TacCon21 (part 2)

The KR Training team taught, competed and attended sessions at the 2021 Rangemaster Tactical Conference, held in Dallas at the Dallas Pistol Club (DPC) facility. In part 1 of this series I wrote about the KR Training team’s participation as trainers, staff and competitors. This post will cover the sessions we attended and other events at the match.

The Sessions

Here was the schedule for all the sessions. As you can see there were a lot of great options: classroom, live fire and hands on.

FRIDAY

Friday morning I attended a 3 hour live fire block taught by Brian Hill of the Complete Combatant. Brian’s background includes coaching for strength and fitness, martial arts and firearms, giving him a very broad perspective. He’s also an excellent shooter. I was too busy shooting and learning to take a lot of pics. A bonus of attending that course is I got to meet and chat with Scott Jedlinski and Tim Herron in person. I’ve chatted with both of them online over the past year. For the past several months I’ve been running my Holosun 507 sight in “32 MOA circle only” mode, influenced by Tim’s suggestion and recommendation. I’m finding I like the big open circle better than small dot or circle-dot.

Interestingly enough, the value of having a larger reticle is something I recommended to the industry back in 2017 when I posted my red dot study results. Apparently a few companies read the post and implemented that idea into their products. As I had predicted in the 2017 post (and something Tim observed in his own use of the larger circle) is that in cases where you don’t get perfect alignment of gun and reticle and eyeball, being able to see part the reticle at the edge of the window gives you sufficient visual information to correct the alignment faster than seeing no dot in the window and having to make a guess (educated or uneducated) about which way to move the gun.

Friday afternoon I taught a 4 hour session.

SATURDAY

The TacCon presentations and seminars are always a mix of new material, special topics trainers only offer at conferences, and “greatest hits” drawn from the presenters’ best known curriculum. Having been to more than 20 TacCons, I admit to skipping the 8 am sessions in favor of getting enough sleep and a decent breakfast, so I would be reasonably well prepared to shoot the match, sample some sessions, grab a snack and be ready to teach all Saturday afternoon. I did get a chance to observe bits and pieces of the Small Auto Pistols class taught by Chuck Haggard and the Revolver Essentials session taught by Lee Weems as they were wrapping up before lunch break.

Sunday

I started Sunday with Darryl Bolke’s Revolver Options presentation. Darryl is working on a book about the history of revolver-oriented training.

The next session I attended, (conveniently in the same classroom as Darryl’s talk) was Eve Kulcsar’s “Business Tactical”. Her talk addressed an issue I get a lot of questions about: how to balance the desire to carry and be prepared for self-defense against the need to dress in business attire, and potentially be in violation of company policies that could lead to being fired. I recently became aware of one gun blogger/serious student of self defense who had lost his job as a result of a co-worker making a comment that attracted the attention of management. That resulted in company security searching his office, finding the pistol he had in his backpack, firing him and removing him from the building.

Eve’s discussion started out presenting classic risk management concepts, and then focusing on specific risk associated with job sites and business environments.

She pointed out that one of the biggest risks (that is often neglected or discounted) is risk of being in a traffic accident commuting to/from the workplace. For most people, that risk is higher than the risk of workplace violence, but gets much less attention.

Her presentation concluded with a discussion of gear and different ways to carry it: not just firearms but also pepper spray and medical gear. Off-body carry has many limitations but is often the most practical, with the lowest risk of detection.

SHOOTOFF

Claude Werner shared this excellent video of the final shootoff. It used the 3D targets developed by John Hearne, originally used for the main match when it was run indoors at the Rangemaster and Memphis PD facilities. KR Training has a set of 8 of these targets that we use in our shoothouse.

The final presentation I attended on Sunday was Jeff Gonzales‘ block on gun range accidents. Like Eve’s talk, it began with discussion of traditional risk management concepts. (Jeff’s presentation was held in one of the classroom tents. Lighting was poor, so these pics are not as good as others I took in other sessions.)

The topics on that last slide are relevant to every level of firearms training, as Jeff explained in his talk. From teaching beginners to working in live fire shoot houses, drawing from concealment and doing force on force training, those elements need to be considered to minimize risk. Most readers have probably seen videos of classes run with students downrange, or muzzling others through inattention, or videos in which negligent discharges occur, sometimes resulting in injury. I’m not going to link to any of those videos, because in many cases they are content the unsafe trainers have posted themselves to promote their businesses, and I don’t want to contribute to their online traffic.

Still more to come…

I still have some videos taken during my sessions and the shootoff to edit and post. That will be the third and final post in the series.

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