The Rangemaster Northwest Regional Tactical Conference was put on by Tom Givens and the Rangemaster crew, in collaboration with Marty Hayes and the Firearms Academy of Seattle, July 27-29, 2018. I’ve been a part of the Rangemaster conferences since the early 2000’s, and Tom invited me to present both the 4 hour classroom and 4 hour live fire portions of my Historical Handgun course at the NW Tac Con.
This is the second in a series of 3 after-action reports covering the things I saw and did at the conference. Day 1 AAR is here.
DAY 2 MORNING
My shoot time for the competition part of the event was 8 a.m. on day 2. I’m not a morning person, but I did manage to shoot the 40 round course of fire with no penalties or “points down” with a respectable total time – good enough to make the top 16 shootoff the next day.
I audited a part of a pistol class Tom Givens was teaching, waiting for the 10 am session to begin.
The second half of the morning (10-12) was spent taking a low light shooting class from John Holschen. I took a lot of classes from InSights Training in the 1990’s when my day job took me to the Seattle area on a regular basis, and hosted John many times at KR Training in the late 90’s and early 2000’s. The Firearms Academy of Seattle facility has a terrific “dark house” that allows low light training to be conducted in daylight hours, with controlled lighting.
DAY 2 AFTERNOON
The afternoon of Day 2 was the 4 hour live fire session of Historical Handgun. Ed Vinyard assisted me with running this training.
The live fire session was run on a narrow, but long range that gave us the 60 yard distance required for some of the older qualification courses, and barrels we could use as barricades needed for some of the drills. As a result, attendance was limited to a small number of diehard attendees who had brought multiple guns and lots of ammo to run the 400 rounds of drills in the class.
DAY 2 EVENING
Day 2 ended with the traditional TacCon “Trainer’s Meeting” – an event where the presenters and staff have a roundtable discussion about a topic related to trainers and training. This year’s topic was instructor credentials and national organizations.
After teaching half of each of the first 2 days, I was ready for Day 3, when I could just be a student for most of the day, except for the top 16 shootoff coming up day 3 afternoon.
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