I\u2019m still sorting voluminous notes taken at the annual Rangemaster Tactical Conference, held last week at the Memphis (TN) Police Academy.\u00a0 Though police and to a lesser extent military folks were certainly represented, the majority of the turnout was comprised of law-abiding citizens who keep and carry guns to defend themselves and those within \u201cthe mantle of their protection.\u201d<\/p>\n
Host and founder Tom Givens makes this conclave an extraordinary mix of participatory hand-to-hand work, live fire defensive shooting, and classroom lecture by subject matter experts. The attendee picks his or her chosen classes from an agenda too big for any one person to take everything. A good overview can be found here \u00a0from Andrew Branca<\/a>, who presented articulately there on his signature topic, the law of self-defense.<\/p>\n As always, a side event was the famous Polite Society Match, named after Robert Heinlein\u2019s famous quote that \u201cAn armed society is a polite society.\u201d For 2015, 136 of the 180 or more participants shot the match. This year\u2019s event was deceptively simple: two targets at only three to seven yards, timed including mandatory draw from concealment, with hellacious penalties for hits outside the relatively small (and indistinguishable) \u201cfive out of five point\u201d boxes in the center of the targets\u2019 heads and chests.\u00a0 What made it tricky was extremely dim light.\u00a0 As you watch one attendee go through it, bear in mind that DrZman, who took the video, had to use his techno-magic to brighten the scene up considerably so a viewer could see what the heck was going on in the first place:<\/p>\n