After a couple of years of focusing on being a full time caregiver, I am easing my way back to doing seminars again. On January 24-25, 2026 I will be doing a somewhat rare in-town seminar at the Casa Grande Police Range. In connection with Independence Training, we will be teaching Close Contact Handgun coursework to give people a safe but realistic understanding of the complicated matter of gaining and maintaining space to use a handgun effectively, but even more importantly how to use movement, awareness, and verbal dexterity to ideally not even get into a violent encounter in the first place.
This is the fundamental base where we try to ensure that we don’t end up in an entanglement, and we can use our handgun to maximum effect. There is some VERY MINOR physical contact in the class with little to no impact, but it is extremely limited, making the course suitable for anyone who is looking to get their feet wet in the close range self-defense envelope. This is a great introduction to the 0-5 yds gunfighting envelope for those who have been hesitant to do so from lack of physical conditioning or little experience in H2H fighting , and has the thumbs up for Craig Douglas of Shivworks (since we shamelessly are teaching a great deal of his material in the course). We have had some great feedback results when we taught this course before, including people who have taken ECQC. We are looking forward to doing it again.
In this class we will look at ways to maintain distance, using verbalization, footwork, positioning, and awareness to keep distance from an aggressive criminal, and to utilize the pistol in a manner in which we can prevent him from stopping us. The focus is on NOT getting entangled and having to get into a physical fight, but rather to use the pistol the way it is intended to be used – at a distance.
We will cover:
Maintaining Spatial Relationship
Functional Footwork
Proper Verbalization
Presenting the pistol through an appropriate line of extension and compression
Live fire through extension and compression
Retention Shooting (both from the thumb-pectoral and the compressed high ready)
Live fire retention shooting
Integrating Verbals with everything else
Recognizing when it is appropriate to go to the gun and when not to
We will be working live fire on the range, as well as drilling concepts with blue guns. At the end we will pressure test our new skills in mild and no-contact Force-on-force scenarios against resisting opponents with opposing will and freedom of action using airsoft. We will be working in open space, in and around vehicles, and inside structures.
Students will need a suitable carry pistol, at least three spare magazines, a quality holster, and 150 rounds of ammo. If you have training guns and training knives, please feel free to bring them.
Click here to sign up: