#fridayfundamentals

Over 10 years ago, I began writing a series called #fridayfundamentals. https://thetacticalprofessor.net/2015/09/25/friday-fundamentals-01-establishing-your-baseline/ It started with ideas from a couple of my friends, Mark Luell and Cecil Burch.

“My friend Mark Luell, the author of Growing Up Guns suggested I provide a ‘Friday Fundamentals’ post weekly. We got the idea from my colleague Cecil Burch who wrote a blog post about Fundamentals. It’s a great idea to stay in touch with the basics.”

The #fridayfundamentals series has continued intermittently ever since. An opportunity has arisen to continue to expand it. As the saying goes, “In the middle of difficulty lies opportunity.” https://quoteinvestigator.com/2021/10/07/difficulty/

For the past two years, I’ve been writing a monthly column for the digital edition of the NRA magazine Shooting Illustrated. https://www.shootingillustrated.com/ Sadly, we authors have been notified that both the digital and print editions of the magazine will cease to be published at the end of this year.

My 2024 monthly columns were about practice sessions derived from Concealed Carry License Qualification Courses. The sessions were focused on a theme and mostly limited to 50 rounds or less. While highly skilled shooters consider qualification courses to be ‘sobriety tests,’ that’s not true for the majority of gunowners. Especially when a person buys their first pistol, actually having to prove they can shoot it at even an elementary baseline level is intimidating. And because qual courses are designed for ease of administration rather than to have any training or feedback value, they can be segmented into smaller sections that actually do have some training and feedback worth.

First and foremost in my mind when I wrote the series was the Resource Constrained Environment that most gunowners have to practice in. Only a tiny minority of gunowners have access to an outdoor range where movement is possible and shot timers are workable. Almost all gunowners are limited to a booth at an indoor range where universally they can’t move, drawing from a holster isn’t allowed, and a shot timer is useless. Sometimes shooting faster than one shot every three seconds is prohibited. One of the benefits of qual courses is that they are mostly designed with this limitation in mind, so I capitalized on that benefit for the series.

Since Shooting Illustrated is going away, I’ll be re-publishing the series on a weekly basis here on my blog. In addition to the articles, I’ll be creating videos of what each session looks like from a third person POV and the shooter’s POV. YouTube has been taking down some of my videos for vague reasons unspecified other than:

“We think your content violated our firearms policy.

Content that facilitates the sale of certain regulated goods, like firearms, ammunition, or prohibited firearm accessories, isn’t allowed on YouTube.”

As a workaround, I’ll just post a Short of the specified qualification course on YouTube. Then the video of the course with the training enhancements will go up on my Patreon page https://www.patreon.com/TacticalProfessor as a free post because Patreon does not give me a hard time about them.

It’s my hope that gunowners who want to increase their proficiency will find the series useful as practice regimens. There are no shortage of incidents where gunowners find out that the gun they’re depending on doesn’t work or they can’t work it. In the context of personal protection, just knowing you can make the gun go off https://thetacticalprofessor.net/2025/09/17/testing-a-new-gun/ has a lot of value. Being able to hit something with it is even better.