I have been re-evaluating what types of events to pursue, what areas I want to grow in. H.W. McBride noted in A Rifleman Went to War that the two main requirements of a soldier were to march and to shoot. At this point I’ve pretty well proven I can march, so let’s look at improving shooting ability.

The obvious first step was to update my CCW permit to my new home state, and I found a class for the Enhanced permit that is recognized in surrounding states.

The class was provided by Rev-Tac Firearm Instruction out of Jackson NE. I chose them to tick the boxes needed to get my permit, and to check out their teaching style to see if I wanted to take additional classes. As it turns out they did a great job, and they have some interesting classes on the schedule, so look for other AARs to come.

The classroom portion was held in a conference room of a local hotel. They covered what are good/ bad options in pistols and holsters, where you can and can’t carry, basics of how firearms work, etc. While this type of information can easily become Death by Powerpoint, they interjected enough humor to keep it engaging and entertaining.

Quick break for lunch and we moved out to the range. We started with basic drawing from concealed, shooting stance, and reholstering. Instructors milled around the students correcting anything that they saw, and did a great job of explaining the context of why they recommended doing something a particular way. (For example, I was using a support-hand grip that worked fine on the Browning Hi Power that I was shooting, but that might result in my hand being too close to the muzzle if I did the same with a smaller gun. In the interest of building good habits, I adjusted to a grip that would work the same on any pistol.)

We then moved on to live fire, starting at very close range and moving back gradually. They put up targets with numbered dots, and gave us a particular dot to shoot at for each distance. We would realize later that we only needed to hit the cardboard silhouette that the target was attached to, but they specified the dots to encourage the “aim small miss small” mentality.

They saw that everyone was getting it, and decided that we were ready to shoot the qualification needed for our permits. Different numbers of rounds shot from different ranges out to 7 yards. Everyone passed, and I kept my target.

(Hole in the grey is from a staple holding up the target, all my shots were good.)

At this point the Iowa and Nebraska residents were done, but the South Dakotans had a little more shooting to do. Our instructor explained that state law requires a certain number of rounds fired, but does not specify what all of them are to be used for, so he uses the rounds left after qualification to give us some drills that would be good to practice. One hand shooting, weak hand shooting, using trigger reset for faster controllable fire. At the end of this we had met the legal requirements and got our paperwork to send in for our permits.

A quick note: I’m purposely mentioning but not explaining these concepts for a reason: Reading this blog does not qualify as training, and if any of this sounds interesting to you, you need to seek out a quality instructor and learn it from them, rather than trying to sort it out from reading it here.