a front sight focus and lining up three planes is back in effect.

With the RMR equipped pistol, there is no front sight focus. If you are taking a 200 yard shot, then you are taking a 200 yard threat focused shot. There is much debate about Hick’s Law and other theories out there right now. There is no debate in my mind though that the ability to go with a single, threat focus no matter the range is a HUGE advantage.

-I am a cross dominant retard. I shoot long gun right handed/right eye even though I am left eye dominant. I shoot pistol right handed/left eye. Even with this, I have had issues in the past with pistol training (especially in FOF when things are hot and heavy) when I am trying to line up the front and rear sights, track the bad guy, move to cover and deconflict which sight picture I should actually be using because with the stress of the situation, both eyes are about as wide open as can be.

Not having to focus on three planes (rear sight, front sight, and target) and being able to engage with both eyes open is capitalizing on a body’s natural reaction to stress and removing another barrier to success.

-Tying into what was just said, big improvement in engaging multiple targets. Transitioning between targets and removing the variable of traditional sight alignment is fast. I am not sure how fast yet, but significantly faster than with irons. It is something I am going to have to spend some time working on with a shot timer.

-Not focusing on the three planes also comes into play at longer ranges. Being able to actually focus on your target and still watch your sights continues to make things easier.

-The last big improvement was inn alternate firing positions (like those used around a V-Tac barricade. Shooting up at a target from the prone can be problematic when you actually have to be behind your sights. With the RMR, just get your dot on target somehow and you are golden. A TON more wiggle room is built into the platform for allowing you to get hits from crappy positions.

The big downsides that I have found are-

-The cost may be an issue to some. $450-$550 for the sight and $200 to have the slide milled, plus an extra $100 if you want a set of tall night sights as BUIS on a $450 pistol may be a tough sell for some people. There are also people out there on SRT teams running C-Mores rather than T-1’s due to the cost of a quality optic. To me, for a serious use gun, the cost is far more than justified in the increased capability brought to bear.

-The jury is still out on the long term durability due to the RMR being so new. Guys I trust explicitly have stated that it is built like a brick shit house and that is good enough for me. At this point, I am not sure there is another mini red dot (other than a T-1) I would trust on a pistol for social work.

-Retraining myself was the purpose of attending the course and it was a good start.

I still have a ways to go on getting rid of training scars before I can truly excel with this setup, but the initial results are promising to me.

As for the pistol/dot combo, I see the potential for this to be a bigger breakthrough then the rifle/dot combo was in the early 90’s. The technology has taken awhile to get to where it is an effective option. It will take more time for people to start accepting how significant of an improvement this really is. The wave is building up steam and in 10-15 years gunfighters are going to look back at 2010 as the beginning of the future for handguns. If you are not looking into this option now for a personal defense handgun, then you are going to be getting farther and farther behind the power curve.

As far as the class goes... As usual, training with Kevin W and LMS is a pleasure. I have taken at least one pistol class per year, for the past 3-4 years with them and the material is constantly changing and being updated. I walked away with 3-4 new techniques that I had not seen or heard of in the past.

The people that show up for training continue to be good quality guys that are a pleasure to share a range with.

My selfish suggestion for these classes is this-

The cost to take two days of training for someone like me who has to travel across the state to get there is not significantly higher than for a one day class. I appreciate that a lot of the lucky bastards who are localish and get to go home at night after a class get more value out of one day classes and that they are popular options. My suggestion would be to do something along the lines of offering a one day pistol one day, then a one day rifle the next. That way whoever wants to only attend one or another class can, but for those of us that have to travel can still get two days of training in. Just something to think about.

I continue to be impressed with Kevin W and LMS. The constantly updated curriculum and professional instruction keep me coming back.

September 09, 2010, 08:16:52 PM

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