Basic Handgun Class

The day finally arrived and I took the Basic Handgun Class offered by Greg Block at Burro Canyon Shooting Park in Azusa, CA.



The class was roughly 6 hours in length:

• 2 hours of lecture - Fundamentals of Firearms Safety, along with the skills necessary to properly handle a revolver and semi-automatic pistol; understanding of what a handgun will do, what it won't do, and why it works the way it works.
  
• 4 hours of shooting - Proper Stance and Grip, Sight Alignment, Sight Picture and Trigger Control; rapid fire/combat shooting with multi-target drills on life-size paper silhouette targets. Every student is required to shoot 250 rounds with their handgun.

I had the smallest caliber gun in the class with my Walther P22 shooting .22lr. Everyone else either had a 38 revolver (as provided by the instructor) or brought their own semi-automatics which were either .45's or .40's. In fact, when one of the instructors (there were 4 instructors for 9 students) pulled out my P22 to inspect it, his exact comment to me was, "Oh, how cute!"

Anyways, my Walther P22 was a champ. It ate up all 250 rounds (200 rounds of CCI Mini Mags and 50 rounds of CCI Stingers). All rounds fired flawlessly - no jams, no FTF, no FTE, etc. I couldn't say the same about the other students' semi-auto handguns: a few jammed, some needed lube half way through, one even got a squib. The cute Walther P22 was just fine....thank you very much!

All in all, it was a very good class. I learned a lot and corrected a lot of things that will help my shooting. The biggest thing for me was my sight alignment (I had a tendency to focus on the target immediately after having acquired the target via the sights) and trigger pull (where I tended to pull the gun slightly to the left when pulling the trigger). As the class progressed, I was able to slowly correct these issues and my shot placement improved to where I was either hitting the target or within an inch of the target.

If you're in Los Angeles and looking for a basic handgun class, I would highly recommend this class. It's well worth the money to pickup these fundamentals and I'm looking forward to my next range session to further hone what I learned from Greg.

PS - If you have never been to Burro Canyon, it's located in the San Gabriel Canyon of the Angeles National Forest. There is absolutely no cell phone signal/reception up there, so be prepared to be away from it all the entire time you are there. Restrooms are just porta potties; and according to the schedule on the doors, they are serviced once per week.