This time, I went to the Gunsite Academy training facility in Paulden, Arizona.  For those of you not familiar with every small town in Arizona, it is between Phoenix and Flagstaff.  My previous firearms training trips were to the late, semi-lamented Frontsite in Pahrump, Nevada.  Frontsite went through bankruptcy and was acquired by a new company, and now goes by Prairie Fire.  I haven’t been to Prairie Fire since the switchover, but I got the general impression they were going to focus more on competitive shooting than self-defense.

For me, Gunsite is an easier drive – about 4 ½ hours from Tucson, as opposed to 8+ hours to Pahrump.  Gunsite is also a nicer facility in almost every way, probably because it wasn’t run as a Ponzi scheme with the owner skimming revenue rather than re-investing it.  The site is hilly, lots of pinon, and really kind of a nice location.  To be fair, I haven’t been to Prairie Fire since the switchover, so I couldn’t say what it’s like now.

Enough blah-blah.  Go to the websites and poke around if you want more info about the two operations.  What about the actual training?

I am still running my Beretta 1301 Tactical.  Highly recommended – it went through three punishing days without a single problem.

This . . . is my boomstick.

I did the three day shotgun course, which is really the first three days of a five day course.  The last two days are the advanced class.  I’ll be going back for the full five day course, because I liked what I saw.

Gunsite encourages everyone to take their five day handgun course first.  Neither Mrs. Dean nor I have taken that class (she did their three day carbine course earlier this year), as we both prefer long guns.  We’re both planning to take the handgun course next year.  This is relevant, I think, because for their long gun courses they just kind of toss you in the deep end, on the theory that you’ve already taken the handgun course, where I believe they spend some classroom time on self-defense law, mindset, etc.

For shotguns, its fill out the paperwork and head for the range.  Our instructor figured out pretty quick that we were all reasonably well acquainted with our weapons, so we hit the range right away.  Gunsite wants you to shoot heavy loads as much as you can – 00 buckshot and slugs.  You can use birdshot instead of 00 buckshot whenever you want, but the ammo loadout for three days is heavy on buckshot and slugs.  The heavy loads really beat up their steel targets – we probably broke  four a day.

We had fifteen people in my class, and I think ten did the full five days.  We had a rangemaster (former LA SWAT) and two instructors (former Marine and former CA SWAT, can’t recall the city).  I thought they did an excellent job, although CA SWAT had a pretty abrupt and abrasive bedside manner that rubbed some of the attendees wrong.  Meh.  I didn’t go to be babied.

The techniques and training on the range were pretty similar to what I learned at Frontsite – no surprise, there’s only so many ways to run a shotgun.  One difference: we spent very little time on malfunctions.  Gunsite’s theory is that if you can’t get your shotgun running again by racking the bolt a couple of times, that weapon is out of the fight and you need to pull your handgun.

Because you carry a loaded handgun at all times at Gunsite, regardless of the class (except, I think, for their Tactical Medicine class).  For those of us who hadn’t been through their handgun class, they had a quick half-hour to show us the basics, because they train on transitioning from the shotgun to the handgun.  The rangemaster was a Sig guy, and drooled over my “antique” P228 (originally Mrs. Dean’s wedding gift from me, old enough to have been made in Austria).  Other than the transition training, though, they want you to carry a loaded handgun because they think it gets your mind right as far as going armed and being mentally prepared to engage in self-defense.

The pace and intensity of the training was great.  Over three days, I went through an estimated 75 rounds of birdshot, nearly 400 rounds of buckshot, and close to 80 slugs.  Mostly on the range, but even during the first three days we hit a couple of shoot houses (one for a walk-through on house clearing with a dummy gun, and one live-fire exercise with targets outside the windows).  Those were both exhausting mental workouts.

We did a night shoot, with weapons lights and handheld flashlights. The night shoot was a very valuable experience, as I have never fired a weapon in the dark.  We had our only negligent discharge during the night shoot.   It was easy to see how you could fumble your controls and get a negligent discharge.  The instructors made sure to tell us “See, we’ve been telling you to stop looking at your weapons.  Can’t see ‘em now, can you?”

Other exercises included a timed drill shooting slugs at range (probably 45 yards to 80 yards) at seven different targets from seven different stations.  My slug shooting was crap because I am developing a haze in my right (dominant) cornea, resulting in sometimes two, sometimes three dots from my optic, and difficulty focusing well in general.  I still got six out of seven on that drill (the first go, the second I only got four).  We also did a sort of outdoor room clearing drill down a wash, which to me was just hunting, so I did much better than the indoor room clearing exercises.

We finished with a competition – a hostage scenario at 15 yards with buckshot (tagging the hostage with a single pellet was an automatic loss), and a slug at 50 yards.  I was one of only a few who didn’t tag the hostage, because I walked my shots in (utterly unrealistic, I know), and then I completely botched the slug shot.  Next time, I’m bringing Flite-Control shells for the competition (and, hopefully, a functional cornea).

I gather the final two days of the five-day class are mostly house clearing, fighting from a car, shooting slugs at extreme ranges (200 yards!), that kind of thing.

I’ll be going back.  I think my next class will be their three-day Tactical Medicine class, because I have accumulated a pretty good supply of first aid stuff that I really don’t have a good idea how to use.  After that, the handgun class.  I also plan to hit one of their “range days” for shotgun.  This is an excellent thing they do for people who have taken their classes – set aside a day or two for people to come back and review/practice what they learned with instructors.

As I told Mrs. Dean after the class, the training wasn’t so much how to run a shotgun, as it was how to fight with a shotgun.  Two emphatic thumbs up.