billprudden
Active Member
- Nov 24, 2008
- 158
11/10/11
EDIT - The November class will be at Peacemaker National Training Center https://peacemakernational.com/ instead of Delmarva Sporting Clays.
Bill
9/9/11
Friends:
With great enthusiasm Ed Shell of Central Virginia Tactical and I are in a position to advertise four classes for November through January. Two of the classes, Concealed-Carry Handgun at Contact Distance and Natural Point of Aim Shooting in Low Light Conditions, will be taught at Delmarva Sporting Clays on Route 50 halfway to Ocean City, Maryland (http://www.dscfff.com/). The other two classes, The Prone Position and Precision Carbine with Imprecise Components, will be taught at CVT’s classroom and range in Louisa, Virginia. Both locations are approximately two hours from the beltway.
The cost for each class is $200. The two classes in Louisa will have an optional Sunday morning armorer’s school for an additional $50. Each class will be limited to eight students maximum – quality over quantity.
As we’ve done in the past, sign-up will be in stages: First, you’ll email me that you would like to reserve a slot in a particular class. Six weeks before the day of the class I’ll email everyone who registered, requesting payment within two weeks. Then, a month out, with checks in hand covering the minimum number of students necessary to rent the range and cover costs, we’ll “lock in” the class. At that point your deposit becomes non-refundable (though it is transferrable to a buddy if you get sick that day or something). If, instead, a month out, there are not enough paid slots to run the class, I’ll return everyone’s deposit. While you are most welcome to ask questions and express intent on this thread, all sign-ups will happen via email – billprudden@hotmail.com.
It is our intention to offer this same quartet of classes again in the spring and summer of 2012, so if you are interested in one, but not for this fall, please reach out and let us know. Further, if it turns out that one of these courses has 16 interested students this fall, and another has few or none, Ed and I can certainly offer one of them twice this fall and forego the less-popular offering. Communication is key, we’re easy.
Below is some background regarding the philosophy and goals for these courses in general followed by a specific course description for each.
During the last two years in which we (Ed, Ron, Ian, Steve, Marc, and others and I) have run the Carbine 101s, Long-Range Movers, Reticle, and Close Combat classes I have reflected on which skills were “learned” in that the students drove home having executed them well that day and mentally understood how to go about the task of executing them again at some future point, but suspecting that they were not “learned” in a way that would allow the shooter to perform them again at a high level without a drop-off or lag. In essence, I was wondering just how perishable those skills were.
This got me thinking more about my own training and the skills that I felt I had learned in such a way that the floor of my performance was, for all practical purposes, permanently raised. What I mean by this is that we all leave a training session, whether it is an intense week at a shooting school or just finishing 15 minutes of dry-firing off the back porch, having temporarily raised our performance ceiling, but only sometimes having raised the floor of where we will start next time we shoot. Further, and really the Big Point when it comes to defensive shooting, is that it will be that floor, our minimum level of skill having not recently practiced and being forced to execute under stress, which will largely decide our failure or success. This is why sniper matches put a lot of points on the cold bore shot and why concealed carry classes often put a stopwatch on your first full-speed draw-and-fire of the day.
So the question I posed to myself became, “What kind of training works toward raising the students’ performance floors, especially in high-stress no-prep situations?” The answer, based on the training I’ve given and received over the years, plus what we have all heard a lot of other shooters and trainers say, is (a) simple, non-diagnostic techniques which are reactive and compatible with gross motor movement, (b) lots of repetitions, (c) with increasing levels of speed, intensity, and stress, (d) appropriately modified for individual needs. This is what we intend to provide this fall and winter.
Further, just as I was percolating on these points as they pertained to contact-distance shooting, knife work, low-light drills with the carbine, and other survival-oriented techniques, I had the opportunity to assist Ed with a Precision Rifle class in July. He really didn’t need my help until the second and third days in the field, so on the first day, as he broke in a group of very novice shooters, I got to sit back and listen to him lecture and demonstrate the absolute basics of the prone position, eye relief, trigger finger position and pressure, follow-through, and so on. He did a fabulous job of explaining the man-machine interface that we call the prone position and I expected that the students would snuggle right in on Ed’s covered wooden platform and get to work blasting them thar’ steel plates way out there in the field.
In fact, they had real trouble setting up a solid prone position and wrestled with it off and on throughout the three day class. As we repeatedly helped them build a good position the back of my brain kept going, “Why are they struggling so? Ed and Marc and Ian and Laura and the rest of the gang and I can build a solid prone position on a rain-slick pasture, the side of a cliff, the bed of a pick-up truck, virtually anywhere, and do so usually in mere seconds… In fact, during timed stages at comps, the harder I hit the earth and the more tense I am, the better and faster I find a situationally-appropriate version of a solid prone position! What gives?”
What gave, the more I thought about it, was that, much like my discussion above, these shooters lacked the precision rifle version of (a) simple, non-diagnostic techniques which are reactive and compatible with gross motor movement, (b) lots of repetitions, (c) with increasing levels of speed, intensity, and stress, (d) appropriately modified for individual needs. And on the way home from Central Virginia Tactical that Sunday night, driving with my left hand, I sketched out these courses with my right.
November 19th: Concealed-Carry Handgun at Contact Distance. Delmarva Sporting Clays, 9am – 5pm.
This course is specifically designed for the worst-case scenario: He or they, the Threat, are well inside the “magical” 21 foot barrier and either actively engaging you or positioning themselves to do so soon. Your handgun is either on the belt or already in hand – the tactics really don’t change much. You will learn:
• Movement and spacing to frustrate their initial attack
• Immediate-action defenses and counter-strikes to reestablish reactive distance and get them damaged and off script
• Lethal and non-lethal retention techniques
• Contact-distance shooting techniques
While there will be some whole-group demonstration, most of the class will be taught in two squads of one instructor and four students each, with half of us “cold” in a slow-paced weapons-cold environment and the other half doing live-fire drills at increasing levels of intensity. We’ll rotate the two squads frequently to allow our brains to learn / practice / stress-fire / reflect over and over again – a kind of pedagogical OODA loop.
This class will be taught with a 180-degree safety rule in effect. It will be completely safe. It will, however, at times, feel really uncomfortable, such as when you fire your handgun with my hands fisted all over it denying it the ability to recoil and cycle normally, or when you engage paper targets with your muzzle only an inch or two off of them so that the exhaust gases shred the paper and tiny little hot powder chunkies bounce into your face, or when I, well, hit you, but it is worth the discomfort. Worth it because you will leave with a lot of good mental and muscle memory for how to win a fight involving a handgun that you became aware of way too late.
Equipment list is a handgun or two, a couple of mags, 150 rounds, and a holster (or not if you never).
December 10th: Natural Point of Aim Shooting in Low Light Conditions. Delmarva Sporting Clays, noon to 8pm.
Our friends who keep the statistics at the Department of Justice have been for years telling us that the majority of defensive shootings occur in non-daylight conditions. We further know, from decades’ worth of first-person accounts, that many people “never even see” their sights under the stress of a life-or-death encounter. OK, then let’s train that way…
With properly-taught and practiced Natural Point of Aim (NPoA) techniques we can hit torso-sized targets, under stress, in low light conditions, well beyond defensive distances (15 yards for handgun, double that for rifle) without ever seeing the sights. Further, if you do happen to have night sights, or lucky moonlight, or it is high noon without a cloud in the sky, good NPoA techniques “pre-aim” the gun at the target very quickly affording you and your eyes little need for correction before taking an “aimed” shot.
Bring a handgun, shotgun, rifle, or any combination – whatever you are likely to have when you need it. Bring a flashlight if you walk or drive or sleep with one handy, but not if you don’t. I’ll bring duct tape for your sights. 250 rounds of blasting-quality ammo for whatever gun you bring. A sling or holster is a good idea if you regularly use one.
This class, if taken in addition to the November Concealed-Carry class, will be a really nice self-defense combination, but can be taken stand-alone with no problem.
January 21st: The Prone Position. Central Virginia Tactical, Louisa, Virginia. Closed!
Why do I shoot 0.5 inch groups one day and 1.5 inch groups with the same rifle and ammo the next? Why does my zero appear to change when I get off the rifle, take a piss, and get right back on it? Why do I shoot some perfect little itty bitty groups, some vertically-strung groups, and some horizontally-strung groups all within the same practice session? Why do I shoot better with a bad-looking non-textbook one-leg-bent prone position than when I adopt, and really try to make work, a “classic” prone position? And why do I have no idea, on any given day, how I will shoot?
Ed will take the class through the theory and reality-driven practice of the prone position. Why we do the things we do, how they affect the man-machine interface, and how to compensate when circumstances try to confound us. Further, getting back to my “raising the performance floor” issue from the introduction, he will explain how to self-diagnose while establishing the position and setting up the shot so you can increase cold bore accuracy and reduce the size and off-zero dispersion of the first group.
Format will be Ed teaching, y’all shooting, and me helping out. Expect to shoot a lot of groups. For this reason, this may not be the class to bring your .300 WinMag to, as fatigue and flinch will become additional factors to overcome. Hell, perhaps not even your .308. Seriously, as a student I’d take this class by borrowing back the 700 in .223 in a half-ton McMillan A-5 stock I sold my buddy a few years ago. Class could even be taken with a man-sized .22 LR. Not kidding. Whatever you bring, plan on 150 rounds.
AR guys: please attend! A 16” carbine with a 3-9 scope would be fine, just make sure you bring precision ammo, it will accelerate your learning. That said, nobody needs to bring super-custom precision guns. The point is not to shoot perfect groups, it is to shoot groups perfectly.
This class will also offer a Sunday morning AR-15 armorer’s course at the CVT classroom / workshop. Ed will spend approximately three hours demonstrating proper take-down, repair, cleaning, maintenance, and assembly procedures. 9am to noon, $50. Let me know during sign-up if you expect to be interested.
* One caveat: If we get enough interested students, Ed would like to run two separate versions of this class, one just for bolt guns and another just for semis. We don’t have to, but there are definitely different “issues” for each within the prone position, and two different squads on different days would allow for more tailored instruction. For this reason, if you email me to enroll in this class, please indicate if you are likely to bring a bolt or a semi, and we’ll see how the numbers work out. If we are 4x bolts and 4x semis it will be just fine, but 2 groups of 8 with similar rifles on consecutive weekends would be even better!
January 28th: Precision Carbine with Imprecise Components. Central Virginia Tactical, Louisa, Virginia.
This class is based on the premise that our ARs, especially those set up to be CQB first and everything else second, are actually far more precise than we imagine. Not as precise as a dedicated long-range AR, for sure, but capable of much more than we usually ask of them at 7 – 25 yards. Once we recognize and learn how to employ that precision, then the head shot, or partially covered just-gun-and-head-and-right-shoulder shot, out to 300 yards, become far more reliable options.
Instruction will begin with the carbine in a series of field-expedient prone positions, then we will learn man- and gun-appropriate seated and kneeling positions, then standing positions, and finally when and how to integrate positional supports, or not, perhaps instead simply using them as cover. These are the positions we’ll take 99% of our defensive shots in, so we’ll really rep them in this class, concentrating on precision and repeatability. Finally, we’ll model for you simple drills that play within the rules of most clubs and ranges which you can use to reinforce these skills.
This class would make a great follow-up to the Prone Position class the week before, but is of course fine on its own as well. In either case, you’ll leave knowing how small you and your carbine can group in different positions, where the point of impact moves as you change positions so you can compensate with your point of aim, and what shots you can take with confidence at what ranges.
Bring at least 150 rounds. You decide how precise or imprecise the ammo should be – we all have different answers based on our carbines being CQB-first. Obviously, if part of your agenda for this class is to see what you and gun and sights can do under ideal conditions, then match ammo is better. If you prefer to go with SS109s or soft points or even frang, whatever you keep the gun ready with, so be it. Plan to go home with relevant data.
Like the Prone Position class, this class will also offer a Sunday morning AR-15 armorer’s course at the CVT classroom / workshop. Ed will spend approximately three hours demonstrating proper take-down, repair, cleaning, maintenance, and assembly procedures. 9am to noon, $50. Let me know during sign-up if you expect to be interested.
_______________________________________________________
Again, please post questions, calendar counter-offers, and any other thoughts, and feel free to contact us as well.
Bill Prudden
Ed Shell, Lead Instructor, Central Virginia Tactical
EDIT - The November class will be at Peacemaker National Training Center https://peacemakernational.com/ instead of Delmarva Sporting Clays.
Bill
9/9/11
Friends:
With great enthusiasm Ed Shell of Central Virginia Tactical and I are in a position to advertise four classes for November through January. Two of the classes, Concealed-Carry Handgun at Contact Distance and Natural Point of Aim Shooting in Low Light Conditions, will be taught at Delmarva Sporting Clays on Route 50 halfway to Ocean City, Maryland (http://www.dscfff.com/). The other two classes, The Prone Position and Precision Carbine with Imprecise Components, will be taught at CVT’s classroom and range in Louisa, Virginia. Both locations are approximately two hours from the beltway.
The cost for each class is $200. The two classes in Louisa will have an optional Sunday morning armorer’s school for an additional $50. Each class will be limited to eight students maximum – quality over quantity.
As we’ve done in the past, sign-up will be in stages: First, you’ll email me that you would like to reserve a slot in a particular class. Six weeks before the day of the class I’ll email everyone who registered, requesting payment within two weeks. Then, a month out, with checks in hand covering the minimum number of students necessary to rent the range and cover costs, we’ll “lock in” the class. At that point your deposit becomes non-refundable (though it is transferrable to a buddy if you get sick that day or something). If, instead, a month out, there are not enough paid slots to run the class, I’ll return everyone’s deposit. While you are most welcome to ask questions and express intent on this thread, all sign-ups will happen via email – billprudden@hotmail.com.
It is our intention to offer this same quartet of classes again in the spring and summer of 2012, so if you are interested in one, but not for this fall, please reach out and let us know. Further, if it turns out that one of these courses has 16 interested students this fall, and another has few or none, Ed and I can certainly offer one of them twice this fall and forego the less-popular offering. Communication is key, we’re easy.
Below is some background regarding the philosophy and goals for these courses in general followed by a specific course description for each.
During the last two years in which we (Ed, Ron, Ian, Steve, Marc, and others and I) have run the Carbine 101s, Long-Range Movers, Reticle, and Close Combat classes I have reflected on which skills were “learned” in that the students drove home having executed them well that day and mentally understood how to go about the task of executing them again at some future point, but suspecting that they were not “learned” in a way that would allow the shooter to perform them again at a high level without a drop-off or lag. In essence, I was wondering just how perishable those skills were.
This got me thinking more about my own training and the skills that I felt I had learned in such a way that the floor of my performance was, for all practical purposes, permanently raised. What I mean by this is that we all leave a training session, whether it is an intense week at a shooting school or just finishing 15 minutes of dry-firing off the back porch, having temporarily raised our performance ceiling, but only sometimes having raised the floor of where we will start next time we shoot. Further, and really the Big Point when it comes to defensive shooting, is that it will be that floor, our minimum level of skill having not recently practiced and being forced to execute under stress, which will largely decide our failure or success. This is why sniper matches put a lot of points on the cold bore shot and why concealed carry classes often put a stopwatch on your first full-speed draw-and-fire of the day.
So the question I posed to myself became, “What kind of training works toward raising the students’ performance floors, especially in high-stress no-prep situations?” The answer, based on the training I’ve given and received over the years, plus what we have all heard a lot of other shooters and trainers say, is (a) simple, non-diagnostic techniques which are reactive and compatible with gross motor movement, (b) lots of repetitions, (c) with increasing levels of speed, intensity, and stress, (d) appropriately modified for individual needs. This is what we intend to provide this fall and winter.
Further, just as I was percolating on these points as they pertained to contact-distance shooting, knife work, low-light drills with the carbine, and other survival-oriented techniques, I had the opportunity to assist Ed with a Precision Rifle class in July. He really didn’t need my help until the second and third days in the field, so on the first day, as he broke in a group of very novice shooters, I got to sit back and listen to him lecture and demonstrate the absolute basics of the prone position, eye relief, trigger finger position and pressure, follow-through, and so on. He did a fabulous job of explaining the man-machine interface that we call the prone position and I expected that the students would snuggle right in on Ed’s covered wooden platform and get to work blasting them thar’ steel plates way out there in the field.
In fact, they had real trouble setting up a solid prone position and wrestled with it off and on throughout the three day class. As we repeatedly helped them build a good position the back of my brain kept going, “Why are they struggling so? Ed and Marc and Ian and Laura and the rest of the gang and I can build a solid prone position on a rain-slick pasture, the side of a cliff, the bed of a pick-up truck, virtually anywhere, and do so usually in mere seconds… In fact, during timed stages at comps, the harder I hit the earth and the more tense I am, the better and faster I find a situationally-appropriate version of a solid prone position! What gives?”
What gave, the more I thought about it, was that, much like my discussion above, these shooters lacked the precision rifle version of (a) simple, non-diagnostic techniques which are reactive and compatible with gross motor movement, (b) lots of repetitions, (c) with increasing levels of speed, intensity, and stress, (d) appropriately modified for individual needs. And on the way home from Central Virginia Tactical that Sunday night, driving with my left hand, I sketched out these courses with my right.
November 19th: Concealed-Carry Handgun at Contact Distance. Delmarva Sporting Clays, 9am – 5pm.
This course is specifically designed for the worst-case scenario: He or they, the Threat, are well inside the “magical” 21 foot barrier and either actively engaging you or positioning themselves to do so soon. Your handgun is either on the belt or already in hand – the tactics really don’t change much. You will learn:
• Movement and spacing to frustrate their initial attack
• Immediate-action defenses and counter-strikes to reestablish reactive distance and get them damaged and off script
• Lethal and non-lethal retention techniques
• Contact-distance shooting techniques
While there will be some whole-group demonstration, most of the class will be taught in two squads of one instructor and four students each, with half of us “cold” in a slow-paced weapons-cold environment and the other half doing live-fire drills at increasing levels of intensity. We’ll rotate the two squads frequently to allow our brains to learn / practice / stress-fire / reflect over and over again – a kind of pedagogical OODA loop.
This class will be taught with a 180-degree safety rule in effect. It will be completely safe. It will, however, at times, feel really uncomfortable, such as when you fire your handgun with my hands fisted all over it denying it the ability to recoil and cycle normally, or when you engage paper targets with your muzzle only an inch or two off of them so that the exhaust gases shred the paper and tiny little hot powder chunkies bounce into your face, or when I, well, hit you, but it is worth the discomfort. Worth it because you will leave with a lot of good mental and muscle memory for how to win a fight involving a handgun that you became aware of way too late.
Equipment list is a handgun or two, a couple of mags, 150 rounds, and a holster (or not if you never).
December 10th: Natural Point of Aim Shooting in Low Light Conditions. Delmarva Sporting Clays, noon to 8pm.
Our friends who keep the statistics at the Department of Justice have been for years telling us that the majority of defensive shootings occur in non-daylight conditions. We further know, from decades’ worth of first-person accounts, that many people “never even see” their sights under the stress of a life-or-death encounter. OK, then let’s train that way…
With properly-taught and practiced Natural Point of Aim (NPoA) techniques we can hit torso-sized targets, under stress, in low light conditions, well beyond defensive distances (15 yards for handgun, double that for rifle) without ever seeing the sights. Further, if you do happen to have night sights, or lucky moonlight, or it is high noon without a cloud in the sky, good NPoA techniques “pre-aim” the gun at the target very quickly affording you and your eyes little need for correction before taking an “aimed” shot.
Bring a handgun, shotgun, rifle, or any combination – whatever you are likely to have when you need it. Bring a flashlight if you walk or drive or sleep with one handy, but not if you don’t. I’ll bring duct tape for your sights. 250 rounds of blasting-quality ammo for whatever gun you bring. A sling or holster is a good idea if you regularly use one.
This class, if taken in addition to the November Concealed-Carry class, will be a really nice self-defense combination, but can be taken stand-alone with no problem.
January 21st: The Prone Position. Central Virginia Tactical, Louisa, Virginia. Closed!
Why do I shoot 0.5 inch groups one day and 1.5 inch groups with the same rifle and ammo the next? Why does my zero appear to change when I get off the rifle, take a piss, and get right back on it? Why do I shoot some perfect little itty bitty groups, some vertically-strung groups, and some horizontally-strung groups all within the same practice session? Why do I shoot better with a bad-looking non-textbook one-leg-bent prone position than when I adopt, and really try to make work, a “classic” prone position? And why do I have no idea, on any given day, how I will shoot?
Ed will take the class through the theory and reality-driven practice of the prone position. Why we do the things we do, how they affect the man-machine interface, and how to compensate when circumstances try to confound us. Further, getting back to my “raising the performance floor” issue from the introduction, he will explain how to self-diagnose while establishing the position and setting up the shot so you can increase cold bore accuracy and reduce the size and off-zero dispersion of the first group.
Format will be Ed teaching, y’all shooting, and me helping out. Expect to shoot a lot of groups. For this reason, this may not be the class to bring your .300 WinMag to, as fatigue and flinch will become additional factors to overcome. Hell, perhaps not even your .308. Seriously, as a student I’d take this class by borrowing back the 700 in .223 in a half-ton McMillan A-5 stock I sold my buddy a few years ago. Class could even be taken with a man-sized .22 LR. Not kidding. Whatever you bring, plan on 150 rounds.
AR guys: please attend! A 16” carbine with a 3-9 scope would be fine, just make sure you bring precision ammo, it will accelerate your learning. That said, nobody needs to bring super-custom precision guns. The point is not to shoot perfect groups, it is to shoot groups perfectly.
This class will also offer a Sunday morning AR-15 armorer’s course at the CVT classroom / workshop. Ed will spend approximately three hours demonstrating proper take-down, repair, cleaning, maintenance, and assembly procedures. 9am to noon, $50. Let me know during sign-up if you expect to be interested.
* One caveat: If we get enough interested students, Ed would like to run two separate versions of this class, one just for bolt guns and another just for semis. We don’t have to, but there are definitely different “issues” for each within the prone position, and two different squads on different days would allow for more tailored instruction. For this reason, if you email me to enroll in this class, please indicate if you are likely to bring a bolt or a semi, and we’ll see how the numbers work out. If we are 4x bolts and 4x semis it will be just fine, but 2 groups of 8 with similar rifles on consecutive weekends would be even better!
January 28th: Precision Carbine with Imprecise Components. Central Virginia Tactical, Louisa, Virginia.
This class is based on the premise that our ARs, especially those set up to be CQB first and everything else second, are actually far more precise than we imagine. Not as precise as a dedicated long-range AR, for sure, but capable of much more than we usually ask of them at 7 – 25 yards. Once we recognize and learn how to employ that precision, then the head shot, or partially covered just-gun-and-head-and-right-shoulder shot, out to 300 yards, become far more reliable options.
Instruction will begin with the carbine in a series of field-expedient prone positions, then we will learn man- and gun-appropriate seated and kneeling positions, then standing positions, and finally when and how to integrate positional supports, or not, perhaps instead simply using them as cover. These are the positions we’ll take 99% of our defensive shots in, so we’ll really rep them in this class, concentrating on precision and repeatability. Finally, we’ll model for you simple drills that play within the rules of most clubs and ranges which you can use to reinforce these skills.
This class would make a great follow-up to the Prone Position class the week before, but is of course fine on its own as well. In either case, you’ll leave knowing how small you and your carbine can group in different positions, where the point of impact moves as you change positions so you can compensate with your point of aim, and what shots you can take with confidence at what ranges.
Bring at least 150 rounds. You decide how precise or imprecise the ammo should be – we all have different answers based on our carbines being CQB-first. Obviously, if part of your agenda for this class is to see what you and gun and sights can do under ideal conditions, then match ammo is better. If you prefer to go with SS109s or soft points or even frang, whatever you keep the gun ready with, so be it. Plan to go home with relevant data.
Like the Prone Position class, this class will also offer a Sunday morning AR-15 armorer’s course at the CVT classroom / workshop. Ed will spend approximately three hours demonstrating proper take-down, repair, cleaning, maintenance, and assembly procedures. 9am to noon, $50. Let me know during sign-up if you expect to be interested.
_______________________________________________________
Again, please post questions, calendar counter-offers, and any other thoughts, and feel free to contact us as well.
Bill Prudden
Ed Shell, Lead Instructor, Central Virginia Tactical
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