CCW Class with GAPPNJ and Cameron Green

I arrived ear­ly to the loca­tion where GAPP was hold­ing the Utah and Flori­da CCW course, or at least I thought I was going to be ear­ly.  It was 30 min­utes before the class was to begin, and there were already a half dozen peo­ple wait­ing out­side the front door to gain admis­sion to the build­ing where the safe­ty class would begin for the Flori­da and Utah CCW course.  I already have my Utah CCW, so Flori­da is the only one that I am inter­est­ed in today.

As every­one fil­tered into the build­ing they polite­ly eyed each oth­er up ban­ter­ing back and forth a lit­tle bit…

As the class was get­ting start­ed, they called names to get our pic­tures tak­en so they could be print­ed out and sent to the respec­tive agen­cies once every­one has passed the class and has to file their paper­work.

As Cam (the instruc­tor) sets up for the class, I watch as he pulls out a myr­i­ad of guns, gear, test equip­ment and more.  As we wait, I look around the class and won­der how many oth­ers here are prep­pers or if they are here for the priv­i­lege of car­ry­ing CCW per­mits.  As I type this there are sev­er­al NRA pam­phlets, infor­ma­tion, and oth­er stuff hit­ting the tables for us to peruse and review.

The first por­tion of the train­ing class is based on the Utah CCW cri­te­ria, since dis­play­ing an under­stand­ing requires suc­cess­ful­ly pass­ing the Utah safe­ty course.  There are also a cou­ple NRA instruc­tors and a NJ local police offi­cer in the class that will be help­ing with the live fire por­tion of the class in the after­noon.

As we get start­ed, there is a bunch of paper­work we are fill­ing out.  After fill­ing out some paper­work we had our fin­ger­prints tak­en.

Through the pro­gres­sion of the class I am find­ing that Cam is much more thor­ough in the safe­ty train­ing than the pre­vi­ous class I took for my Utah, CCW class.  Cam seems to be very focused on mak­ing sure that the stu­dents under­stand all the parts func­tion­al­i­ty of the gun as well as the func­tion­al­i­ty of the gun.  This is a very good thing, and seems to be a good refresh­er for me as well, since I do not get to the range as much as I would like to these days.

The class then went to a deep dive on ammu­ni­tion the dif­fer­ent types, and the advan­tages and dis­ad­van­tages of each one.  There was also a brief legal dis­cus­sion around the legal­i­ty of hol­low point bul­lets in NJ and the ram­i­fi­ca­tions of end­ing up in court using self defense rounds.  Seems it is pret­ty much guar­an­teed, even though it is not ille­gal to use them in NJ.  Next up a whole dis­cus­sion around gun and ammu­ni­tion mal­func­tions…

Oth­er top­ics cov­ered were fun­da­men­tals of shoot­ing, eye dom­i­nance, shoot­ing posi­tion, trig­ger dis­cus­sion, breath­ing con­trol, sight align­ment, dry fir­ing, After break­ing for lunch we chat­ted about pis­tol selec­tion, con­ceal­a­bil­i­ty of your pis­tol, sights/laser sights (advan­tages and dis­ad­van­tages), hol­sters, stor­ing your guns, and much more.

From there, we hit the range for safe­ty and qual­i­fy­ing drills with Cam and oth­er qual­i­fied NRA instruc­tors.  All went well, every­one earned their cer­tifi­cates, and I got sev­er­al point­ers to help improve a cou­ple of shoot­ing habits that will help to improve my accu­ra­cy and safe­ty going for­ward.

In all this was a great course.  I’ve been to a cou­ple of these class­es in the past and Cam clear­ly went into more depth than any of the oth­er cours­es I had tak­en.  An expe­ri­enced shoot­er might think this was too basic, but for some­one who is inex­pe­ri­enced, this a a fan­tas­tic primer for them.  Regard­less, it is required cur­ricu­lum to even qual­i­fy for the CCWs, and you must go through the process, novice or expert.  If you are in the NYC, NJ, or East­ern PA areas, I think regard­less of whether or not you want to get your Utah or Flori­da CCW course, it is worth tak­ing the course with Cam and Green Acad­e­my of Per­son­al Pro­tec­tion just for the edu­ca­tion and lessons in gun safe­ty.  In addi­tion, Cam has a his­to­ry of pre­sent­ing in front of peo­ple so his deliv­ery was more than pro­fes­sion­al and was very good at con­vey­ing the mes­sage to the audi­ence.