JimConway
Instructor
On September 23 and 24, 2005,Jeff Gonzales conducted his Combative Pistol 1 (CP1) 20 hour course followed up on September 25 with his Shooting on the Move Pistol skills (SOMP) 10 hour module. Both courses were held at the Tyngsboro Sportsmen's Club.
For those of you that are not familiar with Jeff Gonzales, he was a Navy SEAL operator for 12 years and is still involved with Special Forces both in a training and an operations. Jeff brings to his courses a unique perspective that bebunks and challenges many traditional aspects of shooting. These two courses involved a very high number of rounds fired - about 1500 in the 2 day CP1 and 600+ in the one day SOMP courses. Before anyone comments about just throwing rounds down range, I will state that not a single shot was wasted and that we were not hosing the targets.
It is very hard for me to adequately describe the content of these two courses, so I will mention only of the highlights.
Each of these two courses started and ended with a skills test that was shot from 25 yards to 3 yards.
For all intent and purposes there were no breaks(except for a short lunch break), other that for mad dashes to grab another handful of ammo needed to keep shooting.
The CP1 course had 14 students, including 5 from law enforcement and the SOMP course had 8 students with 3 from Law Enforcement.
In the CP1 course over 4 hours was spent shooting strong hand only. All of the night shoot was strong hand only. It was amazing that Jeff's approach to strong hand only shooting was easy and quite accurate.
Dealing was malfunctions (MALFs) an integral part of most of the drills. Jeff's approach to dealing MALFs was non-diagnostic, since you can not look to see what is wrong in the dark. After a while no one had to even think about how to do it . They just did what was necessary. I hate to think how many times we were asked to load one or more dummy rounds.
The technique that Jeff taught for shooting around barriers was amazing. We never leaned out but rather were taught to lean forward. This technique provided us with much more cover.
On a personal note, it has taken three days for my right hand to return to some degree of normalcy.
In the SOMP course all shots were fired while moving from 3 to 25 yards. We were all amazed to not have to move using a "moon walk" or "duck walk". We simply moved normally. The reason this is the the exagerated moon or duck walks are very tiring and are not practical for long times.
I will close the review with a quote from another student's comments:
"Jeff REALLY pushes the envelope for those who are willing. I got to see just how fast (and how poorly) I can shoot quickly at 25 yards. We then had drills to re-enforce the basic skills and rip the centers out of the targets. What you see on target is not a bunch of misses, but a bunch of people being pushed out of their comfort zone and into some real fast speed then slowed down again.
This is very much NOT like normal "technique" Jeff G and his co-horts
(SEALS) reverse engineered what works in the field and what does not work, hence his classes."
For those of you that would like to see some of the photos that were taken during the class, you can go to http://www.neshooters.com/galleryGonzales.html
For those of you that are not familiar with Jeff Gonzales, he was a Navy SEAL operator for 12 years and is still involved with Special Forces both in a training and an operations. Jeff brings to his courses a unique perspective that bebunks and challenges many traditional aspects of shooting. These two courses involved a very high number of rounds fired - about 1500 in the 2 day CP1 and 600+ in the one day SOMP courses. Before anyone comments about just throwing rounds down range, I will state that not a single shot was wasted and that we were not hosing the targets.
It is very hard for me to adequately describe the content of these two courses, so I will mention only of the highlights.
Each of these two courses started and ended with a skills test that was shot from 25 yards to 3 yards.
For all intent and purposes there were no breaks(except for a short lunch break), other that for mad dashes to grab another handful of ammo needed to keep shooting.
The CP1 course had 14 students, including 5 from law enforcement and the SOMP course had 8 students with 3 from Law Enforcement.
In the CP1 course over 4 hours was spent shooting strong hand only. All of the night shoot was strong hand only. It was amazing that Jeff's approach to strong hand only shooting was easy and quite accurate.
Dealing was malfunctions (MALFs) an integral part of most of the drills. Jeff's approach to dealing MALFs was non-diagnostic, since you can not look to see what is wrong in the dark. After a while no one had to even think about how to do it . They just did what was necessary. I hate to think how many times we were asked to load one or more dummy rounds.
The technique that Jeff taught for shooting around barriers was amazing. We never leaned out but rather were taught to lean forward. This technique provided us with much more cover.
On a personal note, it has taken three days for my right hand to return to some degree of normalcy.
In the SOMP course all shots were fired while moving from 3 to 25 yards. We were all amazed to not have to move using a "moon walk" or "duck walk". We simply moved normally. The reason this is the the exagerated moon or duck walks are very tiring and are not practical for long times.
I will close the review with a quote from another student's comments:
"Jeff REALLY pushes the envelope for those who are willing. I got to see just how fast (and how poorly) I can shoot quickly at 25 yards. We then had drills to re-enforce the basic skills and rip the centers out of the targets. What you see on target is not a bunch of misses, but a bunch of people being pushed out of their comfort zone and into some real fast speed then slowed down again.
This is very much NOT like normal "technique" Jeff G and his co-horts
(SEALS) reverse engineered what works in the field and what does not work, hence his classes."
For those of you that would like to see some of the photos that were taken during the class, you can go to http://www.neshooters.com/galleryGonzales.html
