Technical Handgun: Test & Standards

Give a man a fish and you feed him for a day, set him on fire and he’s full the rest of the life.

Wait no, that’s not the saying.

What is a shooting class crashed head long into a self-help book? The outcome might look something like the class I just had the pleasure of taking with 6 other individuals.

Self-help books get a bit of a bad rap though so it’s worth clarifying that part of the 10,000 ft descriptor. Self-help books often fail for people because reading them might feel good but the number of people with the drive to implement the lessons is always a very small percentage. This is not really the fault of the book (although some self-help books do tend towards grifting) but perhaps the expectations of the individual and what they are required to do once finishing. Some books that people tout often could be called self-help books. Think Marcus Aurelius’s Stoics. A classic from the past but the attempt is to provide guidance and restructure thinking for the reader. This shooting class attempted similar.

A bit of background about me as a student might be helpful here to the reader – at least in terms of just showing the reader I am not new to classes (I’m not a class junky either). I’ve taken a fair number of classes both in the shooting world and in the non-shooting world:

Immediate Action Jiu-Jitsu – Cecil Burch
A generic ‘Intro to AR Carbine’ class
Red Zone Primer – Jerry Wetzel
GoRuck Counter Active Shooter (Pistol)
GoRuck Counter Vehicle Ambush (Pistol)
Unthinkable – Dr William April and Paul Sharp
DDS Pistol Lab x2 – Rhett Neumayer
Confined Spaces Combatives – Cecil Burch
ECQC – Craig Douglas
Saps and Blackjacks – Guy Schnitzler

Outside of this I’ve shot a gun for 7 years now, I did not grow up with firearms. I did do a period of shooting USPSA matches a few weekends a month but that is not something I have stuck with in recent years (thanks covid/ammo prices).

I signed up to this class for a few reasons.
1) It was recommended to me from within a circle of people I trust
2) I felt my shooting skills had gotten rusty and that this could be a reset – the description of the course also appealed.

I was one of two students in the class who had not shot with John Johnston before and it was a small class of 7 people total. Not so great for John’s bottom line but certainly good for students.

The aforementioned is to set the stage about the class and my thoughts going in. I went in with low-to middling expectations of my own abilities as measured by outcome – I came away with good expectations of my ability to understand and work on the processes that will naturally improve outcome. We are going from outcome driven to process driven.

Sounds great right – but how exactly did that happen?

John is trying something new here, and from some conversations it is clear that this exact class has evolved and changed a few times over the years. To me what John is trying to do in this class is push students outside of their traditional comfort zone when it comes to self-evaluation and also ability to learn and improve. This is not a class where you are just told what to do on the firing line and given adjustments (though there are certainly moments where John did just that to individual students as needed). This is primarily a thinking class.

My own thought processes can serve as a bit of an illustrated example here. Let’s pretend I just shot a USPSA stage and this would have been my thought process as I walk around with the RO and score it

“Fuck, how did I miss that, so stupid, must slow down, this reload felt ok, ugh another shot dropped, can’t believe I pulled that wide, huh this grouping is good for being on the move, damnit why can’t I shoot like this on other targets” and so on and so forth.

A fair amount of negative talk, a fair amount of wanting to understand what I had done but not the best idea of why. Of course fellow competitors would have no doubt offered some advice “Try leading your eyes to the target” perhaps. I would have been grateful but still felt a bit frustrated, a bit happy, and a bit negative. Not ideal mindset.

That mindset can bleed into my regular training as well and what John began to push us to do was to start to divorce some negative thought patterns we develop and start to look more objectively at ourselves. Not to do micro re-inforcements of bad habits or outcomes but to acknowledge them. “That flyer happened because of X” not “Ugh I threw a flyer, why?!!??!”. This isn’t easy to teach and frankly not every person is ready or going to get the most from this.

The whole mindset adjustment and self awareness is a critical component but don’t think for a moment there aren’t important pieces of information conveyed. John’s thoughts on indexing are very concrete and apply to whoever you are, his thoughts on the importance of stance are similar. There are real concrete exercises and concepts taught about shooting in this class as well but the ultimate goal being driven at is once you identify things coming together, how to focus on the thing tripping you up and improve and do it yourself.

Another way I could explain this would be the idea of cues. If you weightlift cues are commonplace part of instruction and teaching. “Butt back” “Pinch lats” “On your heels” “Push through the floor”. There are so many different cues that exist and the interesting element to that is some cues that certain strength coaches use will resonate more with you than others. “Butt back” when squatting might work but for someone else they might need to hear “As if you are sitting back into a chair” – the outcome being sought is the same but the path to achieve it comes more easily through a cue that resonates with you. Here in this class the goal in part feels like if you are able to develop your own cues to help your own performance (which I have to say I felt I did and it helped).

So far, so gushing but I would be remiss if I did not offer a few considerations. Firstly this is a class where student input is critical and an ability to be open and reflective is needed. If you, reader, are someone not overly interested in that this may not be a great class for you BUT it could also be just the class you need to take to nudge you into this area. I will caution though that one should not fall into a trap of saying something to say something. Humans like to please and sometimes in certain environments they end up saying what they think needs to be heard. John was good at managing this and the long days do drain people, whilst I think open ended reflections worked in our class I think sometimes reframing from the open ended to the more concrete question could be good. Sometimes it is ok to prompt people to think of an area of improvement directly.

John is clearly a thoughtful guy, he could not have developed this material otherwise. One thing I think he should consider would be a 1 or 2 page handout with some of the more concrete elements he believes in. This could serve as a grounded reference point and he does have some great ‘one liners’ that really do click with you BUT in the course of a heavy dialogue and reflective course that has high mental load it is easy to forget them. Anchoring some of his own key non-negotiables on paper in a class where there are plenty of other negotiables could be really beneficial.

My final thoughts are about the possible further evolution of shooting classes as skills within a context. I’ve done some specialist weight lifting classes. The last skills clinic I did was a 4 hour squat class. That class was excellent. We of course got a lot of reps of squats in and were perfecting the exercise, what the coaches at those courses don’t do because they don’t NEED to do is give advice on what routine to build into. This is because almost everyone already taking a squat class understands the value of routines and programs. Whether they are doing 5/3/1 or a push/pull/legs they will build it. Shooting classes however I think miss an opportunity here.

Where the weightlifting coach knows implicitly that his or her clients will go away and very likely be implementing those skills the next workout session they have, of which most people have multiple a week, I think shooting instructors/coaches don’t. Some people don’t make it to the range, they make it to a class once in a while like me and have every intention of wanting to build a routine but aren’t sure how. If someone told me they could only weightlift once a week I’d know what to recommend them, if they told me 2x I could give direction, if they wanted more of course. If I can only go to the range for live fire once a month – what does that look like? If I can commit to dry fire 2x a week what does that look like?

I’m not going to give you the answers here, but I asked John and he offered some great thoughts – to me though that is perhaps the next evolution of classes and thoughts for the industry of trainers out there to explore.