Hopefully this AAR does the course justice. First off a big thanks to Grey Group, LAV and the AI's for putting on this class.
I'd also really like to thank the person who picked up the jacket I left by accident and gave it to the guys at Grey Group. I didn't realize I left it Monday morning. Thankfully it's at the store and I just have to go down and pick it up.
The class started at 8:30am and the weather was perfect. I felt sorry for the next days Basic Carbine class because of the very wet weather forecast for that day. This was my 2nd class with LAV, the first was the Basic Carbine Course last Nov, and as expected I learned a lot. As others have said one of LAV's favorite sayings is "Speed is Fine Accuracy is Final". He really stresses accuracy and TRIGGER CONTROL!!
We started of with the tried and true empty shell casing on the front site dry fire drills and then built upon that basis. The main thing I like so far about LAV's classes is that they all start with a base and then building blocks of instruction are sequentially built upon that base. Each block of instruction is the basis for the next one. By then end of the day you are putting all of that instruction to good use. As stated earlier though everything is built upon TRIGGER CONTROL. Something else that is great about the way LAV teaches. He explains the purpose of every block of instruction and how it relates to the real world. Doing so, at least for me, really helps it sink in
We did dry fire drills, dummy and ball drills. Yes I said that backwards. LAV is the one who switched the terminology for that drill. The Dummy and Ball drills really helped me to realize when I was jerking the trigger. When I did my part I stayed in the X or 10 ring. When I jerked on the trigger, low and left. All of the drills were done at the ready and then repeated drawing frmo the holster. We shot a various distances for each drill. At times we were as close as 2 yards and then as far as 25 yards. 95% of the work was done within 10 yards. We also did various team drills. The great thing about the team drills is that you now have the pressure of not letting your team down. Well, unfortunately I did and more than once. One of the team drills we were shooting steel targets and I JERKED my trigger and missed a couple of times. The other team drill we did was a shooting on the move drill. Well I jerked my trigger again and was the cause of about half of our team points. LAV broke up the instruction with some confidence shooting. We all lined up to shoot 2 steel targets. we got 2 shots to hit the steel. We began at about 25 yards and then moved back. You got 2 shots at each distance. If you missed twice you were out. the last person hit the steel at about 90yards. I went out at about 50 yards or so. I've never shot a defensive handgun at that distance.
We broke for lunch about 11:30 and then got back to work about an hour later. After lunch there were more drills and then Shooting on the Move drills. We started SOTM by walking forward, starting at about 15 yards and then on the BEEP at about 10 yards trying to place 4 rounds in the black of the bullseye targets. This really emphasized how bad my trigger control was. I had a very hard time keeping my rounds in the black. I kept maybe 75% of them in the black. A couple ended up in the cardboard. We did forward SOTM drils about 5-6 times then we did it moving backwards. LAV told us that a lot of people are more accurate walking backwards than forwards. That was definitely the case with me. My sight picture was a lot more steady than moving forward.
Well by 4pm or so all of us were getting a bit tired. Even though this was a basic class it was a lot of detailed instruction that we all really sank out teeth into. It wasn't that we were physically tired. Itr was more of being brain dead.
We had a good cross section of people in class. There was at least 1 LEO and and 1 magazine editor. The rest of us were a mix of civilians and ex military. We even had a woman in class. There were 17 of us total. The LEO and Editor were about the best 2 shooters in the class. We also hada a good cross section of weapons being shot. The 2 main weapons being used were Glocks and M&P's. We had a couple of H&K's a 1911 and a Sig226. we didn't have any real weapons break down. We did have a couple of ammunition related malfunctions though. I don't know what kind of weapons they were shooting but the ammunition was Blazer ammo. Most of the people shot 9mm's but we had a good number of 45's also. I may have missed a weapon or two though. People came from all over to take this class. They came from as far north as Wisc and Illinois. My parter, xarmyguy77 Tom, for most of the class came down from Illinois. He shot pretty well also. He definitley blew me away when we were doing SOTM drills.
Overall it was a great class. Everything flowed smoothly and each step of the way was thoroughly explained and demonstrated. LAV has a great , relaxed, easy to understand way of explaining things. There is at least 1 other Basic Handgun class AAR here and our class went pretty much the same way as that one. That is why I didn't really get into all of the various drills into too much detail about them. I am taking his 2 day Level-1 Handgun class the first weekend in April and i will definitley be doing a lot of dry-firing between now and then. Unfortunately I may not be able to get any range time between now and then to practice a few of the live fire drills we did. I have a lot to work on and hopefully I will shoot a lot better next month.
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