Talon Defense Carbine Manipulations

Chief Instructor: Chase Jenkins

Date: 26 JAN 14

Duration: 8 hours

Location: Gadsden, AL

BLUF: Outstanding beginner class, great place to build an excellent base of skills. Talon Defense is some of the best training out there, and $125 for this class is a steal. If you are new to the AR platform, and even if you’re not, take the class.

First Block: We began the day in the classroom with introductions. The class consisted of some civilians, some LEOs who instruct carbine and handgun courses, myself and another .mil type. We then moved on to the safety briefing, which was very thorough. Chase believes in rules of safe tactics as opposed to range rules, because safe gun handling should happen everywhere, not just on the range. This is a great thing for beginners to learn, because gun safety needs to happen whether you are at the range, in your house, or carrying concealed. We moved on to carbine selection and setup. All the students had previously brought their carbines into the classroom, and at this point Chase looked over all our equipment. He discussed the pros and cons of the various setups, and gave his take on a good setup and quality carbine.

Second Block: The second portion of the day was zeroing the carbines. Some folks came with zeroed carbines, and others didn’t. We discussed a solid shooting position from prone for zeroing, and everyone got their carbines squared away quickly. We then broke for lunch.

Third Block: After the class resumed post lunch break, we started at the three yard line working on stance, trigger control, reloads and mechanical offset. After getting our mechanical offset figured out, we worked our way back to the 25 yard line to demonstrate the effects of mechanical offset. We went from shooting single shots to controlled pairs and hammered pairs, teaching the value of using trigger reset to your advantage.

Fourth Block: The next block of training was working malfunctions. The various types of malfunctions were covered, and the response to each was discussed and demonstrated. Pairing off with the person in line next to us, we took turns setting up the various malfunctions in each other’s carbines and then going through the proper steps to get the blasters back up and running.

Fifth Block: Red dot/optic down drills. I was the only person in the class using iron sights, so this didn’t really affect me too much, however the rest of the class was told to turn their optic off and learn to use the outline of the optic as a large ghost ring sight. We then had a mini competition using some steel targets and held races between students to see who could get the required amount of hits the fastest.

Sixth Block: The last chunk of the day was another competition/race between the students. We stepped back to the 50 yard line, and were required to get hits on steel from standing, kneeling, and prone while racing against another student. The level of skill among the students was shown here as everyone had some very good runs.

Summary: Outstanding class, as expected from Talon Defense. I have taken several classes with Talon Defense now, but only their advanced classes. I was curious to see how it was going to go stepping back to a basic class, but I was very pleased. A lot of that had to do with the students in the class, as everyone who was there caught on very quickly and were a very squared away group. While nothing taught was groundbreaking to me, it was good for me to take a step back and just work on the basics, hence why I used my carbine iron sights only. All the advanced and “high speed” stuff is the basics applied at a higher rate of speed, so no matter your skill level it is a good thing to take a step back now and then and hit up a basic course.

Like I stated above, this is an excellent course for those new to the AR platform. If you have not taken a formal course before, I strongly urge you to take one, and I also recommend considering Talon Defense. The $125 course fee is an amazing deal, as the training is worth much, much more.

Gear: BCM middy with pinned BattleComp 1.5 on a 14.5” barrel and Magpul MBUS, LBT 6094A with Midwest Armor Guardian IVs and HSGI TACOs, VERTX pants and Lowa Zephyr boots.

Zeroing the carbines.



Working from the three.



Me reloading. Notice the mag still in the air, cool pic.