Serious Fun ...
FAS-5 Class Review
By Kathy Jackson
The following review was originally written in July, 2003.
I had been shooting handguns for a little over three years and was the
only woman in the class. By that time, I'd been shooting long enough that
the lack of other women in the class didn't really faze me, but it did
make me sad; people miss out on so much when they don't risk
doing this kind of thing!
Firearms Academy of Seattle director Marty Hayes is continually fine-tuning
the curriculum, striving to improve his students' skills and find fresh
ways to communicate what they need to know. As a result, the entire FAS
curricula has been reworked in recent years. If you are interested in
the types of skills mentioned in the review below, consider taking the
course titled, "Tactical Scenarios" instead.
The website for the Firearms Academy of Seattle is
www.firearmsacademy.com
So this weekend I was at the range for FAS-5, an advanced tactical handgun
class from the Firearms Academy of
Seattle. Despite the name, FAS is located in beautiful rural Lewis
County, roughly halfway between Seattle and Portland just off the I-5
corridor. In all, the class was exhausting, educational, and stressful.
It was also serious fun.
FAS classes are of two types: pure shooting skills, and tactical skills.
Pure shooting skills, of course, are just that. You learn how to safely
handle your firearm in a manner appropriate for self-defense -- how to
hit what you're aiming at and (more important) how not to hit what you
don't want to hit. Tactical skills are a bit different and a bit more
exciting to learn. In tactical classes, you experience what it is like
to use your gun in a defensive situation. That's the kind of class I took
this weekend. So what was it like?
Saturday morning, the class began with a short classroom lecture introducing
the basics of team house-clearing tactics and providing an overview of
the weekend ahead. Marty, the lead instructor, also introduced his assistants:
Dean, Heath, Art, and Larry. There were eight students in the class.
Upon adjourning to the range, we worked on left-handed skills (actually,
"weak-handed" -- but everyone in the class was a right-handed
shooter). For some, this was the first intensive left-handed shooting
we'd done. After getting us up to speed, including reloads and malfunction
clearances, Marty had us shoot the FAS-2 qualifier entirely left-handed.
I was pleased with my performance here; though I could have done better,
my left-handed score was better than my original right-handed score when
I first took FAS-2 as a beginning shooter three years ago.
After the left-handed shooting, we ran through a couple of 360-bay exercises,
both of which were fairly high intensity. The 360 bay has berms surrounding
it, so it is safe to shoot in all directions. It has barrels simulating
cover scattered at random intervals, and barrels with scattered breaks
in a rough rectangle around the outer edges. I entered the bay with my
vision blocked by a piece of cardboard for the first exercise. Heath placed
me in front of several cartoon targets, each of which had a number spray-painted
upon it. He then yelled out a number while dropping the vision block.
For the purposes of the exercise, targets with the wrong number upon them
were deemed to be no-shoots. Since this was a 360-degree exercise, the
targets could be anywhere within the bay, including behind me. Also, the
standard 2-second rule applied: if I was exposed to a target for more
than 2 seconds, and did not neutralize it within that time, I lost. I'm
not sure how many targets there were, total, but we repeated the exercise
three times with different numbers (and thus different no-shoots).
Although we were roped up for safety during the 360 exercises, the instructors
also wore their vests -- and with good reason. At one point, I found myself
spinning around so fast that I was face to face with Heath.
"I just swept you!" I said frantically.
Heath smiled calmly. "No, you didn't." He almost looked amused.
"I didn't? Are you sure? I really didn't??"
"Nope," Heath said patiently. "I was watching you. I'd
have stopped you if it was a problem. You knew I was back there. You pointed
at the ground on your way past." Heath gets an award in my book for
aplomb under stress -- and Marty gets a bigger one for getting me to the
point where the safety training is so ingrained that it is no longer conscious.
The next 360-bay exercise was similar to the first, but with steel plates,
and colors rather than numbers as the identifier. This time, Marty ran
me through -- and he had a handheld shocker with him. Every time I exposed
myself to a target, he gave me a jolt with the shocker and yelled, "They're
shooting at you! Get 'em!" Yeowch. Talk about stressful...
During lunch, the class watched a video about confronting multiple attackers.
After lunch, the class met down near the combat alley. Combat alley is
a long, narrow course with steel poppers set in various positions on either
side of it, a total of 10 targets to be knocked over from 5 different
shooting positions. We were going to run the course and see how well we
did. One little addenda: before running the course, each student would
be 'beat up' for a full 30 seconds by four other people who were armed
with training bats and big pads that looked like oversize pillows. The
purpose of this was to get the students' heart rates up around 180 or
so, so that we could see that it was possible to manipulate the gun and
get good hits even under extreme stress. For the most part, we did so
-- or even better. My usual abysmal score on combat alley was better than
it had ever been before, and one of the other students managed to break
the all time record on the course.
Following the discussion after action alley, we headed up to the low-light
range for some night shooting. We ran through one-handed low-light skills
at various distances and tempos. With a proper default stance, I was pleased
with how my skills were coming along -- and even earned a 'well done'
from Marty, a compliment much to be cherished for its rarity.
We concluded the day by watching a 90-minute, very interesting (and somewhat
disturbing) video on hostage negotiation skills.
Sunday morning dawned cool and cloudy, perfect weather considering that
we had all been warned to wear long sleeves for the Code Eagle exercises.
Code Eagle is a brand name for what amounts to a glorified paint gun.
They use genuine revolvers, but the revolvers are modified so that they
will only accept safe training ammunition which is basically a paint ball.
This way, the guns appear realistic and are handled much the same way
as genuine guns, but with proper safety gear, they are as safe as a paintball
marker.
About the scenarios themselves, I can say little since I would not want
to spoil the surprises for others who may want to take this class. Generally
speaking, the scenarios allowed us to practice interacting with real people
in realistic situations -- such as encountering panhandlers in a parking
lot, defending from a carjacking, negotiating a hostage release, or dealing
with a bank robbery gone bad. Each of these exercises had its own learning
points and stressors, and the lesson was often one that we did not expect
it to be. One scenario may have provided students with an opportunity
to assess their own personal boundaries ... but the lesson might equally
well have been that it's not good to draw your gun unless you know for
sure what is going on. You never knew, going into a scenario, what the
lesson was going to be nor how you would cope with the situation until
it played out in front of you.
With the Code Eagle guns, we also practiced searching and clearing houses
both in full light and in low light situations. Against real human beings
acting the way real human beings act in such circumstances, this was definitely
a high stress activity!
By practicing scenarios like this you go way beyond the basic theory of
how to use a gun. You find out just how good you are, how good your training
is, and how well your reflexes will support you in real life.
Toward the end of the day, we put the Code Eagle guns away and got out
our own firearms for a few exercises in shooting and moving, and in shooting
and moving while the targets were also moving. This was almost encouraging
for me, since it turns out that I am finally getting good enough to sometimes
hit a moving target. Considering where I came from three short years ago,
I was pretty pleased with myself as I walked off the range.