NRA basic home protection course (review)

Location: Lions Club Shooting Range, Lucerne Valley, CA

Course: NRA Basic Personal Protection Inside the Home

Course date: June 1, 2025

Website: Personal Protection Home

Training Director: Edmund Swan

Instructors: Bob (Niez?), Chuck (Dotters?), Tracy Graham, Jenaraye Graham

About this course

The National Rifle Association (AKA NRA) says this course teaches the basic knowledge, skills, and attitude essential to the safe and efficient use of a handgun for protection of self and family, and to provide information on the law-abiding individual’s right to self-defense.

This course is for law-abiding adult citizens and experienced shooters. Participants must demonstrate proficiency through certification or passing the pre-course assessment. Normally, the prerequisite for this class is the NRA Basics of Pistol Shooting class, but I was able to pass the pre-course assessment thanks to course instructor Edmund Swan. The eight-hour course covers firearms basics, basic home safety, the mental and physical aspects of violent confrontations, firearms law, and handgun selection. Students receive NRA materials and a completion certificate.

Signing up was a bit confusing, as first one registers for class on an NRA website, where you are asked to pay, but then you are advised to go to the registration page for the location of the class, where you are also asked to pay. As it turns out, while you do need to register with the NRA, they did not process my payment, so the fees went only to the Lion’s Club (although they probably reimburse NRA in some way).

My goal in taking this course was to obtain the prerequisite for future, more advanced courses that I’m seeking. Sitting in a classroom for hours seems not as good a use of time as actually being on the range learning and practicing, but so far finding a stand-alone advanced class has proven unachievable.

Class day

I arrived 30 minutes early to help set up the range if needed, but while the range was not set up, no one was working to get it set up.

Inside the classroom, two nice ladies greeted me at the door, got me signed in, and wrote my name on a wide piece of masking tape. This seemed a step down from the normal name labels used as meeting such as this, but once applied, the tape stuck to my vest without drama all day long, as opposed to starting to peel off the first time the fabric flexed. Straightforward and effective.

Tables, chairs, and materials were lined up inside, facing the front of the room that had a display area and a large screen for the ceiling-mounted projector. Even nicer, the chairs each had wheels on them, so you could move them easily on the carpet.

The materials included the 200-page NRA Guide: Basics of Personal Protection Inside The Home and the 60-page NRA MQP / Marksmanship Qualification Program. A fair portion of the contents of the Guide was covered in the classroom portions, while the NRA MQP was there for future reference. Each publication was printed on high-quality stock, and they were ours to take home. Doughnuts and fruit were available on serving tables.

First classroom lessons

Ed started the first classroom portion of the day introducing staff members and having students introduce themselves. He then followed the NRA Guide: Basics of Personal Protection Inside The Home, sometimes having students read portions aloud from the PowerPoint-like slides on the screen. Classes such as these always begin with some sort of classroom experience, and they feel uniformly awful and a waste of time. This one was a bit worse, however, because the NRA materials seem to have been generated before 1976, when Jeff Cooper started the American Pistol Institute (which later morphed into Gunsite in Arizona). For example, NRA still uses three Basic Firearms Safety rules, including number one, “ALWAYS keep the gun pointed in a safe direction,” which implies that you should never use a gun for self-defense. There is also number three, which is “ALWAYS keep the firearm unloaded until ready to use.” The now-typical four (or more) safety rules commonly taught elsewhere thus have more than twice as many usable safety tips (as having an empty gun may be safe but renders it essentially useless), and make it so that you have to break at least two of the rules to precipitate a negligent discharge.

This classroom session also included the topics of shooting safety inside the home, safe firearm storage, mental awareness, the defensive mindset, and the OODA Loop (Observe, Orient, Decide, Act). The presenter changed from time to time, depending on the topic and the presenter’s area of expertise. Unfortunately, the second presenter mentioned a couple of times that he did not agree with the viewpoint expressed by the first presenter, a poor way to foster confidence in the curriculum.

One interesting tidbit was their instruction to grasp the slide, pull back, and then release it sharply to move the weapon out of slide-lock, rather than using the slide release control. Each method works, but sometimes it is faster to use the slide release control.

Something not covered was the disorientation one can experience after hearing a gunshot in an enclosed space, such as a home. This may be extremely difficult to train without hearing damage, but it should be mentioned over and over because it really can be a shock to the system, at the worst possible time.

Range lessons and practice

After about three hours in the classroom, we moved out to the range, which by this time had been provisioned with water and targets. Each student had his own lane (no buddy system), although there were enough instructors to monitor students pretty well.

Students were told not to do anything unless directed to do so by an instructor. This seemed a good approach, but while it helped with line control, it was sometimes followed to an unhealthy extreme.

Because students supposedly demonstrated some firearm proficiency as a prerequisite for class enrollment, there was little preliminary instruction on weapons handling, sight picture, sight alignment, grip, stance, etc. Unfortunately, many of the students seemed not to have incorporated their previous training into their repertoire, so there was a lot of poor gun handling and dismal marksmanship on display. None of the drills including presenting from the holster.

Unlike many other classes, hats were not considered part of eye protection, so as long as students had on just about any type of glasses, they were allowed to shoot without a hat.

One nice touch was that a majority of the shooting sessions involved two magazines loaded with six rounds, with two or three sessions demanding eight rounds. This might be a hold-over from the old revolver days (no one at this class was using a revolver, although one was using a 1911), but with some of the small “pocket” pistols having limited magazine capacity, it seemed to work well. Even so, we did a fair amount of shooting, and not as much time reloading.

After the first couple of exercises, students needed to scan and assess after firing their string of shots. In this case, though, scanning did not include the target, the target’s surrounding area, or the condition of the weapon. We were supposed to look over each shoulder to see what might be behind us (including cover or concealment), and to count the number of fingers the instructor was holding up. We were told about moving, but this was neither demonstrated nor practiced. As important as scanning, accessing, and moving are outside the home, perhaps the NRA has determined that they are not as important inside the home.

Also, after the first couple of classes, one of the assistant instructors told Ed that the compressed ready position was better than the low ready … another example of an assistant overriding the main instructor. Ed immediately changed the ready position for the remaining exercises. This disrupted the flow of this aspect of the class and ensured that students would be breaking the NRA’s first fundamental rule for safe gun handling, as the muzzle would not be pointed in a known safe direction when not shooting.

Another issue I see with compressed ready is that it is yet another technique that students have to master. The conventional low ready position can be the initial ready position after presentation from the holster, or it can be an intermediate ready position after pointing in (either after engaging the target or deciding not to engage). With the low ready position, you can see your sights and basic sight alignment, see the condition of your gun, and still have good peripheral vision of any threats or potential threats, with the gun pointed in a direction that is usually a safe one. The compressed ready not only has the muzzle pointing toward whatever is in front of you (whether or not it is a threat), it is slower to bring back on target, it feels awkward, it requires more sight alignment, and it requires yet more training to master. In this class, skill-building practice seemed not to be a priority with most of the students. Even worse, we actually shot from the compressed ready position — that is, with the weapon held around mid-chest level — not using the sights at all. Using this technique seems to imply that you always have your gun pointed at something you might be shooting, which is not part of the gun-safety mantra. Additionally, there are cases where the compressed ready position is viewed as more offensive in nature than the more defense-oriented low ready. Perhaps in the home, this makes little to no difference, but again, why teach techniques that are not universally useful?

Many classes train administrative reloads by first checking the condition of the chamber (empty or occupied), checking to see if there is a magazine in the stock, inserting the fresh magazine, racking the slide or activating the slide release control, checking the chamber again to ensure that a round had been fed into it, and then checking the magazine to ensure that it has more rounds it in. Performing administrative reloads this way in this class resulted in an instructor “correcting” me and criticizing my chamber checks because I was muzzling my support hand. I was not muzzling my support hand, which I demonstrated to him. I then went too far by demonstrating how Chuck Taylor taught the press check on the 1911 (this technique does not work on modern semi-auto handguns). The instructor wanted me to grab the top of the slide at the rear to pull it back to check the chamber. I showed him that, given the size of my hands, this blocked the view of the ejection port and thus was not safe. Fortunately, one of the other instructors was also a graduate of Front Sight and told him that mine was an acceptable practice.

One of the last drills was to shoot around a barrier, both left and right. Instead of “slicing the pie” (as it’s called elsewhere), we were instructed to plant our shooting-side foot behind the barrier where it could not be shot, and then to lean out to shoot. This seemed much more maladroit, as well as impossible to do repeatably without knowing ahead of time exactly where the target is going to be when you pop out. Instructors stressed the safety aspects of this approach, but not the procedure to follow when you aren’t able to engage your target the first time you “plant and shoot.”

Judging by the marksmanship of the class in general, and the novelties of some of the exercises, performing each exercise once or twice did not seem sufficient, either to instill competence or even the ability to do follow-up range time to polish the techniques. And while the instructors kept making references to practicing, they never once reminded the class that shooting skills tend to perish from lack of use.

The last range demonstration was a clever recreation of the Tueller Drill. A student stood at the ready, while the instructor stood behind him, facing perpendicular to the shooting and parallel to the targets. When the instructor took his hand off of the student’s shoulder, the student was to engage the target accurately as quickly as possible, while the instructor was running off to the side to see how far he could move before the student got shots on target. The student did fairly well, but even so, the instructor had run more than 21 feet in that same amount of time. To show how it should have been done, one of the other instructors took the place of the student as shooter, and they did the demonstration again. This time, the instructor ran even farther than before, because the instructor doing the shooting had a problem with her weapon! This same instructor, by the way, had earlier told the class what a great weapon it was with the grip and the red-dot optic, etc., which all together made it a fantastic choice for self-defense. Undeterred, they tried the demonstration a third time, but again the shooting instructor could not manipulate her weapon in time to get good hits on target before the running instructor covered more than 21 feet.

At the end of the range session, the students did not have to pick up the brass, strip the targets, or put away the target stands. A nice touch.

Lunch

Back at the classroom, there were well-made sandwiches, potato salad, fruit, chips, and salsa available to self-serve for our late lunch. We had a few minutes to ourselves, but once the next presenter finished his lunch, he moved to the front of the room for the next lesson while the rest of us ate.

The session on the law was interesting if only because the presenter from Apple Valley Gun Club contradicted another Apple Valley Gun Club presenter at a class I had just taken there concerning properly transporting weapons in the car.

Second classroom lessons

With lunch dishes put away, the afternoon classroom sessions continued. One presenter mentioned tactical flashlights, and dragged out a half-dozen examples. He confessed, however, that he had no idea what a “tactical flashlight” was, and he failed to cover the use of a flashlight except as a way of illuminating your target.

At the 4:30 break, I asked the instructor if we were really going to be done by 5:00 as advertised. He assured me we would be. The classroom sessions continued until after 5:00, though, and then there was the test.

The test

The test was three pages that mostly covered what had been presented in the class, with a couple of bizarre exceptions.

Takeaways

As much as I liked the instructor and the treatment we received at the Lucerne Valley Lion’s Club Shooting Range, this class seems as ossified as the NRA itself. There has to be a better way to teach and train shooters in self-defense, as well as a better way to incorporate advanced shooters across programs.

Greg Raven, Apple Valley, CA