New Shooter 101 - Beginners workshop events

Helping beginners learn to shoot

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Beginners workshop event videos

Firearms Instructors: Our Beginners Workshop is your starting point for training new shooters.

This class can be taught anywhere – your church, clubhouse, even your garage or barn. No shooting range required.
Trainees need no firearms experience to attend this class. We've had many attendees who have never held a gun before.

The videos below are excerpts from Beginners Workshops we've helped present. Watch these videos to get an idea what the classes are about. For more about these classes, see our Beginners Workshop lesson plans page.

Developed in association with Armed Defense Training Association, a Washington State nonprofit gun club founded in 2011. ADTA volunteers helped create this training curriculum and have taught hundreds of beginners how to shoot.

Find all of our videos on the New Shooter 101 YouTube Channel

Experienced Shooters: Why Train Beginners? (1:20)

We get many students in our classes who have never handled a gun. Now many of them are shooting with us in open bay tactical events. So what makes us want to train beginners? There are two reasons.

First, there is a big demand for beginners training, driven by record sales to new gun owners. Our beginners classes fill up quickly, and many come back later for more training.

The second reason we want to train beginners is out of a sense of civic duty. Our founders guaranteed the right to keep and bear arms for a reason. They were fresh off a fight against tyranny, and understood it could happen again. By training beginners, we feel like we're helping out in our own small way.

Learn to Shoot at a Beginners Workshop (5:09)

By attending a New Shooter 101 4-hour Beginners Workshop you will learn the following skills:

-- How to be safe around handguns
-- How a handgun works
-- How to unload a handgun and make it safe to handle
-- How to load a handgun and make it ready to shoot
-- Learn to use your handgun by dry-firing at home
-- How to live-fire a handgun at the range
-- How to present a handgun from the holster

Teaching the New Shooter 101 Beginners Workshop (37:11)

This documentary video chronicles the New Shooter 101 Beginners Workshop for training new handgun owners. It was developed in cooperation with the Armed Defense Training Association, a nonprofit gun club in Seattle WA. What you’ll see in the video is an overview of how our Beginners Workshop is organized. It also includes clips from the hands-on portions of the workshop. The idea is to show you how our instructors and mentors interact with the students as they learn the basics of defensive handgun shooting.

Learning about gun safety at a Beginners Workshop (3:51)

Our beginners firearms training classes begin with the four basic rules of gun safety. In this video our instructor tells the trainees they will hear these rules repeatedly at all of our events, and that they will be enforced. He emphasizes that as a trainee you need to memorize these rules and be able to recite them if asked to do so.

Learning to handle real guns at a Beginners Workshop (2:18)

In this video our trainees are learning to load and unload real guns. For many of them this is the first time they have handled a handgun. The most common mistakes they make are (1) pointing the gun in an unsafe direction, and (2) placing their fingers on the trigger before they are on-target. Our instructor always corrects these mistakes, while at the same time allowing them to make all the other little mistakes that are part of the learning process.

Helping beginners learn to shoot