posted by Caleb on Aug 27
This is Mark, the cameraman for Shooting Gallery/DownRange.tv who was with us all weekend.
He followed us around all weekend, in an out of IPSC stages, the shoot house, you name it he was there snagging footage. I have to give mad props to anyone who is willing to run behind me through a shoot house while I’m doing my damndest to shoot everything as fast as humanly possible.
posted by Caleb on Aug 27
Click here to listen to the ParaUSA/Blackwater show, with special guests Kevin Baker and Sebastian.
This was an hour long special, covering all the topics from the recent ParaUSA shoot, everything from the ammo to the guns to the quality of the instruction and the facility. You can also listen via the embedded player below.
Spread this one far and wide - ParaUSA and everyone involved did a great job with this, and it deserves to get as wide recognition as possible.
posted by Caleb on Aug 25
That would be the best way I could describe the time we had at Blackwater, courtesy of ParaUSA. Everyone who was there learned something new about their shooting, and learned how to shoot better. If I was giving out a “Most Improved Shooter” award, I would give it to Robb Allen, who by paying attention to Todd Jarrett went from shooting a weaver stance to smoking the bejesus out of both Joe Huffman and me in the shoot house on Day 3. And I don’t mean that “Most Improved” as a slight, he was literally light years better on Day 3 than he was on Day 1.
I learned so much - so many little things that I’m doing that I need to do differently to bring my shooting up to that next level. At all the local matches I’ve been going to lately, I’ve felt like I’m missing a little component to bring myself into the next tier - after spending a weekend learning from Todd Jarrett, I’ve realized a lot of the stuff that I was doing wasn’t so much “wrong” as it was “not as efficient”.
To elaborate further, one of his big things is “hang on to the gun tighter”, and he would tell all the shooters to grip the gun “20% tighter” - when I would do that, my follow-up shots on steel targets and paper would be light-years faster. He also told me to get more of my weight forward on my feet, and when I look at videos of me shooting steel and IDPA, I can see exactly what he’s talking about. I was tending to sit back too much on my heels, which made my follow-up shots not as fast as they could be.
In terms of my shooting knowledge, I learned more this weekend that I had learned in the last 8 years of shooting, my Coast Guard training included in that. Todd Jarrett is a fantastic instructor, his ability to manage the different skill levels of his class was outstanding, as was his ability to tailor the message for each individual shooter.
I’ll have more content up tomorrow morning, once I get all my videos and pictures uploaded to the blog.
posted by Caleb on Aug 23
Check out the Gun Nuts Radio Blog to view our day at ParaUSA, in beautiful pictures.
posted by Caleb on Aug 23
It is almost impossible to write a summary post of today, as it was the big big big shooting day. We started shooting IPSC targets, and by the end of the day were shooting steel on the move, reloading behind barricades and zapping 8×8 moving targets while we were moving in an opposite direction of the target.
The level of instruction that Todd Jarrett is providing is absolutely fantastic - I know that I’m already a better shooter if I can internalize at least 50% of what I’ve learned from shooting with Todd.
For me, the most valuable piece of instruction has been all the drawing from the holster - my draw used to be slow, and while it’s not that fast it’s a lot smoother, which is aided and abetted by the excellent Blackhawk Serpa holster. Speaking of the Blackhawk stuff, their rigger belt (in addition to being a pretty good belt) makes a decent improvised magazine holder as well.
To echo what Say Uncle said, I’ve learned more in the last two days than I had learned in the past eight years of shooting. For example, by applying the trigger discipline and other sundry lessons, by the end of the day I was knocking down a plate rack at about 35-40 yards with the 9mm. That was pretty awesome.
Sorry we weren’t able to do a live show, however the upcoming show on Tuesday night will contain a full wrap-up of the weekend, and will be extended out to an hour instead of the usual 45 minute show.
The last piece of business is that the bet between Joe Huffman and me has changed, instead of shooting an El Presidente bet, we’re going to use our score on the shoot house we run with the Crimson Trace laser grips tomorrow. So that will be our final determiner on the winner of the bet.
Tomorrow, we run the shoot house - our guns are all equipped with a Crimson Trace lasergrip, so all the shooting tomorrow is going to be indoors.
Come Tuesday on the blog, I’ll have a review of the pistol I shot and the gear I used, however in the mean time you can check out the 2aBlogBash page for a great aggregator of the event.
posted by Caleb on Aug 22
Day One of the ParaUSA Summer Camp was pretty cool, right up until the part where Joe Huffman shot me. I’ll get to explaining that later, so instead I’ll begin at the beginning - getting up in the morning.
I woke in the morning and I was amped, I had so much adrenaline pumping through my system that I didn’t know what to do with myself, as many of the bloggers can attest. Eventually we got calmed down, and we all got on the Blackhawk Bus, which is a site to behold. I took pictures of it, but forgot the sync cable for Camera number 1, and the battery was dead on camera number 2. I’ll hopefully be able to get all the day one pictures uploaded sooner than later.
So, we went to the Blackhawk corporate headquarters, where we had a nice intro to some of Blackhawk’s products, including the Serpa holsters, the clothing line, and what I thought was the coolest thing of all, the Knoxx stock. It sucks up recoil, and if I have any money left over after buying the gun, then I’m going to pick up one of those Knoxx stocks for my Remington 870.
After that, we got to Blackwater, where we were given a tour of the facility, had some chow, and eventually some classroom time with Todd Jarrett…and then the guns. I’m actually going to do a whole separate post on the guns tomorrow, because then Camera 2 will be up and running, and I can get some good shots.
After the classroom time, we finally got out to the range to do some shooting - in less than an hour we managed to run about 100 rounds downrange from our guns. We shot quite a few relays, first at some paper then at some steel, but didn’t do a lot of shooting. What really impacted me was how much difference in my shooting a couple of minor adjusts made. Todd told me I wasn’t gripping the gun hard enough, so I tightened up my grip and got deeping into my stance, and next thing I know my group at five yards closed up quite a bit. I think I’m going to learn a lot from this.
I’m still working out the details of our live show for tomorrow, however if tomorrow is anything like today, we can plan for an 8 or 9pm show, coming in live from Blackwater. Squeaky will be hosting and I’ll have to call in, but it should be a pretty awesome show after a day of shooting, and I’ll be able to give you a full update on the products and and everything that we’re doing out here.
I’ve got some pretty good audio as well, so when we do the ParaUSA wrap up show, we’ll have a lot of different clips to play for the show.
I will break the coverage down a bit and talk about some of the gear as well, we have holsters and mag carriers and gloves from Blackhawk - so far the best piece of gear that I have from Blackhawk hasn’t been the Serpa holster (which is good rig), but the GLOVE they gave me. The factory new 9mm mags were a little…rugged, so I was really happy to have that tactical glove from Blackwater to keep my thumb from getting all ripped to pieces loading these mags.
Tomorrow is going to be a full day of shooting; we’re basically going to shoot all day, which means by the end of the day my trigger finger is going to be hurt and I’m going to be grinning from ear to ear. More to come as we get it!
Remember, you can check out the coverage of the event at one handy place, the 2A Blog Bash.
posted by Caleb on Aug 22
I didn’t do too well. Turns out, I can’t handle the 9mm very well. They gave me a .22 and it worked much better for me.
I cried a lot. I miss home.
Update: Thanks Robb, you cheeky bastard. It’s what I get for leaving my computer unlocked and stepping away while he’s within 500 yards of anything.
And for the record, I only cried a little.
posted by Caleb on Aug 21
I actually really like the airport at Norfolk, it’s pretty well laid out.
Finally here and settled into my hotel, and just kind of chilling out for the time being. Looking forward to getting down with the shooting tomorrow.
Also, if you’re looking for a great place to find all of the ParaUSA Summer Camp coverage, check out this feed aggregator at the 2ABlogBash website.
posted by Caleb on Aug 21
Needless to say, blogging will be light today - I’ll post periodic updates from my Blackberry as sit in the airport and wait for my plane. And of course, for the people that really, really love those posts I’ll post about any misadventures I have with TSA. I’m not bringing a firearm so I don’t anticipate any problems with my luggage, but you also never know with these guys.
Looking forward to getting in to Norfolk! Also, keep your eyes on this spot; hopefully I’ll be able to post details of our “Live from Blackwater” show for Gun Nuts.
posted by Caleb on Aug 20
One of the things that came up last night on the show was Joe wondering how Todd Jarrett is going to compensate for the disparity in the levels of training and shooting disciplines that each of the different shooters have. Just from reading everyone’s blog, the difference in levels of training and shooting styles is a pretty wide dispersion. For example, Robb said on the show last night that he’d never shot while drawing from the holster, and on the flip side Joe has had a lot of civilian training and has competed extensively.
Another good compare and contrast would be between Sebastian and myself - he shoots a lot of Metallic Silhouette, where “rapid fire” is one shot every 15 seconds, I shoot a lot of steel and IDPA where rapid fire is “bangbangbangbangbang”. I think seeing the different level of shooting practices and skill sets, and how that ends up getting managed at the training level is going to be really interesting.
I also had an idea for settling the bet - in the event that we can’t shoot an El Presidente, I know that there’s going to be a shoot house at the course, so we can just compare scores on the shoot house if we don’t have time to run an El Pres at the end of the match. I haven’t done a shoot house since 2003 when I was doing pistol quals, so it should be pretty interesting.
I’m leaving tomorrow - excited!
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