Saturday, June 11, 2022

Acquiring Some Pistol Intelligence

Today was Day 1 of Riley Bowman's Pistol Intelligence Class in Pinckney Michigan.

So I got up rather early and drove to the range out there as learning how to shoot better is always a worthy goal.

Got here and joined thew 13 other students and we got started.

Nice bunch of folks and there are some really, really, good shooters among them. Thankfully I'm not "that guy" but I'm certainly not the top shot either.

Riley started with the standard administratrivia needed to start a class, and then  a solid  and comprehensive safety briefing, and going over the safety rules as well.

He very much wants shooters to be aware of what they're doing, what is in their surrounding and their target area.  All good things. He also focuses a lot on, and talks about the mental game in shooting which is an area not often talked about in shooting classes.

He went on to talk about some of the fundamentals involved in shooting and we heavily discussed grip, stance and a lot on mental focus for shooting.

I ran my Glock 19 with the RMR on it,  and it ran perfectly throughout the day with no issues. Started out cold with a 5 shot drill at black of a B8 center at 10 yards. I was rather happy with how well I did with all 5 in the black with no misses. That did earn me an "Oooh, a lawyer that can shoot" from Riley.  I'll take it.

I somehow developed a tendency to throw my first shot to the left, which occurred in the next couple drills, and then I fixed it.  Overthinking things and not enough use of the support hand tends to do that.

We did quite a few different shooting exercises and then worked on drawing the firearm more efficiently and I learned to improve a couple issues with my draw which was very good.

It turns out that Yeti is an officer at the range we're shooting at and he dropped by to say hello to Riley.  Kinda fun watching two high-level and capable instructors do a little practice shooting over lunch.

Riley gives every shooter direct personal attention during each drill and personalized feedback and instruction to each and every shooter - the drills may take longer as a result but you not only get more reps in, which is good, and he gets to observe, critique, and help you improve which is great.

We finished up with his Pistol IQ Standards, and I ended up scoring a 100.2 which basically means I met the proficiency standards.  I did bugger the drill transition  drill dumping a few shots left and out of the scoring zone on the leftmost A zone target by a few centimeters. All the rest of the drills were nice and pretty darn accurate but I think I can learn to pickup the pace a bit and should be able to get solid hits on the transition drill, so there's some very real potential for improvement.  

We will be taking the Pistol IQ Standards again tomorrow so it will be interesting to see if I can clean it up and improve my score.

In short it is a great class if you want to learn to shoot better and faster and I'm looking forward to tomorrow even as I'm rather wiped right now.