Gun School: Adaptive Combat Pistol - Day 1

Yesterday,  I attended Day 1 of Dave Spaulding's Adaptive Combat Pistol class held at Detroit Sportsmens Congress.

It's an excellent class with a very experienced, personable, and capable instructor.

Unfortunately, these days, the replacement cost of the ammunition I have burned through exceeds the cost of the class.

There were 16 students attended so it was two squads of 8 on the line at a time.

Class began with some warmups and Dave walked the line and saw things that could be improved as a result.  He spent time with each student and customized advice and also worked on getting everyone to stop pinning the trigger.  We also worked on the draw and grip.

Most were pretty good shooters and a few were really outstanding.

A few though had some holster choices that had me look a tad askance especially when standing behind them.

The gun was not fitting in the holster and the trigger was exposed the whole time.  Another shooter also had a leather holster that similarly didn't fit the gun they were running and was doing the course with the trigger hanging out.

Then we moved on to manipulating the gun and clearing malfunctions, first with both hands then one handed.  We also tried malfunction clearing sitting down one handed.  Then we added live fire to the jam clearing.

And that's when the fun started.

We were doing a one-handed stoppage drill - from standing - point gun downrange, pull trigger, hear click, then clear the jammed case by first a tap to the magazine and then racking the slide using whether the red dot window or shelf of the sights on your belt, holster, or other surface that normally have available to rack the slide. This tends to have the ejector port facing down so gravity helps as well.

Next after clearing the jam you quickly fire two shots at the target.

So one guy was on the line went click, turned his Glock over, racked it on his belt and BAM!

Round hits the floor in front of him.

His finger was not on the trigger.  This got people interested to see what was going on.

He repeated the drill and cleared the jam, this time angling the gun to point at the backstop and BAM!

Round hits the backstop in front of him. His finger again was not on the trigger.

While he had had no failures when the gun was upright, turning it upside down to clear it caused it to fire.  

It turns out he had a Zev extra light striker in it and the cruciform of the trigger bar had worn enough to detach it from the trigger housing.  With the combination of those two issues, once upside down, nothing stopped the striker from moving forward to slam fire the round  when the slide closed.    The striker and trigger bar were replaced and his Glock then hummed along happily after that.  Kinda exciting.

We then moved on to jam clearance while moving, and then on to one handed reload drills including while moving, which were conducted without drama.

 Day 1 ended and I had learned a lot.  I'll write up Day 2 once it is done.