Gunsite Day 1

March 15, 2010 by George
Filed under: Gunsite

This is part of my series on my Gunsite experience. Part 1 is here.

Lewis and I woke up early on Monday morning to the jazzy music of his cell phone alarm. (Seriously, buddy…5 am? Is that truly necessary?) We both got geared up. I had not brought my range bag due to space limitations, so I stuffed my backpack with everything I thought I would need. Eyes, spare eyes, ears, spare ears, gloves, sweatshirt, gun belt, spare gun belt, two kinds of holsters…I think I over packed a little.

We were not exactly sure where we were going, so we left early. After a few wrong turns (turn left. No, your other left.) we managed to find our way to the road that we needed to be on. We had a little spare time, and so we decided to stop at a reliable breakfast choice: McDonalds. Unfortunately, the woman in front of us in the drive-through must have ordered food for the entire population of Chino Valley, because it took her like 15 minutes to get her food. This put us back behind schedule. We found the turn we were looking for, and got onto West Gunsite Road.

West Gunsite Road is a four mile or so dirt road that leads to the school. On this particular day, it was soaked through with the prior night’s snowfall, and was essentially all mud. Following Lewis’ advice for driving in mud (“Whatever you do, don’t stop!”) got us up to the school, and we got the first glimpse of the gates.

Clearly this picture was not taken on the day in question, but you get the idea.

We made our way to the classroom and got ready to begin.

We entered our classroom, and a pile of paperwork was waiting for us. It was what you might expect…guns are dangerous, don’t sue us, if you commit safety violations we are shipping your ass home.

The demographics of the class were interesting. The class consisted of twenty people, sixteen male and four female. We had two husband and wife couples. I think we had four doctors, three nurses, four computer geeks, two Greek bodyguards, and one DEA agent.

Our rangemaster, Jerry, introduced himself as well as his fellow instructors: LaMonte, Chuck, and Hutch. All of them had impressive resumes, including police experience, SWAT experience and other interesting things. One was a former SEAL. Each of these guys were very professional, very friendly, simply excellent teachers. With such a impressive backgrounds, you would expect them to perhaps be a little intimidating. Nothing could be further from the truth. They were amazingly helpful, and very perceptive on how to correct shooters. More on that later.

The classroom lectures began with a quick history of Gunsite and the goals of the school. Gunsite does not shy away from the fact that they are a gun fighting school. Make no mistake…these guys are teaching you how to defend your life with a firearm.

The class quickly moved into the basics of shooting. Gunsite does not assume any prior experience with firearms. Maybe another way to say it is that they want to get everyone on the same page. Therefore, we began with the four rules of gun safety:

All guns are always loaded.
Never let the muzzle cover something you are not willing to destroy.
Keep your finger off the target until your sights are on the target.
Always be sure of your target.

These rules are posted everywhere at the school. And I mean everywhere. These guys take their safety seriously.

We also reviewed the proper sight picture, how to press the trigger and how to load and unload the gun. This last part was important. Gunsite runs a hot facility. At the end of each range session, we are told to “put the gun in the condition you want it in when you leave the range.” The school doesn’t particularly care what condition that is, loaded or unloaded. The only rule is that the gun stays in the holster until you are at the range. I was very impressed that attitude, and I never saw any example of unsafe gun handling.

And with that, maybe an hour and a half into the class, we were off to the range.

Tags: Gunsite, Training