The shooting blocks of instruction are limited to a certain number of shooters, and there's a signup process that happens ahead of time. Of course, there's always a cancellation or two, and so it's not uncommon to see one of the instructors take advantage of some downtime in their schedule to hop into one of those empty slots.
Tim Herron and Ernest Langdon have national championships under their belts and are both well-established, top-notch instructors, and they easily could have spent the spare time between the classes they were teaching hanging out in the shade and chilling, but instead they were out sitting in on classes with other instructors.
I think about that when I hear someone telling me how they're just way too cool for school...
The Casino Drill from Tom Givens is a pretty good test of how well you think and shoot at the same time.
It's a 1911-neutral drill, since it only requires seven rounds in the gun to start, and two more magazines loaded with seven rounds each, for a total of twenty-one.
The target is one of those ones with the six colored shapes on it, numbered "1" through "6" (it's technically called the "DT-2A" target.)
Stand with a holstered firearm at five yards from the target and, at the sound of the beep, fire one round at shape number 1, two rounds at shape number 2, three rounds at...you get the picture. Reload when necessary.
Par time is twenty-one seconds. This means you don't want to dawdle on your draw and slide-lock reloads.
Like I said, this test was designed with the 1911 in mind. With a striker-fired 9mm carry auto, I generally run in the twenty-point-something second range, barely under par. Maybe a little quicker if I've been doing a lot of shooting lately.
This isn't a revolver-neutral course of fire. Even a fast revolver reload is going to be slower than a middlin' decent semiauto slide-lock reload, and if you're running a six-shooter? Well, you've got a whole extra one of those slow revolver reloads in there.
Of course, if you're blazing fast with a revolver, like Caleb Giddings, that may not be that big of a deal...
21.89 with zero down and three on-the-clock revolver reloads...from speedloaders, not moon clips...is blistering. And with a plain-Jane medium-frame Taurus Model 82 with the grips wrapped in goon tape that looks like it came out of an evidence locker someplace.
If he hadn't slightly pooched that middle reload, he might have skated under par.
If he'd been shooting a 7-shot revo, he'd have easily beaten my best auto time, and by a healthy margin.
If you want to up the difficulty or reintroduce an element of randomness that requires more thinking in the Casino Drill, you can do things like start from the number 6 target and work your way to number one. Have a friend call out whether you start on no. 1 or no. 6 right before the beep. Even better, have your friend load your magazines so that the twenty-one rounds are distributed in some different fashion than seven per mag, so that the reloads come by surprise. There are a jillion ways to introduce some added complexity.
The worst part of being out of town at TacCon for most of a week is that I get home with a full to-do list and an email inbox that's a disaster area*, but I need at least a day to recover before I can really get things back to my usual manageable level of disorganization.
Meanwhile, apropos of nothing in particular other than me turning on the TV this morning, here's a photo of Lou Ann Hamblin teaching her four-hour block on Responding to Active Killers...
Welp, I gotta unpack, do laundry, process a buttload of photos, and then see if I can't get back up to action speed again tomorrow.
Tim Chandler of 360 Performance Shooting making a shorty Remington 870 sing using good technique. Run a shotgun right, you can do it all day, fast and accurately, without getting beat up.
According to Tiffany Johnson, who would know, TacCon '23 is something like eighty percent sold out in only 24 hours.
Which is wild. Last year it took not quite a month. Back in 2015, I was at a John Murphy class in Virginia with Tiffany in early November and asked her about TacCon tickets and she told me they'd just sold out in October.
