[pax]

This weekend, I attended a class at the Firearms Academy of Seattle where these intermediate to advanced students had already built a solid, good foundation of shooting skills before coming into the class.

The class was a hybrid type class. Half of it focused on refining the students' shooting techniques and the other half focused on solving problems with the gun in hand during scenario and role playing exercises. It was an excellent class and definitely worth the investment.

Quite frankly I see very little value in doing any type of dynamic movement drills or scenario type drills unless and until the shooter has built a solid foundation of basic gun handling skills that will hold up safely under stress. In this, I perhaps part ways with people who want to jump out of flaming helicopters the first day that they own a handgun, & I definitely part ways with people who will have their students doing the tactical range dance long before they have learned how to hit a target in any reliable or repeatable way. But I think, after watching many different students develop their skills from many different schools of thought, that the shooters who start by building a good foundation and then proceed from there to apply those foundational skills in a wider variety of contexts -- well, those people tend to do a better job of learning the skills and almost always and up in a better place overall.

pax