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Grayguns’s Practical Fundamentals: Who is it for?
February 1, 2010 by Bruce Gray · 10 Comments
The Grayguns training crew and I frequently encounter prospective students who dismiss our Practical Fundamentals handgun course program as “too basic” for their level of skill and training. Nearly as often, we’ll talk to a shooter who believes his skills don’t meet our prerequisites for attendance. Both perspectives can’t be right, can they?
Our staff instructors have been on me to clear up these misconceptions as we get ready for our 2010 training season. It’s my pleasure to take a shot at clarifying our training philosophy, with your indulgence.
The key word is “fundamentals”. That’s a term that is often but erroneously confused with “basic” and “beginner”, but our course is not primarily oriented towards the new shooter. Rather, while our Practical Fundamentals course is perfectly suitable for newer shooters with demonstrable safe gun handling skills, that intense three days places the most rigorous demands squarely on the the most accomplished shooters.
Shooting is no different from other disciplines, in which he highest order of skill is attained by the fullest mastery of core, irreducible fundamentals. And, like any other discipline, the core fundamentals of practical handgun shooting have a hierarchy of most crucial to least crucial tasks to perform, and the skills required to accomplish them.
To develop this course program, I took the easy way out and made it simple: I looked to that hierarchy to identify each task and skill in a logical progression from bottom to top. This was obvious to me: 35 years of shooting taught me that nobody wins a contest for a trophy or a fight for her life by missing the target.
My philosophy of instruction follows naturally from that essential truth. At the top of our pyramid, the twin core skills of sight alignment and trigger control are used in coordination with the appropriate mental direction and attitude to solve the marksmanship problem at hand.
Every other task and skill is subordinate to, and supportive of, these twin core fundamentals of sight alignment (which, in the practical context, we define as seeing what you need to see to make each given shot) and trigger control. Everything else plays a supporting role.
Nobody hits the target with a fast reload or nifty malfunction clearance skills, yet few take the time to study trigger control and “seeing” in any real, well-considered depth. While we do cover presentation, gun handling and the firing platform in great detail, it’s only as a means to an end, to support the application and perfection of the core skills that actually accomplish the job of hitting stuff for you.
Thus, far from a “basic” class, our Practical Fundamentals course is really as advanced or basic as each student’s capacity for understanding and applying what are, in all truth, some very simple concepts and techniques.
Fortunately for me – as I’m no more agile or adept as the average guy – shooting is designed to be simple. If it weren’t, we couldn’t do it at all. But, it’s not “easy”. All the extraneous pressure and mental noise that our egos put in front of our performance makes shooting fast and accurately more of a challenge than it needs to be. Thus, it follows that mindset and attitude comprise the third core fundamental that we work on in our course. Our objective is to help you identify what you need to do to solve the problem at hand, how to do it, and how to think about it so that you can do it most effectively under stress.
There’s no mystery to it: that “what” is always trigger control. But our goal isn’t to send you out after three days on the range with a new set of durable, persistent skills. Rather, we will help you identify the skills and techniques you need to achieve your potential, and the methods you can use to develop these skills over the rest of your shooting career.
Wow, this sounds like everyone else’s brochure, except I haven’t used terms like “tactical” and “operator” yet. Thing is, anybody can jerk the trigger at a target 1,000 times in a weekend while somebody yells at them through a megaphone. That’s not what we’re about at all.
I’m not about the fight. I’m about the trigger. If you can’t hit everything you can see on demand at speed, our course isn’t too basic for you, and everything else is too advanced.
Thank you for letting me explain what our Practical Fundamentals course series is about. And, thanks to our many students for six years of fun in the broiling sun, freezing snow and pouring rain. God willing, we’ll be miserable together on a range near you for many more years to come.
Our strong commitment to personal and friendly customer service, leading edge innovation and consistent, top quality work is a reflection of Bruce Gray's 35 year career as a highly regarded custom gunsmith, competitor and practical shooting authority. 
Hi Bruce:
Excellent article! You taught J/M and I to tape over the timer display when training and make accuracy the priority and not the clock. During competition/fight/stress, your priority is to get the hits accurately and the speed will come with repetition.
Wayne, Sacramento
Bruce,
I wholeheartedly agree that your Practical Fundamentals course is a useful class for a wide variety of shooters. I’ve taken it twice and in both cases, I shot with people ranging from those who could produce miniscule groups at speed to those needing to be shown how to insert a magazine or handle their firearm in a safe manner. Provided there were enough instructors, this didn’t hinder the progress of the class and I came away with something different each time.
The hardest part for me, since I had been shooting recreationally for over 20 years prior to your course, was unlearning the bad habits I had picked up. That’s probably why I found myself improving more in the second class than the first – old habits are sometimes hard to break. I remember in the second class when my groups were 8″ in the morning and 3″ by the late afternoon. That was a good day. You include a lot of practical info (hence the course title), and I came away with good insight into why I should do things as well as several drills to use afterwards.
I’d recommend the Practical Fundamentals class to anyone looking to improve the accuracy and consistency of their shooting.
- Chris
San Antonio, TX
In support of Bruces training,
I have been to a number of classes in many different venues. To be honest I am often disappointed with a retread of the same old material. Bruces class do not disappoint. I took a 3 day class in Western MA a few years ago. It was by far the best shooting training I have ever had. We hit shooting fundamentals but not in a way that drove me crazy but rather in a way that consistently improved my shooting over the three days. On the last day of class the entire class was cutting cards in half on end in under 5 shots with many getting it on a shot or two. This was the result of three days of fundamentals focused on true shooting.
Safety…………
I want to start by saying that Bruce and his team insisted on a safe range and shooting experience for all. I get frustrated when I sign up for a two day intermediate focused class and we spend 1/2 of the time on this is how to be safe with the gun. This really galls me when you already made an intro class (totally -80%- focused on safety) a prerequisite. I paid for the next step and that is what I expected to get. In this way the GGI class really delivered. Again I want to stress that unsafe action with firearms was not and should not be tolerated in an class or at anytime with a firearm, but this was about the next step.
Some of the parts that I enjoyed about the class was how every skill level in the class was both respected and addressed. I was not close to the best shooter in the and I had a great time. I am also confident that tackdrivers in the class really enjoyed themselves.
Without reservation I would recommend this class to all levels of shooters once you have taken a basic shooting class and had a little experience. This is one of the best shooting classes you can take.
“I was not the fastest gun in the West, just the most accurate” -Wyatt Earp (I’d like to see how tightly he had his fundimentals wired) Goes along with the old mantra of “Slow is smooth and smooth is fast”. I might have to take a look at this course. I am a big, big fan of fundimentals. With out them, you have nothing.