Just got home from a Vickers Tactical basic pistol class hosted by Grant at M4 Carbine and held at Greenport Tactical Assoc, near Canton, OH. This was the second class that I have taken from Larry Vickers at this location, the first was basic carbine last summer. If you you want to learn to use your guns as weapons, taking a class from LAV is the way to go. Just make sure you are willing to learn and be pushed out of your comfort zone.
Training day one. Trigger control and drills to work on it took us about 4 hours, these were dry firing and live firing drills. After lunch we worked on reloads and draws for about an hour, again dry fire and live fire drills. We then moved onto turns, static and moving. Which, thanks to pleasant weather, were less of a clusterF***k than they were last year's carbine and its 90/90 weather. We closed out the class and about 1/2 - 2/3 of us went out to eat at a nice local restaurant with Larry and our host Grant. Got home about 8pm after 55 minute drive.
TD 2 Rain, lots and lots of rain. Started off with a review of the trigger control and some dry fire and live fire techniques, this took about an hour. Did I mention it was raining and we were in low lying bay? Did some more work on drawing and reloads, than Ken Hackethorn made his appearance. That is one of the great bennies of this club is that it is only about a 2 hour drive for Hack to get to and he likes to train with LAV, so we got both of them on TD2 for both of the classes I have had at GTA. We started with Ken showing us some drills to work on trigger control with your muzzle moving all over hell and gone. Those are eye openers when you are waving your pistol around in a one inch circle and still keeping the hits in the black on an NRA target, if you do not mindf***k yourself and snatch the trigger.
After this we worked on shooting and moving forward, backwards and laterally. Incredibly important, but widely over looked skill needed for gunfighters. After we got the basics we did some barrel drills and corner drills. Good muddy fun.
Grabbed lunch and then had a bit of play time as Ken had a Galil, ARM I think was the model, short barreled select fire gun I had no 5.56 but several others did and that gun was amazingly controllable in F/A. We also got to look at a AR-15 piston gun that uses a FAL style gas set up, as it all comes out of the front, no need to break down the gun to pull the gas system out. Then we got a hell of a blast of rain and wind, almost took out shelters out, so we held them down and got to bs for about 1/2 hour as the storm blew over. Once that had blown through, we did more barrel work and had a team competition.
After this, we took a recess and went out to eat while we waited for it to get dark so we could do some low-light work. Great stories were told by Ken and Larry about training folks all over the world. Some of them were, lose your breath laughing funny, some were so depressing you wanted to beat someone’s ass. Good time. Leave and bid farewell to Ken, sun is out! Yes!.
We get back to the range about 8 ish and get kitted up and we get another blast of weather tearing though. Again we retreat under the sun/rain shelters and hold them in place and BS. I am very glad I was hiding under the shelter with the contractor, the deputy and the gunsmiths; and not the one with the PD captain who was regaling folk with tails of how much human garbage there is. Rain slows down and we go out and work on low light/no light.
Tritium night sights are a must, three dot tritiums are better than nothing, but they suck when compared to Straight 8's or Bar/dot/bar setups. Then worked on the flashbulb lighting/shooting technique. Crimson trace laser grips are the bomb, when you do not break them, which I did. We closed up shop about 10:30 and headed home.
TD3 Worked on trigger control drills. Then went to malf drills, these would have usually been on TD2, but since we had Ken there for shoot on the move they got jiggled back to td3, pistol is much easier and faster to get clearance drills than the AR was last year, or maybe it just seemed like that as we had nice weather again. We then worked on turns again and then went onto running evals and the like.
Larry's philosophy of training is that you must shoot accurately and be able to do so while moving at CQB distances. That is based in his time in SFOD and has been borne out over the past several years with the Unit running a huge amount of ops since 9/11. Why is accuracy prime? Larry's 50% rule of combat. You will only shoot half as well under combat stress as you can under training stress. So if you are shooting 4" groups during training and quals, you will be shooting 8" groups during actual combat. So your goal is to get as close to the weapons limitations as possible in your skill level, so that you are able to get good, solid hits on the targets. This gets you to having a 1.5" gun that you can shoot at 1.85" and when amped out in combat you can still be shooting sub 4" groups. This is why we did so many trigger control drills.
The other key? Practice, go out and f%$*#ing shoot the drills or you are withering on the vine. A great example of this was a DoS security contractor who took our class for shits and giggles. He had not had a chance to do alot of pistol shooting recently and his first several drills showed it. After a few rounds down range, all of the training he had kicked back in and he started hammering the bulls eye, (great shooting Stony!) but the lack of having practice time showed. Now those of us who are just barely proficient that fall off of skills will turn a bad hit into a clean miss. Larry and Ken will both tell you that they only got as good as they are by practicing and running rounds downrange in constructive drills.
Great class, great stories from two of the best CQB pistol instructors in the world, and I got Larry to sign my copy of "Six minutes to Freedom"
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Originally Posted by Thekatar
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