Selecting the Best Defensive Firearm
- 1¼ hour class (for one person – add extra 30 mins for each extra person, maximum of three per class)
- Range class, involves live fire
- No special equipment required – guns, ammo, and targets provided, eye and ear protection can be rented ($1 for each, $3 for electronic ears) if you don’t have them
- Suitable for all skill levels, but of diminishing value if you’ve already shot a wide range of different gun/ammo combinations
- Fee : $100 for one, $150 for two, $200 for three, plus range admission (typically $10) and eye/ear protection rental if applicable. Extra charges for extra ammo, extra gun rentals, extra targets and/or extra instructor time
Code Green’s Selecting the Best Defensive Firearm course introduces you to a comprehensive selection of at least twelve different hand guns, in nine different calibers of ammunition. A carefully staged series of sample shots takes you through revolver options, standard size semi-autos and ‘pocket pistols’ – compact and subcompact semi-autos.
The information and hands-on experiences you’ll get will help you decide whether you want a large/full size/heavy gun or a small/compact/lightweight gun. It will also help you match the appropriate caliber to the appropriate size gun so that you can get a shooting experience that is the best compromise for you between too much power and attendant recoil at one extreme, and insufficient power with way less recoil than you can manage at the other extreme.
We’ll discuss the interplay between gun size, gun weight, barrel length, caliber, and ammunition performance so that you can zero in on the ‘sweet spot’ that applies to you, variously for either at-home or carry type defensive purposes.
During the course of the class, you’ll shoot at least 30 rounds through at least 12 guns and of nine different ammunition calibers, ranging from tiny .22 LR up to the largest .45 ACP rounds, and with an interesting opportunity to try the ‘super pistol’ and its unique ammunition as used by the Secret Service and various other agencies (the FN 57).
In addition to all the different combinations included in the class, you can then choose to shoot additional rounds through the class guns (including others you didn’t shoot in the first sequence of shooting, or to rent more guns from the range to finesse further your understanding of what you do and don’t like.
This class is intended to give you the information and hands-on shooting experience you need to be able to choose a general size and caliber of firearm. It will not give you a chance to try every different gun ever made, or to be able to base a decision such as ‘Do I buy a SIG or a S&W or a Springfield or a Glock (etc) in my chosen size and caliber combination’. Those sorts of issues become increasingly a matter of personal taste (and budget). We are pleased to discuss such choices with you, and some of our instructors also work part-time in gun stores so they are well placed to talk through the specific choices you have.
These are highly personal, one-on-one classes. We conduct them with you and only you, and/or with one or two of your friends present too (your choice). It makes sense for a person to bring their spouse or companion with them so the two of you get a uniform set of experiences and can choose shared guns (or at least, shared calibers), but we feel the highly interactive nature of this course would suffer if we were to offer it to a classroom full of strangers, so we limit the size of your group to three people maximum.
If you have more people who also wish to go through the class, we’ll simply run multiple classes, back-to-back.
A further benefit of this highly individualized approach is that classes can be scheduled any time of any day (range hours permitting), with only a short amount of notice required.
A typical class runs up to about 75 minutes for one person (and we allow an extra 30 minutes each for any extra people also attending). If you’re wanting to spend more time and go through things in even more detail and with even more sample shots, it can be extended as you might wish, subject only to the instructor running out of available time or the range closing. Of course, the extra time (and, if applicable, rounds, targets, and/or extra gun rentals) is all chargeable.
As always, we confidently guarantee the value in our training, so you can confidently choose to participate.