2015 PDN Training Tour Update #7

Rob Pincus here and this is another Personal Defense Network Training Tour update. This is going to be one of the last updates for 2015 because this week is one of the last weeks of the tour. In fact, next week is the last week on the 2015 tour. It has been an awesome one. I have just about reached the Pacific Ocean.

I am up in the wilderness at the JROC. It's a great new training facility, primarily here for military and law enforcement. There's some civilian training going on here as well. I've just done two days of law enforcement only training. And tomorrow we have one of our last open enrollment courses, a one day Combat Focus shooting course, that's gonna take place here.

Now, JROC is a really cool facility. I just came from another facility outside of Boise, Idaho in Meridian. And it is amazing. I want you to take a look at it. It's called Forward Movement Training and we're gonna talk with Matt Schneider right now.

Hey guys, I'm Matt with Forward Movement Training in Meridan, Idaho. The Forward Movement Training center is a reality-based training facility. It's 28,000 square feet indoors. We have a 2100 square foot two story house, five bedrooms, and two bathrooms. We have a 1200 square foot bank branch a UTM live shooting range, mat room, a mat training area, training vehicles, shooting simulator and classroom.

We serve the general public, military and law enforcement and any anything under the aspects of self defense, self protection or things.. So in our facility, we've got a number of different instructors that we have on staff. Most of which come from law enforcement and military backgrounds, that range from special operations to retired service members. We have a number of different companies that we work with on a regular basis. Locally, we work with Gemtech, Vortex all kinds of different companies that help us with what we're doing here.

Our house is 2100 square feet. We have a workout area. We have our shooting range over here. We're 360 degree shoot inside, but it's non-live fire. So we use UTM inside here.

We have the ability to put targets up everywhere and work on unstandardized shooting, draw and shoot. One of the key things that we have in our facility that's real unique, certainly to the civilian market, is our shooting simulator. We have a virtual 100 LE simulator and what that does, it gives people the opportunity to make those split second decisions that oftentimes people think are really easy to make. And they're very, very difficult. In addition to that, we have our mat room.

The mat room's a thousand square feet and gives us that hand-to-hand combat, weapons retention, weapons disarmament arena as well. Now of course we always officially begin the tour by posting a picture of the new tour truck from the beach outside of St. Augustine back there at my home, my HQ, at Ancient City Shooting Range. We roll out to the beach. We kick off the tour touching the Atlantic with the tires in the water.

Now, before I head up to Washington for the final course of the tour, I'm actually gonna roll out to Cannon Beach just east of Portland on the coast and get a picture with the tires in the Pacific ocean as we always do. Before I head out of Oregon though, I want you guys to meet Robert Banes. Come on in here Robert. You're a staff instructor with JROC. I want you to tell people a little bit about what's going on here.

I appreciate you setting up the courses here. You participated with law enforcement guys today on the rifle course. You're gonna be taking the pistol course tomorrow. First, what did you think of the training today on the rifle course? It was outstanding.

Huge fan of you and huge fan of PDN. It's a great course. Everybody got a lot out of it and everybody got to press their limits and backed off. Got it dialed in. So it was good to go.

Good, I appreciate you saying that. I know you get through a lot of training. You do a lot of teaching yourself. Let everybody know about what JROC has to offer. So JROC is a joint regional operations center.

It's a space that we've taken over, over about a year ago and it's geared towards providing a space for law enforcement, state, federal and local, as well as some military units come out here and get some training. Awesome. So we're in a great location. I'm really look forward to seeing the improvements. I look forward to coming back here next year hopefully doing some more classes and we're going to be working, of course, not only with the military and law enforcement but, as much as we can, we like to bring the civilians out here too.

I like to cross train. I like to make sure that we're understanding the fundamentals are the fundamentals. When we do those law enforcement only classes, which are pretty rare on the PDN tour, we really just take the fundamentals that we would teach to everyone anyway. And we might twist them a little bit or tweak them a little bit to fit the context of intended use for the law enforcement guys. Particularly this week, we worked with some guys who were involved in some narcotics, special investigations units activities and it's important for them to keep their identities a little bit concealed, a little bit secret.

So it's easier for them to train as a private group with people that are involved only with the facility and with the training. A lot of people think when they see that law enforcement only training that there's some special whizzbang stuff going on. More often than not, it's really just about the training environment and the intended context of use. The fundamentals are the fundamentals. When someone goes through a Combat Focus shooting course, Combat Focus Carbine course, or just about any of the courses taught by any of the instructors on the Personal Defense Network Tour, you're probably learning exactly the same thing regardless of your intended context of use.

It's up to you to take and tweak that and make it fit. Hopefully you instructor's there to help. I know that's one of the things that I demand from any of our staff instructors or any of the guys who are contributors to PDN. As I said, the PDN tour is coming to an end for 2015 but that doesn't mean that the training is coming to an end. And in fact, in just a couple of weeks we're gonna launch a brand new website, PDN version 2.0.

You're gonna love the new navigability. You're gonna love the new search engine features. It's gonna be a lot easier to get around. We're gonna have everything reorganized by topics. We're working on a lot of new content.

We're working towards that distance education program I've been talking about, as well as a new blog from a lot of our contributors where you're gonna see more things more often. Appreciate you watching these tour updates. We're gonna have one or two more. So stay tuned to all of our social media channels, Instagram, Facebook, Twitter and of course, personaldefensenetwork.com for all the free training articles and videos you need. I will say one cool thing about the law enforcement class that we did today specifically, is that the Benchmade company, who's been a sponsor of the tour the whole time this year, put some special sponsorship into this law enforcement only class from their law enforcement division.

And we were actually able to give away a couple of special knives to some guys who out shot some of the other ones. So we did some practical rifle competition today. We had to get a pistol shot involved for the tie breaker. All of these guys were great shots. We really appreciate everything that Benchmade did to support these guys, to support the course and everything they do to build great products.

We love our store sponsors. Of course, they take care of us. They hook us up with a lot of things. We get to give out a lot of free samples, but I wanted to give a special shout out to Benchmade, particularly the law enforcement division, for helping out with this course.