Gunschool Sunday - MDFI Foundation Shotgun

Since the last time I took a shotgun class was at LFI II way back when, it was time for a bit of a refresher. 

I had signed up for MDFI's Foundation Shotgun to be held in Caro, MI and 4 more of my friends also signed up for it.  Tosh, his cousin Richie from NY, Jason, and Spencer.  First formal training class for Spencer, which made it interesting as he is very much a Gun Culture 1.0 (hunting, everything I need to know I learned from my dad, Taurus Judge is awesome, ugh) type guy working on transitioning to 2.0.

Tosh, Richie, and I originally planned to fly to Caro and get picked up by Jason at the airport, 10 minutes away from the range, thus saving the drive. This would have been rather epic.

It was not to be.  

Weather forecast had thunderstorms en route and back, low IFR conditions with the potential for the ceiling to drop below minimums at Caro at the time of our arrival, and other unpleasantness that I did not feel made for a safe flight at all. 

So I called it and we drove instead. Decent yet unremarkable drive in thus resulted.  Turns out it was very much the correct choice - ceilings were too low on the way there, and the thunderstorms that erupted both during the class and during the expected departure times on the way back nailed it as the right choice. Epic will have to wait.

Class as usual started with an intro, and then a very detailed safety briefing and  detailed emergency plan.

The Instructors, as is usual with MDFI were excellent, attentive, and kept the energy up during class with a great teaching manner.

Lots of Benellis on the line, quite a few Mossberg 500s, some Stoegers and a Mosberg 930s.  I had my Remington 870 along. Tosh and Richie had matching Mossberg 590A1 with 20 inch barrels and Magpul furniture.  Nice guns but Richie's had some breaking in issues with the pump needing some lubrication or it wouldn't easily pickup the next round, and the stock needing to be shortened a tad, both of which were done and it then worked much better.

Started off with basic inspection and inventory of the shotguns, safe handling and movement,  loading and unloading techniques,  carry and shooting techniques, and then we got to some shooting drills. Immediately went into how best to manage shotgun recoil.

ESSTAC cards were extremely popular there.  Pretty much everyone was running them. I had the hard plastic shell carrier on my 870 and while the hard plastic ones are currently being frowned upon compared to the ESSTAC ones, due to the strain the plastic carriers apparently put on the trigger group pins, it was easier and faster to manipulate the shells both loading the carrier and unloading it than the ESSTAC cards, but I can see the value in those too.

Then we went on with how to pattern a shotgun.

Interestingly, 9 pellet Federal Flite Control does tend to throw a pellet from the group and we saw that with everyone's shotgun who had brought that load.  Pretty much all were still within the target but one pellet would end up away from the rest of the shot group.

I had brought along 8 pellet  Federal Flite Control and the results were rather interesting.  Here's the target showing groups from 5, 12 and 20 yards (note I pulled the 12 yard shot as I was in a hurry, so the left impact has nothing to do with the ammo itself, it went right where the shotgun was pointed at the time):

Very low recoil and no spread through 20 yards at all - the shot just flew together making a solid hole through the target.  Interesting.

Neighbor on the line was shooting 9 pellet Flite Control, and at 20 yards the Flite Control Wad from his shot was actually embedded in his target.

We then moved on to emergency reloads and ammunition select drills. Including under time pressure - each person started with an empty shotgun.  Person to your left fired one and then said "Go", you had to immediately fire one and so on.  This continued for 5 rounds so you had to constantly top off your shotgun.  Then we did it from empty shotguns and had to do emergency reloads for each set.  Quite fun and noisy.  It's called  the Rolling Thunder drill.

That rolling thunder drill inspired Mother Nature to chime in with a Thunderstorm complete with a close by lightning strike so class was paused as we all ran to our cars and got in as they were the safest place to be.  Holding metal sticks during active lightning strikes was counter-indicated.

While the rain then let up, that pretty much ended the class as more thunderstorms were on the way so we did not shoot the qualifier at the end.  Good call as indeed more thunderstorms did pass on through, and more confirmation that cancelling flying there was correct.

Excellent class, great instruction, great bunch of shooters,  and a great refresher on shotgun handling.  Highly recommend the class if you;re looking to use a shotgun for self-defense or need a refresher in doing so in a no-ego, positive learning environment.