Intro
I first heard of Kenaz Tactical on the Practically Tactical podcast about a year ago. I’ve subscribed to Practically Tactical’s Youtube channel and I found Kenaz’s chief firearms instructor, Robert Butler, being interviewed when searching through some of the channel’s older posted videos. I was interested to learn that there was a Colorado-based school that I didn’t know about and so I started researching them. In doing so, I heard good reviews about Kenaz Tactical and so I decided that I would check out one of their classes if the opportunity presented itself.
The second Saturday in March was one of the first of 2017 where I didn’t have work or anything else scheduled so I signed up for the class that Kenaz Tactical had for that day, “Carbine 1”. I’ve been wanting to take more carbine training for some time now since I feel like I ought to be running carbines at a higher level than I currently do. I’ve also wanted to devote some time to running my AKM since I have a lot less experience with that firearm than I do with the AR15. I had also done a trade last year for a whole bunch of 7.62x39mm ammo and so it made sense to use some of that up.
Gear
In my rifle case was the rifle that I wanted to use for the class: my Century Arms-imported WASR 10/63. While these rifles get a lot of hate on the interwebs, I can’t really complain too much about mine; the first few shots I ever fired through it caused malfunctions but then it occurred to me that I hadn’t properly lubricated the rifle and so I drizzled some motor oil on the bolt and carrier from a pickup truck’s dipstick and went back to shooting. I’ve not had a mechanical malfunction since.
I bought this rifle before the 2008 election when I was sure that either Obama or Hillary was going to become president and I was pretty convinced that “assault rifles”, “high-capacity banana clips”, and “cop-killer bullets” were going to become regulated as (or more) heavily than they’d been under Daddy Bush and Slick Willy. I’d saved up $1000 and I wanted a military-pattern semi-auto rifle, twenty full-capacity magazines, and a thousand rounds of ammo. The numbers for the ammo and mags were somewhat arbitrary, but the 1994-2004 period where some of the most common magazines on the face of the planet were fetching $50-100 (albeit, when dollars were worth quite a bit more than they are now) was fresh in my mind and I didn’t want to be the chump who had to scour the gun shows for overpriced, second-rate magazines in order to train and shoot. Essentially, I was buying a lifetime supply of magazines. For what I wanted to get and the amount that I’d budgeted, the WASR was really the only game in town at that place and time.
The rifle has been modified to some degree over the years. I pretty quickly learned to hate how quickly the OEM wooden handguards would heat up to the point where they’d be almost impossible to hold without sustaining burns to your hand and so I bought a friend’s Tapco Galil-style AK handguard from him. I got a Tapco SAW-style pistol grip too and eventually partially stippled it. The Tapco furniture was surprisingly good but I always pined for a longer handguard on the AK. It wasn’t until some years later that I got a Magpul Zhukov handguard, which is what is on that rifle now. I certainly got one of the first-ever Zhukov handguards to hit the market, as I posted photos of my rifle with the handguard on ar15.com in the AK Furniture thread and promptly had people post surprise that I had gotten my hands on one. “How’d you already get one?”, one user asked:
http://www.ar15.com/forums/t_4_96/15...re.html&page=3
Back when I was too broke to ever hope to afford a quality optic (and too well-informed to buy an optic that wasn’t of good quality), I bought an XS Sights 24/7 White Stripe front sight. This is a tritium front sight that has a white bar running down the middle of the otherwise black post. The white contrasts with dark backgrounds, the black with light ones and the tritium glows in the dark. As far as iron sights go for a fighting rifle, this seems to be a good way to go. About the time that I got the Zhukov handguard, I also widened the rear sight notch with a needle file and checked my work with a set of Brown & Sharpe calipers to keep the notch centered in the body of the sight. When the rear notch was sufficiently opened, I then rounded off the outside corners of the sight with a bastard file and carefully deburred the whole thing with sandpaper. A couple coats of matte black spray paint served to “refinish” the rear sight and I was left with an ersatz Rifle Dynamics-style sight picture. The first time that I threw this sight picture in front of my eye, I felt a little disappointed; “Big deal”, I thought, “a slightly different AK sight picture”. After shooting and dry-firing with the newer sights for a while, I had the opportunity to look through some OEM AK sights though, and when I did, my reaction was that they were simply awful! At that moment I realized just what a subtle but excellent rear sight modification that Rifle Dynamics had come up with and I was glad that I’d copied it.
Commercial 7.62x39mm ammo tends to have a pretty egregious muzzle flash and so I put on a ‘A1 birdcage’-style flash suppressor years ago. It cost considerably less than $20 and does a remarkable job of taming that flash, especially for the price. A section of M1913 “Pic rail” on the M-LOK slot on the Zhukov allows me to add a light to the handguard, though I didn’t choose to mount my light at this class. I also put an M-LOK Paraclip Sling Mount on the Zhukov.
I put an ACE folding stock on this rifle a few years back and since installing the receiver block required cutting off the stock tang I am now stuck with this setup. That said, since I have no problems with the stock, I figure it’s not a bad thing to get “stuck” with. The version that I got takes an AR15 buffer tube and the actual stock that I put on it is a Magpul MOE stock that I had lying around. The ACE folder has an oddly-placed and designed sling swivel on the right side of the folding mechanism. The placement is understandable since the stock is designed to fold to the left but the swivel itself would look more at home on a hunting rifle; it is decidedly “low speed” in a world of QD cups and HK snap hooks. I used a Condor Stryke bungee sling for this class and its snap hooks worked well enough on the sling swivel but the arrangement seemed somewhat ramshackle compared to the grace with which the Zhukov-mounted Magpul Paraclip mated with the front end of the sling.
The last accessory that I put on was an M-LOK MVG vertical foregrip. I had high hopes for the Zhukov handguard to shield the support hand from heat but I was disappointed to learn that when I shot high volumes through my AK that the Zhukov would still get hotter than hell’s hinges, forcing me to use a magwell grip or get burned. I thought that maybe the all-plastic construction of the MVG would allow for a haven from the heat for me to creep my hand down onto when the gun started getting really hot. Plus, VFGs look cool which is what’s *really* important, right?
I almost didn’t bring a backup rifle, but I knew that I’d regret it if I didn’t (Murphy’s Law and all that) so I brought my 5.56mm AR15 and a .50-cal can of Great Lakes Ammo .223 FMJ (I don’t own a second 7.62x39mm gun). I re-barreled this rifle a few months back after getting a killer deal on a PWS direct-impingement barrel that had been listed on their “Cannon” (i.e.: cosmetically-blemished discount items) page. My previous barrel had been shot to the point that it wouldn’t shoot better than about 5-6 MOA, a result that I found unacceptable. I had also recently purchased a Steiner P4Xi 1-4x scope and I was really wanting to do some shooting with this gun/optic combo in a class environment.
I was in no mood to get all jocked up in a bunch of tactical gear so I decided to just try performing reloads out of my pants pockets. I took this concept of laziness a step further and decided to just wear my work-issue polyester pants with no extra cargo pockets or anything. Since it’s not my responsibility to launder or repair these pants, I figured that I could care even less about getting them dirty or ripped.
I brought some Monster Rehab energy drinks to have in lieu of my usual morning coffee and some unflavored whey protein powder mixed with Gatorade powder to drink at the class. I also wore my Mechanix M-Pact gloves; I feel like I get my hands cut enough at work and I don’t need to cut them more on my days off.
“If it ain’t rainin’...”
I decided to wake up really early on Saturday, 5:30 am (which is to say, about an hour later than I normally do), eat, and then lug my range bag and rifle case down to my truck. The night before I had staged my ammo cans in the truck so that I wouldn’t need to get them in the morning. I bring my range bag pretty much any time I go shooting; since I put the proverbial kitchen sink in that bag, bringing it makes forgetting anything pretty difficult.
I am apparently the only guy left in Western society that doesn’t own a smart phone and so I have to go to Google maps and research how to get somewhere instead of being guided there by GPS. Since the location for Kenaz Tactical’s class looked somewhat remote, I decided to leave myself plenty of time time to get there and was on the road by about 6:00 am.
Stepping out of the house, I was greeted by the first rainfall of the year for this region. The rain wasn’t heavy but it was persistent. I was immediately struck by how just a couple of years ago, I would have found the idea of taking a class like Carbine 1 in the rain as being invigorating: I would be testing myself against the elements, I would be “training like I fight”, and I would be getting some mud on my gear, unlike those cold, timid souls on the internet who know neither victory nor defeat and who post pictures of sparkling clean tactical gear on forums, much to the derision of “real shooters” like me .
For the last few months I’ve really been reevaluating who I am and how I spend my time, money, and effort. I haven’t given a shit about impressing other people since I started kindergarten and that is the only reason I’ve concluded that all that I’ve done for almost a decade in the realms of shooting, fitness, martial arts, outdoorsmanship, and other “tactical life” stuff wasn’t all just some sort of affectation… unless it was *myself* that I was trying to convince that I was more of a badass than I actually was. Now that I’m starting to accept that I’m nothing more impressive than a 33 year-old machinist, the way I’m starting to feel about things like, say, crappy weather when I’m supposed to spend the whole day outside is probably the same way that everyone else does: it’s just inconvenient and uncomfortable.
Still, I wasn’t about to throw my tuition money away or to change my plans for the day on account of a little rain, so I threw my stuff in the truck and started the drive to Colorado Springs.
The drive was long but scenic and even the dreaded Big City was kind of interesting to drive through from north to south. I don’t go to Denver often at all and when I do it’s almost never a straight drive through the city from one end to the other so seeing as much as I did was a new experience. The highlight of driving in Colorado, however, is always going to be the mountains and they provided a great view for the 2-hour drive.
In the confirmation email that I got from Kenaz Tactical, there was a little blurb about the location where the class would be held, a place called “Dragonmans” outside of Colorado Springs. The note said “We will meet at our gated entrance, Gate 3 on the map below. Note: there is some ‘interesting’ road art on the approach. That’s Dragonmans’-no, we’re not crazy!” This little note had be intrigued as to what I’d see.
I looked up Dragonmans online and they seem to be a combination of a small military museum, a shooting range, a paintball field, and a motocross track. An odd combination, to be sure but also a strangely logical one; I can see how those who are into one of those things would be at least somewhat interested in the other three.
Pulling up the drive towards Dragonmans, I was kind of surprised to see how many cars were parked along the drive. First, I didn’t think that all that many people would sign up for the classes and secondly, I was about 45 minutes early. As I got closer, however, it became apparent that these cars were all part of the “road art” that we’d been warned about in the email. The cars were all in some state or another of ruin, ranging from obviously crashed to riddled with bullet holes, to being planted grille-first in the ground with the rear bumper sticking straight into the air. These cars had mannequins around them dressed in either military garb, motocross outfits, or clown suits. Some of the mannequins were also shot full of bloody holes or otherwise mutilated and had signs in front of them like “This guy wrote Dragonmans a bad check!” or “This guy was caught on Dragonmans property between 6:00 pm and 9:30 am!” I was in awe of the amount of effort that had been put into the road art and obviously twisted mind behind it. By the end of the driveway I was laughing and shaking my head, wishing that I’d brought my camera to take some photos of the outrageous signs.
I got to the gate for the office which had no less than three signs to the tune of “If you can read this, you are in range!” and sharp warnings to continue no further before 9:30 am. Since it was closer to 8:45 am at that point, I just decided to wait in the truck and sip on my Monster Rehab. Before too long though, a pickup truck with the Kenaz logo on it came driving past and down a different trail than the one that the office was on. I finished my Monster and then followed the truck.
High and Dry
I’d left the rain behind me somewhere south of Denver and as the elevation increased towards Colorado Springs, the weather got drier and windier. The driver of the truck, who I recognized as Robert from the internet videos, was setting up target stands and VTAC barricades. I parked, walked over and introduced myself, and then offered to help him with setup. He politely declined, saying that this range was perpetually windy and so he just got used to setting stuff up in the wind. He and I chatted a bit as he set stuff up and then he announced that we would be going up to the office soon to sign in.
The “office” was more of a gun shop than anything and there seemed to be more guns packed onto the walls than I’d ever seen in a shop. Once wall was almost exclusively AR15s and the other was almost exclusively AKs. I didn’t have much time to explore the shop, however, since after signing in and paying the $10 range fee, Robert told us that we would be getting started soon.
At the shop I did have a brief moment to speak with one of my fellow students, Nick. Nick told me that he had never taken a class before but he’d gotten interested in training from watching the Magpul Dynamics videos. Back on the range, he showed me his Smith & Wesson M&P 15 Sport which he’d accessorized a bit with a Vortex scope, and free-float rail, and some other stuff. He said that he’d only shot a couple of thousand rounds through it but that so far it had been reliable.
I’d noticed that Robert had set up only four target stands and so I was expecting a small class. This supposition turned out to be true when our third and final student, Stephanie, showed up. She too was taking her first ever rifle class and had just bought an Inland Manufacturing M1 1945 Carbine. This is a new-manufacture M1 carbine by Inland Manufacturing and Stephanie had never shot hers. In fact, she told us, she had only shot 16 rounds through an M1 Garand and 24 rounds through a .22 rifle and that was the sum total of her life’s rifle shooting experience! I was really glad to see that such a green shooter was stepping up to take a class before she had the chance to ingrain bad habits from trying to figure stuff out on her own. I wish that I’d gotten into training as early on as she did!
At this point the weather was sunny but with a constant, strong wind. The clouds were scattered but “they” were saying that rain was a possibility. As it stood, the incessant wind was really making me think that the day was going to unpleasant in terms of weather, even if it did stay dry.
Robert introduced himself and told us that he’d served in the Army in engineer and artillery units for 18 years before getting out and becoming a police officer in Colorado for three years. He started teaching firearms classes in 2001 and they soon got to be so popular that he had to quit police work to try and satisfy demand for firearms instruction full-time. Robert also described some of the other classes that he offers and the people who teach them, including a currently-deployed PMC and a former EOD tech who now works for the military as a civilian contractor, teaching people to disarm IEDs. I was glad to hear that Robert pushes medical training and that he encourages shooters to get medical training if nothing else.
After Robert introduced himself, he asked us to introduce ourselves, a part of the class that I always enjoy since it always intrigues me to see who else is into training besides me. Nick works for a Nissan dealership and Stephanie is a preschool teacher. For both of them this was their first training class and they were both younger than me. It was encouraging to see younger shooters taking their first steps into improving their skill at arms.
Opening Lecture
The lecture started, predictably, with a safety briefing. Fire sectors were laid out and we were told that this class would focus on the defensive nature of shooting with a carbine and so there would be no shots taken over 25 yards. We were also told that since there would be no pistol use in this class that pistols (if we had them) were to be kept holstered at all times. A prep area was designated for loading magazines. A positive control of our fire control group (i.e.: safety selector and trigger) was emphasized if the gun was loaded and slung. If a gun was set down, it was to be cleared first. Since this was a busy range, we were to stay off of the berms since others were shooting all around us.
Cooper’s Four Fundamental Firearms Safety Rules were covered in pretty standard form. A slightly different way of thinking about Rule 4 is to “positively identify your target, what’s around it, and what’s around you”; I rather liked the simplicity of putting this rule this way.
Range commands were also pretty standard fare, with commands like “Threat!” to shoot. Robert showed us his trauma kit and had a pretty cool laminated card to go with it that instructed people on what to do in the case of someone getting shot. This card included everything from securing firearms before any emergency personnel showed up, a script to read to the emergency dispatcher, and GPS coordinates for a medevac (the coordinates for Dragonmans’ address takes you to the front office, not to the shooting range that we were on). I have asked Robert to email me this card so that I can use it for a template for my own range kit. I really think it’s a great idea!
I’m not going to ever say that I know it all, but I’m at the point where when I attend any given shooting class I can expect to have to sit through a bit of “the basics” before we get to “the cool stuff”. In the class description on Kenaz Tactical’s website they claim that “The course is intended for shooters of all levels, whether a new AR-15 owner or a seasoned shooter, the skills taught create the basis of threat focused shooting and defense using the carbine platform. Don’t let the name fool you, this is a tough course and all level shooters will benefit from the course content.” This is part of what attracted me to the class: it wasn’t claiming to be something that was too cool for me to attend and yet it promised that I wouldn’t get bored either.
I mention this because I’m not going into detail of some of what was covered in the class; if you want to know what the fundamentals of marksmanship are, you can look that up on your own but I’m not going to write it all down in this AAR. There were other things discussed like reloads but there are only so many ways to skin a cat and what Robert is teaching where that is concerned is pretty much what I’ve been taught for as long as I’ve been taking classes. One thing that Robert emphasized that I thought was interesting was that you should endeavor to perform reloads from your least accessible pouch/carrier if you have the cover and time. This will keep your most accessible pouch full in case you need the fastest possible reload.
Robert suggested that we load a random number of rounds into our magazines throughout the day so as to have to deal with surprise emergency reloads. I decided to do this and for the rest of the class I randomized the amount of ammo that I put in any given magazine.
All manipulations were done “in the workspace” so as to keep your head up and to maintain awareness of your surroundings. Task Obsession was discussed as was how that could get you in trouble, even in a situation where it might difficult to *not* get task obsession. As an example of the latter, Robert told us of a time when he was wrestling with a suspect back in his policing days and when he finally got the guy on the ground and got the cuffs on one of his wrists, something told Robert that he should take a look around. That quick glance around kept him from getting brained by the suspect’s buddy who was charging in with a baseball bat raised!
On The Range
When the lecture was complete we set about zeroing our rifles. I had a rough zero with my AK irons but was able to fine-tune it even more at this class. Robert advocates a 25m zero which he says is a product of his Army background. Lots of competent 7.62mm AK shooters actually prefer a 25m zero so I had no problem with adjusting my sights to that range. Nick had a zero on his scope already but Stephanie had never shot her M1 Carbine before and took a bit more time to get dialed in.
When Robert got to shooting positions is when things got interesting for me. The only positions that he teaches in this class are standing, what I call “hasty kneeling” (this is where the ball and the bottoms of the toes of the rear foot stay on the ground as opposed to lying the foot on its side and then sitting on it), and prone. Robert says that he teaches some other positions in his Carbine 2 class but that he wants to keep things simple in Carbine 1, an attitude that I tend to agree with.
Robert believes that “if a position is slow to get out of, you shouldn’t get into it in the first place” when it comes to defensive shooting. Most of the work that we did in Carbine 1 was from kneeling or standing. Prone was taught to get us zeroed (though we were given the option to zero from a bench) but not used much after that.
Even just practicing the prone position dry made me frustrated at the “wear a 2-point sling with your head and one arm through it” concept. I’ve tried this method (a method that seems to be wildly popular, including with people who obviously know what they’re talking about) of using a 2-point sling and always felt like I the sling was wrapping me up like a mummy. I thought that maybe using a bungee sling would make this method more viable but I still hated it. Oh well, I guess I’ll go back to being part of that tiny minority of 2-point sling users who simply hang the sling around the back of their necks and wonder why the rest of the world doesn’t do it the same way!
The standing position that Robert taught us was a “modern” squared-up shooting stance rather than a traditional bladed stance. The reasons for using such a stance are well-known: stability, ease of movement, recoil control, and maximizing armor presentation. What was newer to me, however, was the concept of simply dipping one knee to rotate your body rather than using core muscles to torque your torso around. The knee dip is something that Robert credits Travis Haley with showing to him and it really seems to make snapping to other targets easy without “oversteering” past the target. It also reduces fatigue if you’re practicing target transitions all day long, as you would be at a class like Carbine 1.
Kneeling is basically the standing position but with one knee touching the ground. Where Robert made this position interesting to me was when he demonstrated that good balance could be maintained by extending your foot out in front of you when leaning out from behind a barricade. I asked Robert what he calls this variation on kneeling and he said that he doesn’t have a name for it. I guess that I’ll have to come up with something to call it since I actually like this position quite a bit and will be using it in the future!
We shot some IPSC targets at various ranges, though never past 25m and often well within half that. These are more probable defensive ranges for a Citizen to shoot at and so I thought they were appropriate for the spirit of the class. At these ranges height-over-bore was discussed as well as what we should do to compensate for that. With my 25m zero on my AK, I had to hold almost as high as I would with my AR15 and a 100m zero. This was actually fine with me since the similar holdovers meant that I didn’t really have to learn anything new about where to hold in order to get my hits where I wanted them because I was using a different caliber and style of rifle. We also did some head shots on the IPSC targets to show where you’d have to hold on someone’s head to hit the cranio-ocular cavity (this is represented by the “credit card” on the IPSC target). The concept that I’ve always been taught is to aim for the hairline to get a hit on the nose within about 10m and this held pretty true with my AK as well.
At first we just fired one shot per “Threat!” command but this was soon increased to a controlled pair. Once it was obvious that we could control recoil well enough to make more than one shot in a row, Robert told us that when we were given the “Threat!” command that we should fire 2-5 shots at our own discretion for the rest of the class unless otherwise noted. I am a fan of this methodology to prevent people from falling into a double-tap rut and I was a little nervous that I might have fallen into such a rut due to all of the competitive shooting that I’d been doing for the last couple of years. As it turned out, I was watching my sights and calling my shots so if I had doubts about whether I’d made a good hit or not, I just took another shot or two (just like I do in competitions, actually).
After it seemed like we had a good handle on holdovers, we went into target transitions. We weren’t just burning down multiple targets as fast as we could but rather we would shoot the target in front of us, scan around, and then shoot a target to the right or left of ours using the knee dipping technique.
We shot a couple of times from kneeling and Robert gave us a procedure to follow for standing up afterwards: when you’ve shot all the rounds that you mean to, call “Standing!” in case a teammate is standing behind you, ready to shoot. If you get clearance to stand then go ahead but if you don’t then scan behind and beside you before standing up. When you stand, do another scan since now you elevation, and thus your perspective, have changed.
Robert then drew a circle and a triangle on our targets and started calling out either “Threat!” for shots on the upper thoracic cavity or one of the shapes for a more precision hit. He would sometimes call out a confusing command to see how we’d react. The teaching point here was that we should be thinking clearly and making sound decisions, not just looking for the next target to turn our itchy trigger fingers loose on.
Shoot or Scoot?
Robert is not a fan of shooting on the move and, in his experience, it is a lot faster to simply get to where you’re going (which should be a piece of cover) and then shoot from behind that. Robert showed us techniques for walking or running with a rifle in our hands but he didn’t advocate shooting while in locomotion. He sees the point of advancing on a line while firing in a military context but that’s probably not appropriate or even realistic for an armed Citizen in a self-defense scenario or a police officer in CONUS. We practiced moving forwards on a line a few times and then we took a break while barricades were brought out.
The barricades used were VTAC style of barricade though in this class we were not using the ports, just leaning out around the sides. There was a discussion about what can and what cannot be relied upon to stop incoming fire. There was also a discussion on the dangers of crowding cover. The example of the police officer who was killed on camera in Dallas this past summer was brought up: the officer could maybe have seen the shooter coming and gotten a shot or two off if he’d kept a bit of distance from his cover. Crowding that cover kept him from seeing the shooter moving around the other side of the pillar and he wound up getting shot in the back.
After we got some practice on shooting around the barricades, Robert staggered the barricades at different ranges and then backed his pickup around to the 25 yard line. He also made a makeshift short barricade out of a pallet and some scrap wood that was lying around and placed this fairly close to the targets. He then wrote “2”, “6”, “A”, and “7” on the targets in large letters, one character on each.
We did a drill dry (i.e.: with no actual shooting) where we were told to advance on a target using our running technique but to keep a barricade between ourself and the target in question. When we got to our cover (without crowding it; all of us did a really good job of not making this mistake throughout the class) we would “pie out” (not a term that I recall Robert using but a common term for this technique) from the barricade, leading with our muzzle, towards the target.
Robert informed us that we’d been ahead of schedule all day long and so we had more time to devote to something a little more involved than what we’d been doing up to this point. We took a brief break to load mags and hydrate and then moved onto the next exercise.
Final Exercise
The next drill was very simple but it was also a lot of fun and it apparently induced enough stress that we started making some errors. This drill was run one shooter at a time with another student who was not carrying his rifle calling out commands. Starting at Robert’s truck, if the student couldn’t see a target that was being called out, then it was on him or her to move to the next barricade to try and make the shot. This was repeated until the student had reached the pallet barricade and then a cease-fire was called.
The first run through the drill was done at a pretty easy pace, with one target getting called at a time and no real effort being put into messing with people’s heads. Still, the pressure from the commands, the knowledge that this was the “final exercise”, and knowing that you were being watched closely by all of your fellow students did a lot to up the stress level.
On the next run through this exercise Robert beckoned me over away from Nick and told Nick to turn off his electronic earmuffs so that we could talk without Nick overhearing us (Nick was the shooter and I was giving the range commands on this run). Robert told me to add more pressure, to call out multiple targets, and to call out targets that didn’t exist or other confusing commands. Nick did well but at one point I called out “Five!” (a target that didn’t exist) and Nick blasted target #6 instead. I called out some other nonsense targets too but Nick didn’t fall for it like that more than once.
Stephanie was visibly tiring by this point, her muscles not being used to holding up a rifle all day long. In addition to slowing down, she also fumbled a reload or two, and her marksmanship started suffering. Still, she never quit and she never uttered a word of complaint the entire class so I think that the worst is behind her where her training journey is concerned.
Some other errors that we observed were sight offset errors that led to the wooden barricades getting shot and something that Robert called “Sequential Thought”. An example of the latter would be if the target sequence of “Alpha, Seven!” was called out and the shooter leaned out of cover to see Alpha and then subsequently shot Seven, even though Seven could be seen first, without exposing one’s self to Alpha. Meanwhile, the shooter is fully exposing himself to Seven while shooting Alpha.
I point out the errors that I observed not to belittle my fellow students, but rather to make note of all lessons learned, even if I wasn’t the shooter who had to learn the lesson the hard way. It’s always better to learn from someone else’s mistakes!
On that note, I should confess to my blunders too: I felt like I did alright on my first two runs, but I started losing my balance a little bit when leaning out from behind some barricades. This wasn’t such a big deal in and of itself, but at one point I didn’t quite settle into a kneeling position right and when I slid/stumbled a bit I NDed my AK into the berm, missing the target by about two feet (we could see the bullet splash into the sand, well to the side of the target). I really felt stupid to have done that and if that had been a blunder in a real defensive shoot, that could have been a round that killed a bystander.
I made some less egregious errors too, such as leaning out from behind cover and attempting to shoot with my safety on, failing to check my ammo status and getting a ‘click’ instead of a ‘bang’, and fumbling for magazines in my pockets.
Robert said that we’d gotten through previous lessons so quickly that we had time for a third run through the drill, if we so chose. While Nick and Stephanie were stuffing mags, I ran to my truck and got my 5.56mm ammo and AR15 so that I could give the course of fire a try with the other gun.
I think that most realistic people will concede that the 5.56mm AR15 is somewhat easier to shoot than the 7.62mm AK and that low-powered optics are easier to shoot with than iron sights. I certainly knew this going into the drill but I was actually almost stunned at just how much easier it was to run that AR than it was to run the AK that I’d been using all day! The small but bright red dot in the Steiner scope was ridiculously easy to snap onto a target and the lack of recoil was remarkable; the muzzle device that I have on that AR is a Yankee Hill Machine & Tool “Phantom” flash suppressor but after shooting 7.62x39mm all day, it felt like I was shooting with a recoil compensator! I think I gave every target a five-round burst, pretty much just as fast as I could fan that trigger and kept every shot in the IPSC targets’ A-zones! I usually don’t feel like I run a carbine exceptionally well, but I really felt like I cleaned house on that drill. Maybe it was just my perception, but to me the difference between the two guns was profound.
I don’t want to come across like I’m bashing the AK; I have a lot less experience with it than with the AR and that optic really gave me an advantage as well. When I’ve put more time in behind the AK and I have a suitable optic mounted on it, then I will be able to give it a more fair appraisal.
The Hot Wash
After we had done the final exercise three times each, Robert told us to get packed up and then we’d do our final self-evaluation. I really liked this approach to the conclusion of the class since it made us put into words what we needed to work on and what we might not need to practice so much. This made it easy to focus on what we should plan to do at the range in the future. Robert then asked us to evaluate him as a teacher and the class as a whole. Robert says that there aren’t a whole lot of folks who can teach classes full-time and make a living at it and he credits his business success to actually listening to what his students have to say, good, bad, and ugly. I felt like I should try to think of some constructive criticism for him and so I mentioned that Stephanie had suffered some malfunctions with her new M1 Carbine and that there hadn’t been a block of instruction that day on how to clear them. I mentioned that perhaps that would be something to include in future Carbine 1 classes.
After the evaluations were done Robert handed out certificates to all three of us and said that he had no compunctions about doing so; we had all demonstrated that we’d learned the lessons that were taught and that we had done a great job at the class. I settled in for the long drive home, pleased with the class and the experience overall.
What Went Right
- Nobody got hurt at the class. While this is the norm in my experience, there is always the potential for someone to get hurt when firearms are being used and so I’m always thankful when that’s not the case.
- The class was appropriate for both beginners and more advanced shooters, as Kenaz Tactical advertised. It was great to see two shooters who were taking their first steps in training too.
- I learned a new variation on the kneeling position that I think will be of use to me in the future. The “knee dip” thing from standing is something that I’m interested in playing with too.
- I got down to Colorado Springs with plenty of time to spare and without getting lost. Google’s directions were spot-on, including distances.
- My AK needed minimal zeroing and now the zero is even more fine-tuned than when I showed up.
- My two rifles both ran 100%, with nothing goofy going on like screws loosening or other stuff falling off.
What Could Have Gone Better
- The weather was ugly at first, although it improved later on. Kind of a pointless thing to complain about this, since there’s nothing that anyone could have done about it though.
- I took some notes but not as many as I should have. I just got a bit lazy about it.
- I’m still kicking myself for that ND into the berm. I was a good learning point but it bothers me to know that I did it at all.
- I have been lazier where physical fitness is concerned in the last few months than I’ve been for about eight years. I could tell that I was getting into and out of shooting positions slower and with more effort than was the case a few months earlier and the morning after the class I felt more sore than I’d expected. I should really decide to do something to upkeep my PT and then do it.
- There was at least once where I performed a technique that I had learned at a previous class instead of what I’d learned at this one. The example that comes to mind was running with the muzzle up instead of the belly/shoulder brace technique that Robert taught us. I didn’t get told that I was wrong for doing it “my way” but I hate to be the guy who pays to get shown how to do something and then disregards the advice, even if it was unintentional.
Stuff I Had That I Was Glad For
- Warm clothes, including my fleece jacket and hat. My face still got wind-burnt but I was more comfortable than I’d have been without it.
- Mechanix gloves. In addition to contributing to warmth, they kept my hands from getting cut up on the gravel or the AK.
- Plenty of ammo. The course’s gear list only called for 250 rounds to be expended (and I think that was a pretty accurate count) but on the final exercise it was “shooter’s choice” for how many rounds got expended. I was glad that I didn’t need to worry about having enough and I could just shoot as much as I thought was appropriate.
Water and Gatorade powder. Even when it’s not hot out, you still gotta hydrate.
Stuff I Had That I Wish I Didn’t
- That Condor sling is somewhat sucky and I’d like to replace it with something a little better quality. It actually wasn’t horrible, but I rather prefer the 2-point offerings from BFG and Viking Tactics. I also think I’d rather attach the sling to the rear of the stock instead of where the stock and receiver connect. This might require me to replace the MOE stock with something else.
Stuff I Didn’t Have That I Wish I Did
-Knee and elbow pads. The knee pads would have been especially good, as we were kneeling a lot in this class. Shooting ranges tend to be rocky and littered with spent brass and Dragonmans was no exception.
- A scope mount. I have a scope that I want to throw on my AK but the mount that I recently ordered just didn’t work out and so I ran the class with iron sights only. On one hand, I’m kind of glad that I got the humbling experience with AK irons but on the other hand I would like to start accruing experience with a scope on the AK.
Stuff I Didn’t Have That I Was Glad For
- Load-bearing gear. I can now say that I’ve done a carbine class with nothing more for holding mags than my pants pockets. It’s just nice to know that you don’t actually need tactical nylon gear to play. I didn’t “learn” that at this class, but it helps to reinforce the lesson.
Conclusion
Kenaz Tactical’s “Carbine 1” was worth my time and money. The new twist on the kneeling position was pretty cool to learn about and the process of “scraping the rust off” made me realize just how little I’d been shooting in 2016-present.
It’s good to know that there is a Colorado-based company that is doing good stuff and that you can go there and expect to learn something, regardless of your skill level. A lot of the stuff that was practiced was “basic” but, if we’re being honest about it, it’s the mastery of the basics that makes for a proficient shooter, not necessarily the newest technique on the block. If you’re in or Near Colorado Springs or are willing to take a trip there, I’d say it’s worth your time to check out Kenaz Tactical.
I first heard of Kenaz Tactical on the Practically Tactical podcast about a year ago. I’ve subscribed to Practically Tactical’s Youtube channel and I found Kenaz’s chief firearms instructor, Robert Butler, being interviewed when searching through some of the channel’s older posted videos. I was interested to learn that there was a Colorado-based school that I didn’t know about and so I started researching them. In doing so, I heard good reviews about Kenaz Tactical and so I decided that I would check out one of their classes if the opportunity presented itself.
The second Saturday in March was one of the first of 2017 where I didn’t have work or anything else scheduled so I signed up for the class that Kenaz Tactical had for that day, “Carbine 1”. I’ve been wanting to take more carbine training for some time now since I feel like I ought to be running carbines at a higher level than I currently do. I’ve also wanted to devote some time to running my AKM since I have a lot less experience with that firearm than I do with the AR15. I had also done a trade last year for a whole bunch of 7.62x39mm ammo and so it made sense to use some of that up.
Gear
In my rifle case was the rifle that I wanted to use for the class: my Century Arms-imported WASR 10/63. While these rifles get a lot of hate on the interwebs, I can’t really complain too much about mine; the first few shots I ever fired through it caused malfunctions but then it occurred to me that I hadn’t properly lubricated the rifle and so I drizzled some motor oil on the bolt and carrier from a pickup truck’s dipstick and went back to shooting. I’ve not had a mechanical malfunction since.
I bought this rifle before the 2008 election when I was sure that either Obama or Hillary was going to become president and I was pretty convinced that “assault rifles”, “high-capacity banana clips”, and “cop-killer bullets” were going to become regulated as (or more) heavily than they’d been under Daddy Bush and Slick Willy. I’d saved up $1000 and I wanted a military-pattern semi-auto rifle, twenty full-capacity magazines, and a thousand rounds of ammo. The numbers for the ammo and mags were somewhat arbitrary, but the 1994-2004 period where some of the most common magazines on the face of the planet were fetching $50-100 (albeit, when dollars were worth quite a bit more than they are now) was fresh in my mind and I didn’t want to be the chump who had to scour the gun shows for overpriced, second-rate magazines in order to train and shoot. Essentially, I was buying a lifetime supply of magazines. For what I wanted to get and the amount that I’d budgeted, the WASR was really the only game in town at that place and time.
The rifle has been modified to some degree over the years. I pretty quickly learned to hate how quickly the OEM wooden handguards would heat up to the point where they’d be almost impossible to hold without sustaining burns to your hand and so I bought a friend’s Tapco Galil-style AK handguard from him. I got a Tapco SAW-style pistol grip too and eventually partially stippled it. The Tapco furniture was surprisingly good but I always pined for a longer handguard on the AK. It wasn’t until some years later that I got a Magpul Zhukov handguard, which is what is on that rifle now. I certainly got one of the first-ever Zhukov handguards to hit the market, as I posted photos of my rifle with the handguard on ar15.com in the AK Furniture thread and promptly had people post surprise that I had gotten my hands on one. “How’d you already get one?”, one user asked:
http://www.ar15.com/forums/t_4_96/15...re.html&page=3
Back when I was too broke to ever hope to afford a quality optic (and too well-informed to buy an optic that wasn’t of good quality), I bought an XS Sights 24/7 White Stripe front sight. This is a tritium front sight that has a white bar running down the middle of the otherwise black post. The white contrasts with dark backgrounds, the black with light ones and the tritium glows in the dark. As far as iron sights go for a fighting rifle, this seems to be a good way to go. About the time that I got the Zhukov handguard, I also widened the rear sight notch with a needle file and checked my work with a set of Brown & Sharpe calipers to keep the notch centered in the body of the sight. When the rear notch was sufficiently opened, I then rounded off the outside corners of the sight with a bastard file and carefully deburred the whole thing with sandpaper. A couple coats of matte black spray paint served to “refinish” the rear sight and I was left with an ersatz Rifle Dynamics-style sight picture. The first time that I threw this sight picture in front of my eye, I felt a little disappointed; “Big deal”, I thought, “a slightly different AK sight picture”. After shooting and dry-firing with the newer sights for a while, I had the opportunity to look through some OEM AK sights though, and when I did, my reaction was that they were simply awful! At that moment I realized just what a subtle but excellent rear sight modification that Rifle Dynamics had come up with and I was glad that I’d copied it.
Commercial 7.62x39mm ammo tends to have a pretty egregious muzzle flash and so I put on a ‘A1 birdcage’-style flash suppressor years ago. It cost considerably less than $20 and does a remarkable job of taming that flash, especially for the price. A section of M1913 “Pic rail” on the M-LOK slot on the Zhukov allows me to add a light to the handguard, though I didn’t choose to mount my light at this class. I also put an M-LOK Paraclip Sling Mount on the Zhukov.
I put an ACE folding stock on this rifle a few years back and since installing the receiver block required cutting off the stock tang I am now stuck with this setup. That said, since I have no problems with the stock, I figure it’s not a bad thing to get “stuck” with. The version that I got takes an AR15 buffer tube and the actual stock that I put on it is a Magpul MOE stock that I had lying around. The ACE folder has an oddly-placed and designed sling swivel on the right side of the folding mechanism. The placement is understandable since the stock is designed to fold to the left but the swivel itself would look more at home on a hunting rifle; it is decidedly “low speed” in a world of QD cups and HK snap hooks. I used a Condor Stryke bungee sling for this class and its snap hooks worked well enough on the sling swivel but the arrangement seemed somewhat ramshackle compared to the grace with which the Zhukov-mounted Magpul Paraclip mated with the front end of the sling.
The last accessory that I put on was an M-LOK MVG vertical foregrip. I had high hopes for the Zhukov handguard to shield the support hand from heat but I was disappointed to learn that when I shot high volumes through my AK that the Zhukov would still get hotter than hell’s hinges, forcing me to use a magwell grip or get burned. I thought that maybe the all-plastic construction of the MVG would allow for a haven from the heat for me to creep my hand down onto when the gun started getting really hot. Plus, VFGs look cool which is what’s *really* important, right?
I almost didn’t bring a backup rifle, but I knew that I’d regret it if I didn’t (Murphy’s Law and all that) so I brought my 5.56mm AR15 and a .50-cal can of Great Lakes Ammo .223 FMJ (I don’t own a second 7.62x39mm gun). I re-barreled this rifle a few months back after getting a killer deal on a PWS direct-impingement barrel that had been listed on their “Cannon” (i.e.: cosmetically-blemished discount items) page. My previous barrel had been shot to the point that it wouldn’t shoot better than about 5-6 MOA, a result that I found unacceptable. I had also recently purchased a Steiner P4Xi 1-4x scope and I was really wanting to do some shooting with this gun/optic combo in a class environment.
I was in no mood to get all jocked up in a bunch of tactical gear so I decided to just try performing reloads out of my pants pockets. I took this concept of laziness a step further and decided to just wear my work-issue polyester pants with no extra cargo pockets or anything. Since it’s not my responsibility to launder or repair these pants, I figured that I could care even less about getting them dirty or ripped.
I brought some Monster Rehab energy drinks to have in lieu of my usual morning coffee and some unflavored whey protein powder mixed with Gatorade powder to drink at the class. I also wore my Mechanix M-Pact gloves; I feel like I get my hands cut enough at work and I don’t need to cut them more on my days off.
“If it ain’t rainin’...”
I decided to wake up really early on Saturday, 5:30 am (which is to say, about an hour later than I normally do), eat, and then lug my range bag and rifle case down to my truck. The night before I had staged my ammo cans in the truck so that I wouldn’t need to get them in the morning. I bring my range bag pretty much any time I go shooting; since I put the proverbial kitchen sink in that bag, bringing it makes forgetting anything pretty difficult.
I am apparently the only guy left in Western society that doesn’t own a smart phone and so I have to go to Google maps and research how to get somewhere instead of being guided there by GPS. Since the location for Kenaz Tactical’s class looked somewhat remote, I decided to leave myself plenty of time time to get there and was on the road by about 6:00 am.
Stepping out of the house, I was greeted by the first rainfall of the year for this region. The rain wasn’t heavy but it was persistent. I was immediately struck by how just a couple of years ago, I would have found the idea of taking a class like Carbine 1 in the rain as being invigorating: I would be testing myself against the elements, I would be “training like I fight”, and I would be getting some mud on my gear, unlike those cold, timid souls on the internet who know neither victory nor defeat and who post pictures of sparkling clean tactical gear on forums, much to the derision of “real shooters” like me .
For the last few months I’ve really been reevaluating who I am and how I spend my time, money, and effort. I haven’t given a shit about impressing other people since I started kindergarten and that is the only reason I’ve concluded that all that I’ve done for almost a decade in the realms of shooting, fitness, martial arts, outdoorsmanship, and other “tactical life” stuff wasn’t all just some sort of affectation… unless it was *myself* that I was trying to convince that I was more of a badass than I actually was. Now that I’m starting to accept that I’m nothing more impressive than a 33 year-old machinist, the way I’m starting to feel about things like, say, crappy weather when I’m supposed to spend the whole day outside is probably the same way that everyone else does: it’s just inconvenient and uncomfortable.
Still, I wasn’t about to throw my tuition money away or to change my plans for the day on account of a little rain, so I threw my stuff in the truck and started the drive to Colorado Springs.
The drive was long but scenic and even the dreaded Big City was kind of interesting to drive through from north to south. I don’t go to Denver often at all and when I do it’s almost never a straight drive through the city from one end to the other so seeing as much as I did was a new experience. The highlight of driving in Colorado, however, is always going to be the mountains and they provided a great view for the 2-hour drive.
In the confirmation email that I got from Kenaz Tactical, there was a little blurb about the location where the class would be held, a place called “Dragonmans” outside of Colorado Springs. The note said “We will meet at our gated entrance, Gate 3 on the map below. Note: there is some ‘interesting’ road art on the approach. That’s Dragonmans’-no, we’re not crazy!” This little note had be intrigued as to what I’d see.
I looked up Dragonmans online and they seem to be a combination of a small military museum, a shooting range, a paintball field, and a motocross track. An odd combination, to be sure but also a strangely logical one; I can see how those who are into one of those things would be at least somewhat interested in the other three.
Pulling up the drive towards Dragonmans, I was kind of surprised to see how many cars were parked along the drive. First, I didn’t think that all that many people would sign up for the classes and secondly, I was about 45 minutes early. As I got closer, however, it became apparent that these cars were all part of the “road art” that we’d been warned about in the email. The cars were all in some state or another of ruin, ranging from obviously crashed to riddled with bullet holes, to being planted grille-first in the ground with the rear bumper sticking straight into the air. These cars had mannequins around them dressed in either military garb, motocross outfits, or clown suits. Some of the mannequins were also shot full of bloody holes or otherwise mutilated and had signs in front of them like “This guy wrote Dragonmans a bad check!” or “This guy was caught on Dragonmans property between 6:00 pm and 9:30 am!” I was in awe of the amount of effort that had been put into the road art and obviously twisted mind behind it. By the end of the driveway I was laughing and shaking my head, wishing that I’d brought my camera to take some photos of the outrageous signs.
I got to the gate for the office which had no less than three signs to the tune of “If you can read this, you are in range!” and sharp warnings to continue no further before 9:30 am. Since it was closer to 8:45 am at that point, I just decided to wait in the truck and sip on my Monster Rehab. Before too long though, a pickup truck with the Kenaz logo on it came driving past and down a different trail than the one that the office was on. I finished my Monster and then followed the truck.
High and Dry
I’d left the rain behind me somewhere south of Denver and as the elevation increased towards Colorado Springs, the weather got drier and windier. The driver of the truck, who I recognized as Robert from the internet videos, was setting up target stands and VTAC barricades. I parked, walked over and introduced myself, and then offered to help him with setup. He politely declined, saying that this range was perpetually windy and so he just got used to setting stuff up in the wind. He and I chatted a bit as he set stuff up and then he announced that we would be going up to the office soon to sign in.
The “office” was more of a gun shop than anything and there seemed to be more guns packed onto the walls than I’d ever seen in a shop. Once wall was almost exclusively AR15s and the other was almost exclusively AKs. I didn’t have much time to explore the shop, however, since after signing in and paying the $10 range fee, Robert told us that we would be getting started soon.
At the shop I did have a brief moment to speak with one of my fellow students, Nick. Nick told me that he had never taken a class before but he’d gotten interested in training from watching the Magpul Dynamics videos. Back on the range, he showed me his Smith & Wesson M&P 15 Sport which he’d accessorized a bit with a Vortex scope, and free-float rail, and some other stuff. He said that he’d only shot a couple of thousand rounds through it but that so far it had been reliable.
I’d noticed that Robert had set up only four target stands and so I was expecting a small class. This supposition turned out to be true when our third and final student, Stephanie, showed up. She too was taking her first ever rifle class and had just bought an Inland Manufacturing M1 1945 Carbine. This is a new-manufacture M1 carbine by Inland Manufacturing and Stephanie had never shot hers. In fact, she told us, she had only shot 16 rounds through an M1 Garand and 24 rounds through a .22 rifle and that was the sum total of her life’s rifle shooting experience! I was really glad to see that such a green shooter was stepping up to take a class before she had the chance to ingrain bad habits from trying to figure stuff out on her own. I wish that I’d gotten into training as early on as she did!
At this point the weather was sunny but with a constant, strong wind. The clouds were scattered but “they” were saying that rain was a possibility. As it stood, the incessant wind was really making me think that the day was going to unpleasant in terms of weather, even if it did stay dry.
Robert introduced himself and told us that he’d served in the Army in engineer and artillery units for 18 years before getting out and becoming a police officer in Colorado for three years. He started teaching firearms classes in 2001 and they soon got to be so popular that he had to quit police work to try and satisfy demand for firearms instruction full-time. Robert also described some of the other classes that he offers and the people who teach them, including a currently-deployed PMC and a former EOD tech who now works for the military as a civilian contractor, teaching people to disarm IEDs. I was glad to hear that Robert pushes medical training and that he encourages shooters to get medical training if nothing else.
After Robert introduced himself, he asked us to introduce ourselves, a part of the class that I always enjoy since it always intrigues me to see who else is into training besides me. Nick works for a Nissan dealership and Stephanie is a preschool teacher. For both of them this was their first training class and they were both younger than me. It was encouraging to see younger shooters taking their first steps into improving their skill at arms.
Opening Lecture
The lecture started, predictably, with a safety briefing. Fire sectors were laid out and we were told that this class would focus on the defensive nature of shooting with a carbine and so there would be no shots taken over 25 yards. We were also told that since there would be no pistol use in this class that pistols (if we had them) were to be kept holstered at all times. A prep area was designated for loading magazines. A positive control of our fire control group (i.e.: safety selector and trigger) was emphasized if the gun was loaded and slung. If a gun was set down, it was to be cleared first. Since this was a busy range, we were to stay off of the berms since others were shooting all around us.
Cooper’s Four Fundamental Firearms Safety Rules were covered in pretty standard form. A slightly different way of thinking about Rule 4 is to “positively identify your target, what’s around it, and what’s around you”; I rather liked the simplicity of putting this rule this way.
Range commands were also pretty standard fare, with commands like “Threat!” to shoot. Robert showed us his trauma kit and had a pretty cool laminated card to go with it that instructed people on what to do in the case of someone getting shot. This card included everything from securing firearms before any emergency personnel showed up, a script to read to the emergency dispatcher, and GPS coordinates for a medevac (the coordinates for Dragonmans’ address takes you to the front office, not to the shooting range that we were on). I have asked Robert to email me this card so that I can use it for a template for my own range kit. I really think it’s a great idea!
I’m not going to ever say that I know it all, but I’m at the point where when I attend any given shooting class I can expect to have to sit through a bit of “the basics” before we get to “the cool stuff”. In the class description on Kenaz Tactical’s website they claim that “The course is intended for shooters of all levels, whether a new AR-15 owner or a seasoned shooter, the skills taught create the basis of threat focused shooting and defense using the carbine platform. Don’t let the name fool you, this is a tough course and all level shooters will benefit from the course content.” This is part of what attracted me to the class: it wasn’t claiming to be something that was too cool for me to attend and yet it promised that I wouldn’t get bored either.
I mention this because I’m not going into detail of some of what was covered in the class; if you want to know what the fundamentals of marksmanship are, you can look that up on your own but I’m not going to write it all down in this AAR. There were other things discussed like reloads but there are only so many ways to skin a cat and what Robert is teaching where that is concerned is pretty much what I’ve been taught for as long as I’ve been taking classes. One thing that Robert emphasized that I thought was interesting was that you should endeavor to perform reloads from your least accessible pouch/carrier if you have the cover and time. This will keep your most accessible pouch full in case you need the fastest possible reload.
Robert suggested that we load a random number of rounds into our magazines throughout the day so as to have to deal with surprise emergency reloads. I decided to do this and for the rest of the class I randomized the amount of ammo that I put in any given magazine.
All manipulations were done “in the workspace” so as to keep your head up and to maintain awareness of your surroundings. Task Obsession was discussed as was how that could get you in trouble, even in a situation where it might difficult to *not* get task obsession. As an example of the latter, Robert told us of a time when he was wrestling with a suspect back in his policing days and when he finally got the guy on the ground and got the cuffs on one of his wrists, something told Robert that he should take a look around. That quick glance around kept him from getting brained by the suspect’s buddy who was charging in with a baseball bat raised!
On The Range
When the lecture was complete we set about zeroing our rifles. I had a rough zero with my AK irons but was able to fine-tune it even more at this class. Robert advocates a 25m zero which he says is a product of his Army background. Lots of competent 7.62mm AK shooters actually prefer a 25m zero so I had no problem with adjusting my sights to that range. Nick had a zero on his scope already but Stephanie had never shot her M1 Carbine before and took a bit more time to get dialed in.
When Robert got to shooting positions is when things got interesting for me. The only positions that he teaches in this class are standing, what I call “hasty kneeling” (this is where the ball and the bottoms of the toes of the rear foot stay on the ground as opposed to lying the foot on its side and then sitting on it), and prone. Robert says that he teaches some other positions in his Carbine 2 class but that he wants to keep things simple in Carbine 1, an attitude that I tend to agree with.
Robert believes that “if a position is slow to get out of, you shouldn’t get into it in the first place” when it comes to defensive shooting. Most of the work that we did in Carbine 1 was from kneeling or standing. Prone was taught to get us zeroed (though we were given the option to zero from a bench) but not used much after that.
Even just practicing the prone position dry made me frustrated at the “wear a 2-point sling with your head and one arm through it” concept. I’ve tried this method (a method that seems to be wildly popular, including with people who obviously know what they’re talking about) of using a 2-point sling and always felt like I the sling was wrapping me up like a mummy. I thought that maybe using a bungee sling would make this method more viable but I still hated it. Oh well, I guess I’ll go back to being part of that tiny minority of 2-point sling users who simply hang the sling around the back of their necks and wonder why the rest of the world doesn’t do it the same way!
The standing position that Robert taught us was a “modern” squared-up shooting stance rather than a traditional bladed stance. The reasons for using such a stance are well-known: stability, ease of movement, recoil control, and maximizing armor presentation. What was newer to me, however, was the concept of simply dipping one knee to rotate your body rather than using core muscles to torque your torso around. The knee dip is something that Robert credits Travis Haley with showing to him and it really seems to make snapping to other targets easy without “oversteering” past the target. It also reduces fatigue if you’re practicing target transitions all day long, as you would be at a class like Carbine 1.
Kneeling is basically the standing position but with one knee touching the ground. Where Robert made this position interesting to me was when he demonstrated that good balance could be maintained by extending your foot out in front of you when leaning out from behind a barricade. I asked Robert what he calls this variation on kneeling and he said that he doesn’t have a name for it. I guess that I’ll have to come up with something to call it since I actually like this position quite a bit and will be using it in the future!
We shot some IPSC targets at various ranges, though never past 25m and often well within half that. These are more probable defensive ranges for a Citizen to shoot at and so I thought they were appropriate for the spirit of the class. At these ranges height-over-bore was discussed as well as what we should do to compensate for that. With my 25m zero on my AK, I had to hold almost as high as I would with my AR15 and a 100m zero. This was actually fine with me since the similar holdovers meant that I didn’t really have to learn anything new about where to hold in order to get my hits where I wanted them because I was using a different caliber and style of rifle. We also did some head shots on the IPSC targets to show where you’d have to hold on someone’s head to hit the cranio-ocular cavity (this is represented by the “credit card” on the IPSC target). The concept that I’ve always been taught is to aim for the hairline to get a hit on the nose within about 10m and this held pretty true with my AK as well.
At first we just fired one shot per “Threat!” command but this was soon increased to a controlled pair. Once it was obvious that we could control recoil well enough to make more than one shot in a row, Robert told us that when we were given the “Threat!” command that we should fire 2-5 shots at our own discretion for the rest of the class unless otherwise noted. I am a fan of this methodology to prevent people from falling into a double-tap rut and I was a little nervous that I might have fallen into such a rut due to all of the competitive shooting that I’d been doing for the last couple of years. As it turned out, I was watching my sights and calling my shots so if I had doubts about whether I’d made a good hit or not, I just took another shot or two (just like I do in competitions, actually).
After it seemed like we had a good handle on holdovers, we went into target transitions. We weren’t just burning down multiple targets as fast as we could but rather we would shoot the target in front of us, scan around, and then shoot a target to the right or left of ours using the knee dipping technique.
We shot a couple of times from kneeling and Robert gave us a procedure to follow for standing up afterwards: when you’ve shot all the rounds that you mean to, call “Standing!” in case a teammate is standing behind you, ready to shoot. If you get clearance to stand then go ahead but if you don’t then scan behind and beside you before standing up. When you stand, do another scan since now you elevation, and thus your perspective, have changed.
Robert then drew a circle and a triangle on our targets and started calling out either “Threat!” for shots on the upper thoracic cavity or one of the shapes for a more precision hit. He would sometimes call out a confusing command to see how we’d react. The teaching point here was that we should be thinking clearly and making sound decisions, not just looking for the next target to turn our itchy trigger fingers loose on.
Shoot or Scoot?
Robert is not a fan of shooting on the move and, in his experience, it is a lot faster to simply get to where you’re going (which should be a piece of cover) and then shoot from behind that. Robert showed us techniques for walking or running with a rifle in our hands but he didn’t advocate shooting while in locomotion. He sees the point of advancing on a line while firing in a military context but that’s probably not appropriate or even realistic for an armed Citizen in a self-defense scenario or a police officer in CONUS. We practiced moving forwards on a line a few times and then we took a break while barricades were brought out.
The barricades used were VTAC style of barricade though in this class we were not using the ports, just leaning out around the sides. There was a discussion about what can and what cannot be relied upon to stop incoming fire. There was also a discussion on the dangers of crowding cover. The example of the police officer who was killed on camera in Dallas this past summer was brought up: the officer could maybe have seen the shooter coming and gotten a shot or two off if he’d kept a bit of distance from his cover. Crowding that cover kept him from seeing the shooter moving around the other side of the pillar and he wound up getting shot in the back.
After we got some practice on shooting around the barricades, Robert staggered the barricades at different ranges and then backed his pickup around to the 25 yard line. He also made a makeshift short barricade out of a pallet and some scrap wood that was lying around and placed this fairly close to the targets. He then wrote “2”, “6”, “A”, and “7” on the targets in large letters, one character on each.
We did a drill dry (i.e.: with no actual shooting) where we were told to advance on a target using our running technique but to keep a barricade between ourself and the target in question. When we got to our cover (without crowding it; all of us did a really good job of not making this mistake throughout the class) we would “pie out” (not a term that I recall Robert using but a common term for this technique) from the barricade, leading with our muzzle, towards the target.
Robert informed us that we’d been ahead of schedule all day long and so we had more time to devote to something a little more involved than what we’d been doing up to this point. We took a brief break to load mags and hydrate and then moved onto the next exercise.
Final Exercise
The next drill was very simple but it was also a lot of fun and it apparently induced enough stress that we started making some errors. This drill was run one shooter at a time with another student who was not carrying his rifle calling out commands. Starting at Robert’s truck, if the student couldn’t see a target that was being called out, then it was on him or her to move to the next barricade to try and make the shot. This was repeated until the student had reached the pallet barricade and then a cease-fire was called.
The first run through the drill was done at a pretty easy pace, with one target getting called at a time and no real effort being put into messing with people’s heads. Still, the pressure from the commands, the knowledge that this was the “final exercise”, and knowing that you were being watched closely by all of your fellow students did a lot to up the stress level.
On the next run through this exercise Robert beckoned me over away from Nick and told Nick to turn off his electronic earmuffs so that we could talk without Nick overhearing us (Nick was the shooter and I was giving the range commands on this run). Robert told me to add more pressure, to call out multiple targets, and to call out targets that didn’t exist or other confusing commands. Nick did well but at one point I called out “Five!” (a target that didn’t exist) and Nick blasted target #6 instead. I called out some other nonsense targets too but Nick didn’t fall for it like that more than once.
Stephanie was visibly tiring by this point, her muscles not being used to holding up a rifle all day long. In addition to slowing down, she also fumbled a reload or two, and her marksmanship started suffering. Still, she never quit and she never uttered a word of complaint the entire class so I think that the worst is behind her where her training journey is concerned.
Some other errors that we observed were sight offset errors that led to the wooden barricades getting shot and something that Robert called “Sequential Thought”. An example of the latter would be if the target sequence of “Alpha, Seven!” was called out and the shooter leaned out of cover to see Alpha and then subsequently shot Seven, even though Seven could be seen first, without exposing one’s self to Alpha. Meanwhile, the shooter is fully exposing himself to Seven while shooting Alpha.
I point out the errors that I observed not to belittle my fellow students, but rather to make note of all lessons learned, even if I wasn’t the shooter who had to learn the lesson the hard way. It’s always better to learn from someone else’s mistakes!
On that note, I should confess to my blunders too: I felt like I did alright on my first two runs, but I started losing my balance a little bit when leaning out from behind some barricades. This wasn’t such a big deal in and of itself, but at one point I didn’t quite settle into a kneeling position right and when I slid/stumbled a bit I NDed my AK into the berm, missing the target by about two feet (we could see the bullet splash into the sand, well to the side of the target). I really felt stupid to have done that and if that had been a blunder in a real defensive shoot, that could have been a round that killed a bystander.
I made some less egregious errors too, such as leaning out from behind cover and attempting to shoot with my safety on, failing to check my ammo status and getting a ‘click’ instead of a ‘bang’, and fumbling for magazines in my pockets.
Robert said that we’d gotten through previous lessons so quickly that we had time for a third run through the drill, if we so chose. While Nick and Stephanie were stuffing mags, I ran to my truck and got my 5.56mm ammo and AR15 so that I could give the course of fire a try with the other gun.
I think that most realistic people will concede that the 5.56mm AR15 is somewhat easier to shoot than the 7.62mm AK and that low-powered optics are easier to shoot with than iron sights. I certainly knew this going into the drill but I was actually almost stunned at just how much easier it was to run that AR than it was to run the AK that I’d been using all day! The small but bright red dot in the Steiner scope was ridiculously easy to snap onto a target and the lack of recoil was remarkable; the muzzle device that I have on that AR is a Yankee Hill Machine & Tool “Phantom” flash suppressor but after shooting 7.62x39mm all day, it felt like I was shooting with a recoil compensator! I think I gave every target a five-round burst, pretty much just as fast as I could fan that trigger and kept every shot in the IPSC targets’ A-zones! I usually don’t feel like I run a carbine exceptionally well, but I really felt like I cleaned house on that drill. Maybe it was just my perception, but to me the difference between the two guns was profound.
I don’t want to come across like I’m bashing the AK; I have a lot less experience with it than with the AR and that optic really gave me an advantage as well. When I’ve put more time in behind the AK and I have a suitable optic mounted on it, then I will be able to give it a more fair appraisal.
The Hot Wash
After we had done the final exercise three times each, Robert told us to get packed up and then we’d do our final self-evaluation. I really liked this approach to the conclusion of the class since it made us put into words what we needed to work on and what we might not need to practice so much. This made it easy to focus on what we should plan to do at the range in the future. Robert then asked us to evaluate him as a teacher and the class as a whole. Robert says that there aren’t a whole lot of folks who can teach classes full-time and make a living at it and he credits his business success to actually listening to what his students have to say, good, bad, and ugly. I felt like I should try to think of some constructive criticism for him and so I mentioned that Stephanie had suffered some malfunctions with her new M1 Carbine and that there hadn’t been a block of instruction that day on how to clear them. I mentioned that perhaps that would be something to include in future Carbine 1 classes.
After the evaluations were done Robert handed out certificates to all three of us and said that he had no compunctions about doing so; we had all demonstrated that we’d learned the lessons that were taught and that we had done a great job at the class. I settled in for the long drive home, pleased with the class and the experience overall.
What Went Right
- Nobody got hurt at the class. While this is the norm in my experience, there is always the potential for someone to get hurt when firearms are being used and so I’m always thankful when that’s not the case.
- The class was appropriate for both beginners and more advanced shooters, as Kenaz Tactical advertised. It was great to see two shooters who were taking their first steps in training too.
- I learned a new variation on the kneeling position that I think will be of use to me in the future. The “knee dip” thing from standing is something that I’m interested in playing with too.
- I got down to Colorado Springs with plenty of time to spare and without getting lost. Google’s directions were spot-on, including distances.
- My AK needed minimal zeroing and now the zero is even more fine-tuned than when I showed up.
- My two rifles both ran 100%, with nothing goofy going on like screws loosening or other stuff falling off.
What Could Have Gone Better
- The weather was ugly at first, although it improved later on. Kind of a pointless thing to complain about this, since there’s nothing that anyone could have done about it though.
- I took some notes but not as many as I should have. I just got a bit lazy about it.
- I’m still kicking myself for that ND into the berm. I was a good learning point but it bothers me to know that I did it at all.
- I have been lazier where physical fitness is concerned in the last few months than I’ve been for about eight years. I could tell that I was getting into and out of shooting positions slower and with more effort than was the case a few months earlier and the morning after the class I felt more sore than I’d expected. I should really decide to do something to upkeep my PT and then do it.
- There was at least once where I performed a technique that I had learned at a previous class instead of what I’d learned at this one. The example that comes to mind was running with the muzzle up instead of the belly/shoulder brace technique that Robert taught us. I didn’t get told that I was wrong for doing it “my way” but I hate to be the guy who pays to get shown how to do something and then disregards the advice, even if it was unintentional.
Stuff I Had That I Was Glad For
- Warm clothes, including my fleece jacket and hat. My face still got wind-burnt but I was more comfortable than I’d have been without it.
- Mechanix gloves. In addition to contributing to warmth, they kept my hands from getting cut up on the gravel or the AK.
- Plenty of ammo. The course’s gear list only called for 250 rounds to be expended (and I think that was a pretty accurate count) but on the final exercise it was “shooter’s choice” for how many rounds got expended. I was glad that I didn’t need to worry about having enough and I could just shoot as much as I thought was appropriate.
Water and Gatorade powder. Even when it’s not hot out, you still gotta hydrate.
Stuff I Had That I Wish I Didn’t
- That Condor sling is somewhat sucky and I’d like to replace it with something a little better quality. It actually wasn’t horrible, but I rather prefer the 2-point offerings from BFG and Viking Tactics. I also think I’d rather attach the sling to the rear of the stock instead of where the stock and receiver connect. This might require me to replace the MOE stock with something else.
Stuff I Didn’t Have That I Wish I Did
-Knee and elbow pads. The knee pads would have been especially good, as we were kneeling a lot in this class. Shooting ranges tend to be rocky and littered with spent brass and Dragonmans was no exception.
- A scope mount. I have a scope that I want to throw on my AK but the mount that I recently ordered just didn’t work out and so I ran the class with iron sights only. On one hand, I’m kind of glad that I got the humbling experience with AK irons but on the other hand I would like to start accruing experience with a scope on the AK.
Stuff I Didn’t Have That I Was Glad For
- Load-bearing gear. I can now say that I’ve done a carbine class with nothing more for holding mags than my pants pockets. It’s just nice to know that you don’t actually need tactical nylon gear to play. I didn’t “learn” that at this class, but it helps to reinforce the lesson.
Conclusion
Kenaz Tactical’s “Carbine 1” was worth my time and money. The new twist on the kneeling position was pretty cool to learn about and the process of “scraping the rust off” made me realize just how little I’d been shooting in 2016-present.
It’s good to know that there is a Colorado-based company that is doing good stuff and that you can go there and expect to learn something, regardless of your skill level. A lot of the stuff that was practiced was “basic” but, if we’re being honest about it, it’s the mastery of the basics that makes for a proficient shooter, not necessarily the newest technique on the block. If you’re in or Near Colorado Springs or are willing to take a trip there, I’d say it’s worth your time to check out Kenaz Tactical.
