Course: ITTS Defensive Handgun I
Dates: June 19-20, 2010
Location: Angeles Shooting Range
The purpose of this review is to share my personal experience of taking the two day Defensive Handgun I course offered through ITTS. I will provide an overview of topics covered in the two days of training and personal impressions and experience(s).

Day 1
Day one began with an introduction of class members and instructors.
Needless to say with over thousands of students a year the people at ITTS have a lot of experience at teaching. The head instructor (Scott Reitz) is one of a handful of experts in the legalities on the use of deadly force. He has served and continues to serve as an expert witness in countless cases and has enough experience to say “if you can name a scenario I can probably tell you a case that is like it”. Couple this knowledge with his 22 years in LA Metro, with 10 years in SWAT, gives him a very unique perspective on the use of deadly force and capabilities as a firearms instructor. This is something that I don’t think can be found elsewhere and if so I’d like to know.
The entire first day was all lecture, we talked extensively about the defensive mindset and deadly force. I was very nervous the previous day and had about 4 hours of sleep so I was afraid of nodding off. However it was not boring for me at all and I feel I learned a lot from the lecture as it was very interesting, especially with all the real world examples and Reitzisms.
Topics covered were (in no particular order as some topics overlapped with others)
- Firearms safety
- Criminals and criminal mindset (many example cases)
- Situational awareness and how to remain safe in public
- Tid bits on survival and safety
- Safe room and home defense
- Terminal Ballistics (example cases that will surprise you)
- Deadly Force (many examples)
- What happens after (what to say to police, what will come back and get you in trouble)
- Transporting firearms
We were also privileged to have a civilian speaker who went through ITTS and had a home invasion happen. He talked to us about his experience and fielded questions.

Day 2
Day two began with new introductions to a few more instructors and student introductions to them. This is a beginner handgun course designed to take people who have never shot a gun and get them up to speed.
So we proceeded to go through the basics: Firearms safety, grip, sight picture, stance, trigger pull, presentation, handgun mechanics, range safety and more terminal ballistics. All of the things taught are taught with a combat mindset and an expert understanding on the use of deadly force.
Topics covered (in no particular order)
- Firearms safety
- Grip
- Sight Picture
- Trigger Pull
- Follow through
- Loading and unloading
- Presentation
- Singles and pairs on paper
- Failure drills
- Shooting steel at 50 yds

We were told that this class was a little more advanced than usual Handgun I courses so we did things outside the normal curriculum. Some of these things included one handed shooting and engaging steel at 136 yards. There was also person on person competitions on hanging steel and poppers.

Experiences/Impressions
Instructors were all great and very attentive to safety throughout the course. Since I have been around guns for a while I could tell they hold themselves to a higher standard of safety than the students and I think that really helped with the safety. What I couldn’t figure out how to articulate in this review are the small bits of wisdom and knowledge that came from interacting with each of the instructors. That is something I want to encourage people to do if they take a course from ITTS. Talk to the instructors and ask questions even if it’s a little pointless since you never know what you might learn.
As far as improvements or suggestions I don’t think one can really ask for more on day two which ended up incorporating handgun-II material. We did end a little early on day one and I probably should have asked more questions but I was trying to digest the material. I think it might have helped to drive home my confidence in understanding the use of deadly force by breaking the students into groups and presenting each group with deadly force scenarios and having them (as a group) articulate the reason for the use or reasons for not using. I imagine the feedback to the instructor would be helpful since he/she will be able to gauge the classes understanding based on the discussions and what they present.

I look forward to taking more classes from ITTS and hopefully getting some education on “problem solving at speed”.
Front Sight, Trigger Press, Follow Through