Close Range Gunfighting with Uli Gebhard - Los Angeles Oct 20-21 (pic-heavy)
I had seven students this weekend for the SI Flagship course. It was a diverse crowd in age as well as in skill level with backgrounds ranging from receiving the course as a gift to work-related training for fugitive apprehension.
Before I go into any details about the course, I want to thank my students for their hard work during this class. Special thanks go to those who took the long trip from Northern California to attend. The difference in experience level was a bit of a challenge, but all of you worked well with each other to achieve our course goal of becoming more proficient and dynamic fighters with the handgun.
We went through a thorough safety briefing and established our basics of combat pistolcraft. Each step was practiced extensively in dry runs and then put to the test with live fire exercises.
Once we had the basics of combat marksmanship and presentation from the holster established it was time to get dynamic. We introduced movement off the X. A dry practice segment made sure that we had all the elements engrained, then came the fun of testing the new skills with the live firearm. All of the students did well and achieved solid combat-accurate hit patterns during those runs.
We worked on this and on improving our time to the first round into the bad guy for the rest of day one.
Sunday began with a refresher of the skills from the day one and we moved on to the introduction of flashlight work into movement matrix. Our group had a variety of flashlights and we had a good opportunity to discuss their characteristics and how well they work for each student in a tactical application. Lots of live fire exercises followed dry runs on using the flashlight while getting off the X.
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These T-shirts are not going to make it past the next 15 minutes
The next exercise addressed the topic of a fouled-up draw, where the gun ends up outside the holster but inside the cover garment. We donned old t-shirts, and practiced firing our first shots through the shirt. Once we had an opening we cleared malfunctions as needed and continued the fight. It was interesting to see that this exercise induced quite a few double feeds.
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We literally blasted through them!
Other exercises for the remainder of the day included responding to attacks from the side or from behind, dealing with multiple opponents and the use of cover inside the movement matrix.
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The course concluded with a long debrief, discussion of options to maintain skills and an outlook of available training to learn additional skills.
Again, my thanks go out to the students who put in two days of hard work – on their own skills as well as with the other members of the group.
