The Real ParaUSA Day One Post

Day One of the ParaUSA Summer Camp was pretty cool, right up until the part where Joe Huffman shot me.  I’ll get to explaining that later, so instead I’ll begin at the beginning – getting up in the morning.

I woke in the morning and I was amped, I had so much adrenaline pumping through my system that I didn’t know what to do with myself, as many of the bloggers can attest.  Eventually we got calmed down, and we all got on the Blackhawk Bus, which is a site to behold.  I took pictures of it, but forgot the sync cable for Camera number 1, and the battery was dead on camera number 2.  I’ll hopefully be able to get all the day one pictures uploaded sooner than later.

So, we went to the Blackhawk corporate headquarters, where we had a nice intro to some of Blackhawk’s products, including the Serpa holsters, the clothing line, and what I thought was the coolest thing of all, the Knoxx stock.  It sucks up recoil, and if I have any money left over after buying the gun, then I’m going to pick up one of those Knoxx stocks for my Remington 870.

After that, we got to Blackwater, where we were given a tour of the facility, had some chow, and eventually some classroom time with Todd Jarrett…and then the guns.  I’m actually going to do a whole separate post on the guns tomorrow, because then Camera 2 will be up and running, and I can get some good shots.

After the classroom time, we finally got out to the range to do some shooting – in less than an hour we managed to run about 100 rounds downrange from our guns.  We shot quite a few relays, first at some paper then at some steel, but didn’t do a lot of shooting.  What really impacted me was how much difference in my shooting a couple of minor adjusts made.  Todd told me I wasn’t gripping the gun hard enough, so I tightened up my grip and got deeping into my stance, and next thing I know my group at five yards closed up quite a bit.  I think I’m going to learn a lot from this.

I’m still working out the details of our live show for tomorrow, however if tomorrow is anything like today, we can plan for an 8 or 9pm show, coming in live from Blackwater.  Squeaky will be hosting and I’ll have to call in, but it should be a pretty awesome show after a day of shooting, and I’ll be able to give you a full update on the products and and everything that we’re doing out here.

I’ve got some pretty good audio as well, so when we do the ParaUSA wrap up show, we’ll have a lot of different clips to play for the show.

I will break the coverage down a bit and talk about some of the gear as well, we have holsters and mag carriers and gloves from Blackhawk – so far the best piece of gear that I have from Blackhawk hasn’t been the Serpa holster (which is good rig), but the GLOVE they gave me.  The factory new 9mm mags were a little…rugged, so I was really happy to have that tactical glove from Blackwater to keep my thumb from getting all ripped to pieces loading these mags.

Tomorrow is going to be a full day of shooting; we’re basically going to shoot all day, which means by the end of the day my trigger finger is going to be hurt and I’m going to be grinning from ear to ear.  More to come as we get it!

Remember, you can check out the coverage of the event at one handy place, the 2A Blog Bash.