Riding Shotgun With Charlie
#111
Tom Hall
Instructor
Buckeye Firearms Foundation
FASTER Saves Lives

Tom Hall & I met just last week. He was instructing with the FASTER Saves Lives staff in Ohio. We enjoyed some social time with some of the other students and instructors of the class the night before the class started. What I thought was really cool was finding out that he was working on getting some education from a whiskey university. He said if there was a cigar university, he could be all set with firearms, whiskey and cigars!

Tom has been with FASTER Saves Lives since the second year they were around. He is a firearm instructor in Ohio in his own right, but volunteers with FASTER and teaches their FASTERS Foundations courses. That’s a class for school educators who are going to be carrying a firearm in their schools and have a concealed carry permit already. The Foundations class gives them all the vernacular of firearms and fundamentals of shooting. He’s also worked at some local gun stores.

FASTER Saves Lives is a non-profit that teaches the teachers what they need to know to help defend their students. As gun folks, we have to know that there’s more than having and using a firearm in a defensive situation. The shooting portion of the FASTER Level 1 class is about 2 days of shooting. We shot from various distances, with various stances, one handed/two handed, shooting and moving and more. For newer shooters, there’s a lot of ground we covered. FASTER also teaches trauma first aid: when, where, & how to use a tourniquet, chest seals, and other first (& immediate) aid.

But the biggest take away for me wasn’t shooting at the paper targets. There were targets that shot back. It was the scenario training we did. We did use scenarios that were from real school shooting incidents. Tom was the ‘bad guy’ who donned a padded safety vest, protective mask, and an airsoft gun that fired rubber balls. Other students role played victims and someone was the armed teacher. The teacher knew nothing about the scenario except that there was an ‘active murderer’ in the classroom area. Not only did they have to avoid oncoming and running students, they also had to figure out what to do if or after they neutralized the ‘bad guy’. This is why it’s important to have some scenario training.

Tom and I reviewed the 3 day course during the show. I did have a FASTER buzz while we were filming. I was also ‘-4’ on the scenario training. Yeah...I was shot 4 times by the ‘bad guy’ in one scenario. On the last day of the class, the Ohio Supreme Court ruled that schools are no longer able to determine which of their staff can carry in the schools. But if a teacher wanted to carry, they needed to go through police training to be able to carry in their school. For the record, passing the qualification from FASTER Saves Lives is a higher standard than what the police in Ohio use for qualifications.