People who are far better qualified than I am have looked at the school’s training methods and philosophies and have found them questionable (to put it mildly), but I’ve largely avoided talking about the school because I simply didn’t have any solid indication that what Tactical Response was doing was a threat to the safety of it’s students… until now.

In a mid-February class held at the Folsom Shooting Club/Sacramento Valley Shooting Center, a Tactical Response instructor had a grossly irresponsible and pointless negligent discharge, as noted on CalGuns.Net.

I am creating this thread as a “last resort” after reasonable attempts (by me and others) to contact Tactical Response for comment and clarification had failed.

It is my opinion that firearms training organizations should err on the side of being overly communicative when it comes to safety and incidents where student safety are or have been jeopardized.

I am not reporting the following events as fact at this time, rather as a report from a trusted source, but still awaiting confirmation, denial or clarification from those that have first-hand knowledge.

So, as reported to me:

During the recent (Feb 17-18) Tactical Response “Fighting Pistol” course near Sacramento, an instructor instructed the students to throw their pistols on the ground, then the instructor proceeded to stomp on the pistols to make some point along the lines of “these things aren’t meant to be pretty, they’re meant to be tools, so treat them as such” (quotes mine). He then threw his own pistol onto the ground and stomped on it–resulting in a round being fired parallel to the line of students, into a student’s truck, with a possible ricochet towards who-knows-what.

Now, we can discuss the validity of that exercise (do we need to?), but my central issue here is that when the Tactical Response was questioned both privately and publicly about the incident (by me and others), emails were not responded to, comments on various social media outlets were deleted, etc.

As I mention above, if you are in the firearms training business, your students and potential students are entitled to know the operative safety protocols while training with your organization. In turn, the students should be aware of failures of these protocols and efforts to remediate these failures. If these simple concepts are ignored, you are probably dealing with an unsafe (by definition) organization.

A student in the class then posted the following negative review of the class on Yelp which confirms that a Tactical Reponse instructor created a negligent discharge that shot a student’s truck.

We contacted the the Folsom Shooting Club/Sacramento Valley Shooting Center about the incident, and they gave Bearing Arms the following written response, banning Tactical Response from returning to the Sacramento Valley Shooting Center.

Folsom Shooting Club takes safety seriously, as any well run range must.  We have well documented policies and procedures to assure a safe range for all shooters and guests.  A safety issue was reported to us regarding a private training class and we immediately spoke to persons with firsthand knowledge of the reported incident.  The results of our investigation were reported to the board of directors and our board made what it believes to be the best decision for the club, its members and guests.  Tactical Response will no longer be permitted to conduct training activities on our facility.

Bearing Arms sent Tactical Response an email yesterday asking the training company to respond to the claim that an instructor had a negligent discharge that endangered the lives of students.

Tactical Response has been curiously non-responsive.