Front Sight Diary
Okay, I confess. I’ve been skeptical of Front Sight and its dapper, square-jawed proprietor, Ignatius Piazza. The slick advertising always set my B.S. detectors off before I got too close. Last year when brother Jeff suggested participating in a scheme to pad their site’s search engine rankings by posting a set of links to a blog in return for a class(as previously noted on The Firearms Coalition web site), I posted the links, but I didn’t feel a hundred percent good about it. The promised certificate for a class arrived in due time and I set it aside. Jeff, who had also attended their free machine gun course several years ago, was more sold on the idea. He suggested we set a time in September to dovetail with his trip out for the Gun Rights Policy Conference to be held here in Phoenix and take our course either the week before or the week after the GRPC. Still less than enthusiastic, I made my part of the arrangements (which mostly consisted of registering for the Four Day Defensive Pistol Class, and storing three thousand rounds of .45 ACP hardball as the course requirements suggested). Having large quantities of ammunition on hand always makes me feel better. If I’d be shooting 800-plus rounds of .45 over four days, it couldn’t be all bad.Day Zero – Travel and lodging
Late Thursday afternoon we made the two hour drive north to Bagdad, Arizona to pick up Jeff’s Army buddy Danny Tope, and then on another five hours to Pahrump, Nevada, some 40 miles northwest of Las Vegas. Arriving at the hotel, which gave us a discount through Front Sight, we took some pause when we were asked to sign a statement that we would “not possess” firearms in the hotel lobby or parking lot. “What’s that mean?” I asked, perhaps a little suspiciously. Basically they didn’t want to see our guns and they especially didn’t want other guests to see them. The hotel management knew why we were there, being as how they had given us the Front Sight discount and provided uw with some nice discount coupons with the Front Sight logo for breakfast. But the other guests didn’t know why we were there.
We also received a polite request to keep gun safety at the front of our minds when handling guns on the hotel property. The girl was so circumspect, I asked whether something bad had happened. Sure enough, there had been at least one serious incident – what Front Sight doctrine quite correctly terms a negligent discharge – in a Front Sight student’s room. The round penetrated a couple of interior hotel walls and a bed, and caused a minor wound to another guest. Undoubtedly a bad day for all involved.
In the room we considered the fact that since we were surrounded on three sides and below by potentially occupied rooms and with a walkway out front, there was no consistently safe direction. We took the warning to heart. We didn’t do a lot of dry practice in the hotel room. In fact, we barely handled the guns in the room except to strip and clean.
