It finally happened: I attended a bad firearms training class. I don’t have the deepest training resume, but I have trained with quite a few national-level trainers. Though I once wrote a couple scathing reviews of a local concealed carry class, most of my class AARs are glowing; I love training and it’s not hard to make me happy. Here is what happened at the worst firearms training class I have ever attended.
Full Disclosure: I paid out-of-pocket for this class.
I hate to write a bad review, but the tipping point for this one was safety, which we’ll get to. In addition to at least one egregious safety violation, there was all around bad instructional methodology throughout. My purpose in writing this is to tease out some lessons-learned, rather than just complain.I have also tried to provide some good, real-world examples of instructors who do a great job in these areas.
Before we get into it: one important note: I am not going to name this instructor here. I grappled with this decision, and reached out to a couple other, more experienced bloggers for their opinions, because I don’t want you to spend your money on him, but I also don’t want to fuel drama in the gun industry. If you think you may be attending one of his classes, contact me and I may confirm or deny the instructor’s name. I reserve the right to make a case-by-case decision on this, however.
To the Firearms Instructors Reading This
I’m not a firearms instructor. I don’t make my living teaching gun stuff (or teaching at all, anymore). I’m not on my high horse as an instructor claiming to be better than you at your job. But I have seen a good bit of firearms instruction. I am also representative of at least some portion of your student body, being a more-active-than-average attendee of firearms training. Take that for what it’s worth.
However, I know that neither I nor the three friends with whom I attended this class will ever spend money with this particular instructor again. Additionally, if asked about this instructor I will discourage anyone from attending his classes.
Some of the following examples may seem extreme. It may even seem as if I’m exaggerating or even making stuff up. I assure you, I am not. I vetted this through two fellow attendees to make sure I wasn’t overstating anything.
The Worst Firearms Training I’ve Ever Attended
First, the background. The class itself was a two-day pistol/carbine class. It cost $600 and was close to capacity. The range facility was fine, as was the classroom.
The instructor isn’t among the normal collective of instructors I generally follow (The Rangemaster Mafia†) but he does have some name recognition. Looking at his website it is obvious he has a military background and is a very high-level competitor. Satisfied with this, I booked my spot. I thought just about all of the national-level, traveling trainers were solid, but was to be thoroughly disabused of this notion at this class.
I attend a lot of training by myself, which is certainly useful, but it’s also fun to train with friends. For some reason the stars aligned and I was responsible for no fewer than four tickets sold to this class: mine, a local friend, an out-of-town friend, and his brother, the latter two who drove eight hours to attend. I had people on the line to commiserate with…but also the guilty knowledge that I roped them into spending time and money on a bad class.
Lesson Learned for Students: Vet your classes, vet your instructors! In the future I will vet instructors more carefully. I will look closely at their training resumes, read reviews of their classes, and attempt to learn more about them through videos and public articles/videos. I will do much more due diligence about the classes I talk friends into attending. If I’d done some homework I would have found reviews calling this instructor’s classes “disorganized,” “stream-of-consciousness,” and “perhaps a bit freestyle.”
Let’s look at what made this the worst firearms training I’ve ever attended.
†I say that good-naturedly, of course, as I have had exceptionally good experiences with Rangemaster-trained instructors. I am also a Rangemaster-certified instructor and I have already registered for Tom’s Defensive Shotgun Instructor class in 2025.
Poor Instructorship: Classroom
The first morning began in the classroom. I’m not going to bash the instructor too much here. I don’t think he had planned to teach in the classroom, but some unforeseen circumstances conspired to force us to remain “cold” for an hour or so. Instead of utilizing the A/V system in the classroom, the instructor had his bullet points written out on a target. It was impossible for some students to see his handwritten lesson from the back of the room.
I don’t think there’s anything wrong with writing topics out on a target if you are only teaching on the range where students can gather around. If your class does have a classroom block, however, use the best possible means to present it. I have an article on using Powerpoint to help you in this endeavor.
Most instructors use the classroom portion to make clear, upfront, what will be covered on the range. Very often I see a building-block approach of, “we’ll do A, which will let us do B, then we’ll incorporate C.” The instructor did have some catchy little phrases about his approach to training, yet I could discern no unified approach to his methodology. More often than not lesson points diverged into stories and anecdotes that did nothing to improve the students’ experience. The entire time just seemed like he was shooting from the hip.
Lesson Learned: Develop a cohesive lesson plan and teach it. Don’t shoot from the hip. Don’t improvise your entire class. Have a clearly-defined way to train the points of performance that are important to your class. This seems like a small point, but it impacted the rest of the class, as we will see.
Simon Golob had a very clearly-defined lesson plan in his On Demand Performance class that I took back in June. It’s not necessary to lay out the whole lesson-plan right up front, but Simon clearly built on each point of performance, culminating in demonstrable, quantifiable improvement from the students. This is ultimately why people pay tuition and travel to attend classes.
Leaving the classroom and walking to the range I asked one of my friends what he thought. “I’m reserving judgment,” he said, but allowed that, “it doesn’t look too good.” My friend has also attended a lot of very expensive, very high-level training (he is still the real fucking deal, operationally speaking) and we were both on the same page.
Time Management
Time management issues drive me crazy in a class. In a two-day class, 16-hour class, wasting an hour and forty minutes means wasting 10% of the student’s investment. I firmly believe you should give students the maximum amount of training value possible. Time management was a huge part of what made this class the worst firearms training I’ve ever attended.
The general flow of the class, once we arrived on the range was this: the instructor would gather us into the middle of the line. He would talk for a while, then say, “Ok, go practice. Wait…one more thing.” Then he would talk, sometimes as long as forty-five minutes. Frequently these anecdotes were only tangentially related to the class.
Lesson Learned: Minutes quickly add up to hours, which add up to significant lost training time. Additionally, students are only going to stay engaged for a few minutes of talk. Keep your anecdotes brief and relevant. Your students paid to get better, not hear about the time you hung out with Rob Leatham. Better yet, avoid them altogether! Stay on topic!
Tom Givens is an absolute MASTER at time management. His classes are so refined that even his targets are chosen to give maximum value, while spending minimal time changing out targets. Drills are carefully selected and so smoothly run that just when you think you need to reload mags, relays would swap and you’d have a chance to reload. Givens’ Protective Pistolcraft IDC is an excellent course, and one I’d highly recommend this instructor attend.
Lesson Learned: More Time Management
The second day of class was particularly bad. We were told we would be doing pistol for about an hour, then switching to carbine. The first drill of the day was a USPSA match-style stage. It took almost two hours to run students through two iterations each of this COF. The first iteration was scored, which I supposed provided some value.
The second iteration was not scored, and was shot on a target that was badly shot-up. I question the value of this as relevant defensive training, where marksmanship is crucially important, not only to stop the threat, but to avoid hitting a non-threat. These two iterations put us at lunchtime with two magazines fired. I want to be clear that I don’t judge a class based on the number of rounds fired. However, I received no personalized instruction during this entire day. I made no improvement in my technique at all, and that is a metric for how I judge a class.
This left only half a day for carbine. We did a couple of rifle drills, then the rest of the second day was spent doing three competition-like stages. There were no structured drills to improve on errors made during the execution of the stages. It seemed like a tremendous outlay of time to get to shoot three competition stages.
Lesson Learned: Choose drills and exercises that give maximum training time and repetitions to all students. Running through match stages consumes a tremendous amount of time, but provides extremely little instruction. If you are going to teach a competition-focused class, choose drills that support this while still giving all students maximum return on their investment. Also market the class as
Mike Seeklander did an superb job of teaching individual elements from stages in his Competition Handgun, which I took back in 2018. This maximized time and instructor attention, and gave students maximum time on the range. Everyone left feeling like they got something out of the class, and the class was specifically marketed as a competition-oriented class.
Poor Instructorship: On the Range
The instructor also had poor instructional style on the range. Here is a list of my grievances:
Coaching Over Gunfire
Something that quickly became a pet peeve was the instructor’s tendency to coach over gunfire. He would walk up in the middle of a string of fire, and begin yelling into a student’s ear-muff. Despite multiple students asking him to repeat himself, he continued this style of coaching. I got nothing whatsoever from his coaching because I could not hear it.
Lesson Learned: Do not attempt to coach over gunfire! Wait until shot strings have died down to begin coaching a student so your corrections can be heard and acted on. This is much easier to do if you are actually running the firing line, so all shooters are shooting at the same time, and all are not shooting at the same time.
This has been the case in every other firearms class I have ever taken. This is much easier if you actually call strings of fire instead of just turning students loose to shoot, as we will see.
Inconsistent Coaching
Of my little group of four people, the instructor only coached two of us. Out of the four of us there were drastically varying levels of skill, training, and experience. Between me and my partner, I had a drastically higher level of skill, and my partner had difficulty performing some of the prescribed drills. However the instructor never once attempted to provide her with any individualized coaching. Even worse I’m not sure he even watched her shoot enough to notice that she wasn’t performing the drills correctly.
Lesson Learned: Make sure all of your students get your time and attention where needed. This requires spending a few minutes observing each and every student to check for comprehension and progress, and providing coaching as needed. If you can’t help each and every student in your class apply the techniques you are teaching, you need an assistant instructor.
The Haughts do a phenomenal job with this. Every student gets individual attention, tailored to his or her performance. They are able to do this because there are three instructors, all of whom know the curriculum and know how to coach, not just one guy trying to do it iall.
Ill-Defined Drills
The instructor would bring the line into the middle of the range and talk. And talk. And talk. He would then send us to the line with the instruction to “shoot a couple of magazines doing that.” It is no exaggeration to say that by the time we were sent back to the line I had only a vague idea of what we were supposed to be doing. Secondly, the vague instructions lead to several minutes of sustained gunfire as a student would finish two magazines, then see other people shooting…then shoot a little more. This greatly exacerbated the problem of trying to coach over gunfire.
Lesson Learned: Control your range! Actually run the range, don’t just say, “go shoot!” (which this instructor literally said). I have shot with a lot of big-name instructors. One thing all of them, without exception, do is provide clear guidelines on when to shoot and how much to shoot.
I know, this sounds like “firing squad practice,” but I’ve also attended John Hearne and Dustin Soloman‘s classes, where you shoot on a given visual stimulus and stop shooting when said stimulus goes away. This still lets you shoot (or not) as many rounds as possible without having a SPENDEX, and with built-in breaks for instructors to instruct.
At this point, even without the safety issue I will discuss in the next section this class was bad. I certainly wasn’t learning anything, nor were the friends with whom I attended. But it was about to get so much worse.
Safety
The biggest complaint I have about the worst firearms training I’ve ever attended is safety. Never before in a firearms training class have I seen the muzzle of another student’s firearm. On the second afternoon, the instructor demonstrated one of the competition-style rifle stages. It required some shooting on the move. After several students had done a walk-through, the instructor abruptly stopped and demonstrated shooting on the move (SOTM). He then told students, “go back there and practice,” pointing to the uprange area. Meanwhile, he remained where he was and continued to watch students do walk-throughs.
About this time I had to answer nature’s call. When I returned, I walked back onto the range at the extreme uprange end. I was walking back toward the 25-yard line where my gear was staged. Something caught my eye and I looked to my left; a student had his rifle raised and was advancing laterally across the range, in my direction, dry firing. I realized he was following the instructor’s directions and practicing SOTM. The range had not been secured and the instructor was not supervising this dry practice. Not only was he failing to provide feedback on technique, he was also not monitoring the range for safety.
This incident occurred after some carbine live-fire, without a formal clearing of weapons in between, and it scared the shit out of me. I accept some responsibility for not checking my surroundings but again, I was in the UPRANGE area. No barriers, safety officers, or anything else were put in place to alert me that I was walking into a newly-designated downrange area.
At this point I decided to go ahead and leave. The out-of-town half of my party stayed for the rest of the afternoon. My line partner and I packed up and left the worst firearms training I’ve ever attended.
Lesson Learned: Maintain control of your range. Safety is everyone’s responsibility, but ultimately the safety of your students falls on YOU. If you separate groups of students (i.e. one doing walk-throughs and the other dry-practicing), both need to be supervised! Downrange areas need to be controlled, especially if they were previously safe, uprange areas (as Tom Givens points out, “don’t say ‘no one would be stupid enough to walk through there!’ because someone will prove you wrong.”). Safety rules need to be clear, unambiguous, and violations immediately corrected.
Closing Thoughts on the Worse Firearms Training I’ve Ever Attended
I sincerely hope this doesn’t just come across as a bitch-fest, or as me having an axe to grind with a particular instructor. I admit being a bit upset – I spent hard-earned money and didn’t get a single useful thing out of this class, which is really rare for me. Not only did I spend my money, but three other people spent money and time because I encouraged them to. Some of them may not ever attend firearms training again because of this bad experience. None of my group felt their time or money was well-spent. Believe me, that is a pretty terrible feeling.
For the students out there, I hope this has given you a good reason to vet the background of your instructor before spending money on a class. There are just so many excellent instructors out there, you shouldn’t spend your money on a bad one! For you instructors, avoid these pitfalls. Don’t get complacent. Following best practices will give your students a good return on investment. Following good safety practices will literally save lives – maybe even your own.
