Basic Pistol I-Handgun Safety & Functionality 

Course Description: This course is intended for people with little or no pistol shooting experience. It is an introduction to the basics of pistol shooting, including the knowledge, skills and attitudes necessary to shoot a handgun safely and accurately at a very basic level.

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Topics: basic safety, gun parts and operation, and fundamentals of marksmanship.

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Length: 2 hours

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Prerequisites: none

Required Equipment: 30 rounds of ammunition, eye and ear protection. Students should also bring a baseball cap (to deflect spent brass), pen and paper.

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Beyond the Basics: Pistol

Course Description: The goal of this course is to improve the general shooting skills of intermediate level pistol shooters.

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Topics: reducing perceived recoil, improving on the basic grip and stance, and increasing accuracy and speed on single and multiple targets.

Length: 2 hours

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Prerequisites: previous handgun shooting experience, Basic Pistol or equivalent preferred

Required Equipment: a handgun and 150 rounds of ammunition, a belt holster, eye and ear protection. 

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Additional information:

We are frequently asked "what are the differences between your Defensive Pistol Level 1 and Beyond the Basics classes?"

Defensive Pistol Skills is all about 0-5 yard shooting and drawing from concealment - teaching specific skills that you'd use to survive a close range gunfight. In that course we don't fix any problems with grip and stance - there's not time allotted in the course for it. Students shoot multiple targets but they are at the same distance.

In Beyond the Basics the focus is on 5-15 yard shooting and teaching students to understand that it's possible to get hits at close range with a less than perfect sight picture. There's a spectrum of sight pictures. Once students understand then the next step is learn how to transition between those and "see what you need to see" for a given target, so in BTB we work on shooting multiple targets at mixed ranges in the 5-15 yard zone, so students get out of the "use the same sight picture for every target" mindset.

Type 3 is 7-15 yard shooting (roughly) and corresponds to the traditional sight picture most shooters use for every shot regardless of target size or distance. It's too slow for up close and personal and too coarse to get good hits beyond 15 yards.