LEVEL UP AT THE SMORGASBORD
- Jun 27th 2025
- By
It’s no secret that we’re big fans of firearms training. We think of all our customers as family and, like one does with one’s real family, we hope you stay out of jail and the hospital and are able to occasionally send us money.
The best way to do that is to get trained in safe and legal handgun carry and get occasional refreshers to stay current.
The thing is, unless one is actually into taking training classes as a hobby, then it’s just another thing in the calendar year competing for finite money and time off work. Add up tuition, travel costs, ammo, a hotel, and sundries, and a weekend at gun school turns into a Friday-through-Monday four-figure proposition pretty quickly if you’re not careful. On top of that, you only have so many days to spend with the kids at Yellowstone or Disney every year.
So where—and more importantly, with whom—do you spend your precious training time and money every year?
Word of mouth is good, if you have trusted friends who can recommend instructors they’ve trained with, but another source is the multi-instructor weekend smorgasbord type format.
These are usually two- or three-day (but sometimes longer) events where a number of instructors come together and do condensed versions of their regular programs, typically in 2-, 4-, or 8-hour blocks.
Some of them are very audience-specific. For instance, there’s the Thunderstick Summit, which brings some of the best shotgun instructors, or the Pat Rogers Memorial Wheelgun Roundup, geared toward revolver shooters, or the annual A Girl & A Gun National Conference, tailored for women who carry.
Historically, there have been a number of “pop-up” training conferences over the years that run as benefit events, like Friends of Pat, Paul-E-Palooza, or Hebrew Hogger, where a bunch of trainers will contribute their services to raise funds for a cause.
The granddaddy of all these is the Rangemaster Tactical Conference, which has always happened in late March and will occur in Texas at the Dallas Pistol Club for the foreseeable future.
The advantage of these events is that they give you a chance to get a bite-sized chunk of several trainers over the course of a weekend, and thereby decide if you want to seek out their full-length classes the next time they pass through your neck of the woods. Theoretically, you could take a handful of training blocks at TacCon with several reputable instructors and then pencil out your “I can only manage one weekend class a year” schedule for the next three or four years based on what you experienced.
Sometimes, the best feature of a buffet is discovering what you like, so you can order it as an entrée later!
