Maximizing Your Training Resources at Gander Mountain

Everyone's training resources are limited. Finding out how to maximize those training resources, takes some expert advice sometimes. And I'm here with one of the greatest experts in the industry when it comes to maximizing training resources, Billy Hieb. He's the director here at the Gander Mountain Academy. They have a facility that allows you to come in, one-stop shop, get classroom instruction, live fire range training, virtual range training, and scenario training.

Billy, how do you help people maximize their training resources? Well, we really like to think of this place as truly your one-stop shop. From Gander Mountain as a whole, one of the leading retailers of firearms. So people can purchase a firearm, they can buy the ammo right out in the store, walk five feet into here, and we can have 'em shooting. Now, if customers are not sure what they wanna buy, now we're gonna utilize our virtual range.

What exactly is the virtual range, the V range? The virtual range, what we've done here is we've established almost an identical representation of a live fire range. What we do in there is we use real firearms. We've modified them for recoil and laser fire. So a lot of people think of it as a game, but it's not X-Box or none.

We're using real firearms that recoil. So what we can do in there is we can push that envelope from a training standpoint. We don't have to worry about the added cost of ammunition. We don't have to worry about that. We're always concerned about safety, but in there, it's a safe environment.

Other than dropping a firearm or something on your foot, it's virtually one of the safest places to practice firearms training. And we have it right here. So we can not only come in and do the live fire training and be very efficient, maximize our time resource, for example, we come one place. We can get the ammo, we can even buy the gun then go right into the live fire range. So it maximizes that training resource of time, first and foremost, but it also maximizes the training resource of time and budget when it comes to the V range because it's much less expensive to go in there and fire hundreds of virtual rounds with some recoil, with reps from the holster.

And it's also gonna be much more convenient in terms of safety. So we can jump in there. And it's not right to say "Cut corners," 'cause they aren't corners that we wanna cut on a live range, but there's just certain things we don't have to worry about. And we don't have to worry about when we're in that virtual range. So if we wanted to practice deploying from a holster, from deep concealment we might need to go very, very slowly in a live fire environment.

But here we can start to learn it more in context, which is obviously an important component to realistic training. You mentioned something too. In a typical half an hour, customers that are advanced to beginners, you're right. They shoot on average of five, 600 rounds in that half an hour. If we were to try to do that in a live fire, it would cost a lot more than $25.

And there's fatigue. There's fatigue that builds up in that environment. You have some of the cleanest ranges, some of the best ranges going, but at the end the day, training in an indoor range involves more fatigue, just with the atmosphere, with the air moving, with that mental fatigue of knowing that you are controlling this tool, that if you aren't paying attention to it every second, something bad could happen. Well, now you're in here. You're a little more emotionally relaxed.

Maybe you're bringing a friend in, you can have that conversation, right? You can actually not have to worry about that air flow that you have to have cleaning out all the things that are going on in the live fire range. So it's a more comfortable environment, which again allows you to get more reps. We talked about the plausibility principle. We can't train for everything that's possible.

We have to train for everything that's probable. And as you expand your resources for training, then you start to train for things that are also plausible. Well, you can expand your resource a lot faster here at the Gander mountain Academy using the virtual range to augment your live fire training. Billy, I appreciate you sharing that with us. My pleasure.