Review: concealed carry course

As part of my 2022 goal to shift my work/fun balance to weigh heavier on fun things (like flying!), I decided to sign up for a concealed carry course a few weeks ago. I’m not a big firearms enthusiast, but I’ve been hunting and shooting as long as I can remember, and figured the course would be a good excuse to get back into the swing of things. I’ll give a brief review of the course in a moment, but for some quick background:

I’ve been shooting guns my whole life - starting with BB guns as a kid, and eventually moving into rifles and shotguns as a teenager. I’ve always loved going grouse hunting, and even have an experience getting shot while doing so (I’ll save that for a future post)! When I graduated from college, my parents moved to a large property, and my dad promptly setup a shooting range. Every time my family is up to visit, we’ll break out the shotguns and do some trap shooting. My oldest son, Cameron, even joined a trap team last year and has really taken a liking to the sport. He also hunts deer with grandpa every year.

Anyway, despite growing up shooting and loving any chance I get to blast some clay targets, I’ve never made shooting an intentional hobby. Seriously, every time I drive away from my mom and dad’s house, I’ll make some sort of comment to my wife, like “Gosh, I should really try to find a way to shoot more - just for fun.” But I’ve never put my time and money where my mouth is until this year. I figured a great way to ease into shooting was to sign up for a concealed carry course from a local gun range.

I found the course itself to be really informative. It’s roughly a four-hour time investment, starting with about three hours of classroom material. The curriculum moved pretty quick and covered a variety of topics, including the cardinal rules of gun safety, where you can and can’t carry a firearm, and the Minnesota defense laws at a glance. Our instructor really drilled into us that from a legal and safety standpoint, firearms should be used as an absolute last resort in a situation where you are in imminent threat of great bodily harm or death. It was interesting to hear students chime in and ask questions about various “what if” scenarios involving firearms, many of which did not have clear cut answers.

Our class also covered some interesting related topics like the various ammunition types, as well as the pros/cons of different holsters. I really enjoyed that portion of the training, because the instructor passed around a variety of bullets and holsters for us to examine. Some holsters were kind of high tech and packed with safety features - so much so that even after wrestling with them for 30 seconds, I couldn’t get the gun free!

At the end of the classroom session, we moved over into the gun range to take six shots at a paper target. This is the part of the course that I think could be done differently in the future. We were tested two at a time, and were prompted to step up to the range, load the pistol and begin firing. This was not an issue for me as I’ve had experience with handguns in the past, but you could tell some students were kind of freaking out because it was their first experience handling a firearm. Nowhere in the course had we practiced proper loading and gripping of the gun, or how to stand while holding it. So I sympathized with the students who were being prompted to do all of that in a limited time window with little instruction. To make matters possibly more stressful, the second round of shooting was done in “double tap” style. And while I certainly enjoyed channeling my inner Woody Harleson, I could see that this exercise freaked out some new students even more. Several were closing their eyes - something you definitely don’t want to be doing in a self-defense situation.

I also realize that the range offers other courses focused heavily on proper gun handling. However, if a goal of the concealed carry course is to get the average person more comfortable with handling a gun for self-defense purposes, perhaps a gun handling and shooting class should be required first?

Based on this experience, I’ll definitely consider additional classes this range offers, and maybe even a membership as well. This club is within spitting distance of a location I’m already at several times a week, so from an ease-of-access perspective, it’s a no-brainer.

Here’s how my “double tap” round went. If I had been shooting zombies, this one would still be lumbering towards me. But still, I think I’m getting the basic idea:

At this point, I’m ready to complete the additional paperwork required to get my permit, and turn it in at the sheriff’s office. From there, the permit should be issued in about 30 days. In the meantime I’m going to do some research on handguns to figure out which one might be a good fit for my needs.