navycrna
Smell My Face
I had been wanting to take one of the carbine courses at Commonwealth Criminal Justice Academy for some time. So when I saw a civilian class was happening on Feb 25 & 26 I told my wife that is what I wanted my birthday present to be. Let me preface this by giving the disclaimer that I am not the most eliquent writer out there so bare with me.
I wasn't quite sure what to expect but I knew that other MDshooters had attended the classes and were very happy. We arrived at the schoolhouse in Fredericksburg Saturday morning and Tom and his son Tommy were there to greet us. He then started to give us a brief overview of his background and training experience and asked the students about our backgrounds and level of experience with the carbine. We had only four students in the class so we knew we would be getting a lot of one on one attentions. Tom explained that there may be classes out there that slung more lead down range but he would be focusing on techinque in order to make us better shooters.
For the first part of the morning we were in the class discussing the break down of the weapon, cleaning and maintance (he said that although this was not an armorers course he wanted us to be able to maintain our weapons), magazine styles, stock, sights and optics. He also lectured us on proper movement and tactics. He did a very good job at holding everyones attention and kept things interesting.
At noon we broke for lunch and after all headed to his brand new shooting facility just South of his office. It was a very open shooting area with nice high berms on three sides and a covered gear/shooting area. Tom had told us from the very start that he would let us progress and do some cool shit, as long as we could handle it safely. We started our time shooting doing some drills from about 10 yards which included malfunction/reload drills and transitioning to our side arm. At this point he also had us practice switching from our dominant to non-dominant side.
It was a very windy day on Saturday and all of our targets were blowing over so Tom opted to put up steel tagets for the remainder of the day. We next start doing some movement drills in which we were advancing and backing away as we were putting lead on target. We then started practicing shooting from cover, both standing and kneeling from our strong and weak sides. They put alot of emphasis on keeping everthing tucked in and tight and only leaning out enough to get your shot before tucking back in. By 5 pm we started wrapping up for the evening. Tom had a quick after action with us. The one thing I realy appreciated about Tom is that he let us know that his course teaching style was fluid and if there were things we wanted to focus on he would do those with us.
On day two we met at the schoolhouse for a short time in the morning were Tom discused threat assesment, the OODA loop, and the color code of readiness. He also went over aspects of team movement. We then broke and headed to the range. After some brief rifle work one of the students asked Tom if he didn't mind doing a little pistol instruction too. So for almost an hour Tom went over some of his pistol course with us including clearing of stovepipes and doublefeeds. Shooting with dominant and non-dominant hands
including operating and reloading one handed while simulating an injury to the other.
We then went on to conga line shooting doing figure eights around barrels, more shooting behind cover, and two man bounding drills which eventually turned into three man drills.
So after two days of instruction almost 1000k rounds of 5.56 and 200 pistol rounds I certainly felt I got my moneys worth. He did a very good job at beeing very easygoing with us while maintaining a high degree of safety. I will definetly be coming back for somemore of Toms classes and would recomend them to anyone in a heartbeat.
I wasn't quite sure what to expect but I knew that other MDshooters had attended the classes and were very happy. We arrived at the schoolhouse in Fredericksburg Saturday morning and Tom and his son Tommy were there to greet us. He then started to give us a brief overview of his background and training experience and asked the students about our backgrounds and level of experience with the carbine. We had only four students in the class so we knew we would be getting a lot of one on one attentions. Tom explained that there may be classes out there that slung more lead down range but he would be focusing on techinque in order to make us better shooters.
For the first part of the morning we were in the class discussing the break down of the weapon, cleaning and maintance (he said that although this was not an armorers course he wanted us to be able to maintain our weapons), magazine styles, stock, sights and optics. He also lectured us on proper movement and tactics. He did a very good job at holding everyones attention and kept things interesting.
At noon we broke for lunch and after all headed to his brand new shooting facility just South of his office. It was a very open shooting area with nice high berms on three sides and a covered gear/shooting area. Tom had told us from the very start that he would let us progress and do some cool shit, as long as we could handle it safely. We started our time shooting doing some drills from about 10 yards which included malfunction/reload drills and transitioning to our side arm. At this point he also had us practice switching from our dominant to non-dominant side.
It was a very windy day on Saturday and all of our targets were blowing over so Tom opted to put up steel tagets for the remainder of the day. We next start doing some movement drills in which we were advancing and backing away as we were putting lead on target. We then started practicing shooting from cover, both standing and kneeling from our strong and weak sides. They put alot of emphasis on keeping everthing tucked in and tight and only leaning out enough to get your shot before tucking back in. By 5 pm we started wrapping up for the evening. Tom had a quick after action with us. The one thing I realy appreciated about Tom is that he let us know that his course teaching style was fluid and if there were things we wanted to focus on he would do those with us.
On day two we met at the schoolhouse for a short time in the morning were Tom discused threat assesment, the OODA loop, and the color code of readiness. He also went over aspects of team movement. We then broke and headed to the range. After some brief rifle work one of the students asked Tom if he didn't mind doing a little pistol instruction too. So for almost an hour Tom went over some of his pistol course with us including clearing of stovepipes and doublefeeds. Shooting with dominant and non-dominant hands
including operating and reloading one handed while simulating an injury to the other.
We then went on to conga line shooting doing figure eights around barrels, more shooting behind cover, and two man bounding drills which eventually turned into three man drills.
So after two days of instruction almost 1000k rounds of 5.56 and 200 pistol rounds I certainly felt I got my moneys worth. He did a very good job at beeing very easygoing with us while maintaining a high degree of safety. I will definetly be coming back for somemore of Toms classes and would recomend them to anyone in a heartbeat.
