My wife and I did a CCW class with Louisiana Shooters Unlimited south of Lake Charles yesterday overall I would rate it postive and would not hesitate to recommend them to any gun familar person looking for a CCW course. The facility / range is a bit primitve, but includes are fairly sizeable advanced outdoor range with shoot house area where they offer more advanced shooting classes. Given the bad weather with drizzling rain all day yesterday we spent almost all of our time indoors, their class room / indoor range is in a portion of a small converted metal shop building and is functional if not exactly elegant, folding thankfully padded metal chairs, work tables, portable propane heaters (they do have window air conditioners for the summer), indoor pistol range would have been comfortable with 2 shooters, but was cramped with 3 on the line at a time. We had a groupd of 12 students, a main instructor and a couple of helpers that came in throughout the day. (be aware the restroom is a camping trailer for now as they have no running water on site) For the shooting portion we werre divided up into 2 groups of 6 one shot while the other took their lunch break (there are few dining options in the area a few miles south of the Lake Charles airport, we opted for the nearest, a Subway sandwich shop about 2 miles away). When I was younger I worked as a scuba instructor, so have a fair amount of training and experience in techniques for conveying technical and potentially life threatening details to groups of adults in similar situations, so my take on things may be a bit different than others, looking at little details, etc. With that in mind I would say they the presentation was good, but did get off track a few times with some jumping ahead and back, but in the end covered everything in what I think was a mostly appropriate detail. Some parts were a bit light, but obligatory, parts of a gun, and that sort of thing, however our class group seemed to be made up of a majority of somewhat experienced shoots, with only one or two with little or no shooting experience. Some of this may have been due to a lack of recent teaching on the part of the insturctor, I get the feeling this was the first class since the holiday break, and I know from personal experience when I was scuba instructing that the first class of the season always seemed a little off, until getting back in the groove. The process as a whole made for a LONG day from 8 am - 6 pm, there was a lot of dry material to go over and overall I feel they did a good job. Some of the shoot / no shoot scenarios in the question and answer portion did tend towards the borderline, but that seems to always happen on message board like this one also. One nice feature is they had a notary come by that for a nominal fee would notarized the applicable portions of the application. Is this the right CCW class for you, I don't know, but I will say I will consider using them in the future, some of the comments were not exactly politically correct, but not too offensive to anyone, unless perhaps you are an anti-gun type. My wife also felt like she got a fair amount of positive things out of the class, but did feel the women in the class were treated somewhat differently than the men, which I noticed as well, but this may be because they were seen (and probably were) less experienced shooters. An example of this in our shooting group we had 3 women and 3 men, the women shot first and started out learning how to load and chamber a round, first with snap caps then with real ammo, whe it was the mens turn the instruciton was a much simpler, load and chamber a round with much less hand holding. Most of the hand holding with the men was centered around one guy with a new gun and lots of failure to load problems. I am not sure what else to say, but will be glad to answer any questions, again I would have no problem suggesting these folks to any experienced shooter wanting to take a CCW class, just don't expect it to be an intro to firearms class.
Ike
Ike
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