Handgun Skill Drills

Gun owners should be able to fluently use and exercise their weapons at a mere moment’s notice. This is especially true for self-defense, home defense or concealed carry situations. This guide offers helpful skill drills for improving handgun safety.

• Practice Reload – When using a weapon for self-defense practice, it’s important to become completely fluent with the weapon. It should become a natural instinct to slide the lock back, press the magazine to release, confirm the magazine is clear, slide a new magazine in place and release the slide. Practice this drill enough and it will become second nature. Shooters should be able to load their guns quickly and efficiently, without looking at the weapon, magazine or their hands.
• Emergency Reload – An emergency reload is when all the weapon’s rounds are gone and a new magazine is required. A trained marksperson should able to efficiently reload the magazine while maintaining accurate sights on the target. Temporarily lowering a weapon gives criminals a significant psychological advantage.
• Tactical Reload – This is more common for police officers that find themselves in a shootout. They are able to gain cover and reload the magazine. It’s important to never focus fully on the weapon, as these skills should be automatic, allowing the body to gauge surroundings and threat levels.
• Feel – Experienced shooters don’t simply run out of bullets, they can feel that the weight of their guns are becoming lighter and that the bullets need to be replaced.
• Training – It’s important that concealed carry and survivalists train themselves for emergency situations. This includes practicing emergency drawing skills, bursting onto metal targets and quickly firing two to three shots, practicing with multiple heavy-duty targets, practicing with moving targets and even incorporating the popular Mozambique Drill. This drill is a close shooting technique where the shooter rapidly fires several times into the target.
• Rapid Fire – This technique includes using rapid fire drills. This varies depending upon the time of weapon being used, but is extremely effective practice against home invasion scenarios.
• Drills – There are several other types of drills that help refine shooting skills. Consider participating in exercise routines and then regularly pulling concealed weapons. This helps make sure that hands remain steady when adrenaline-rushing situations arise. Setup multiple targets for an obstacle course as this also helps improve shooting abilities, such as standard shooting drills and also rapid fire drills. It’s important to focus on controlled speed firing, which helps balance accuracy and speed, which is essential for emergency shooting situations.

Jumping Targets uses high quality AR500 steel targets that work with a wide variety of calibers, including high power, hand gun and rim fire ammunitions.