Instructor
David Miller
“It’s not about motivation, it’s about discipline”
David is an avid firearms enthusiast who is passionate about the 2nd amendment, firearms training, shooting sports, and responsible gun ownership. David has been active in Law Enforcement for over 25 years and competes nationally in the United States Practical Shooting Association (USPSA). He is currently ranked as a Master Class pistol shooter in both production and carry optics division. He knows the best techniques for teaching students, because he must utilize those techniques himself in competition.
David has been doing firearms training for over 7 years and in a quest to continually better himself and his teaching techniques, he has sought training from top National and world champion pistol speed shooters such as Bob Vogel and Ben Stoeger. His philosophy for teaching people to shoot, is that they should learn to shoot at the pace they would in a competition or a deadly threat encounter. In other words, slow doesn’t fit into that equation. Fixing shooting related issues at speed is a priority. Going fast isn’t the issue, the technique is the issue.
After about 16 years in law enforcement, he believed he was a good pistol shooter and ventured into the start of his competition shooting journey. After shooting his first USPSA match, he was humbled as he placed in the bottom 40 percent of the shooters in his division. He thought to himself, “how could this be with my training background”.
The simple answer is that Law Enforcement training had not prepared him adequately to be efficient with his firearm. Even with the advanced training he had participated in, no emphasis was ever placed on how to properly shoot his gun. In other words, no one had ever broken down recoil management, the affects your grip has on trigger control and how trigger control will suffer when grip is improper, how and when to properly transition to another target/threat, how to efficiently move while shooting, etc.
His training had consisted of shooting a gun with little instruction and then eventually qualifying. Some phrases that he heard over and over from Law Enforcement firearms instructors were, “you’re jerking the trigger” or “slow down”. The first is an improper analysis of technique and the 2nd is good advice if losing a gunfight is the goal. For Dave personally, he qualified for years by aiming high right on the target to insure center hits.
Fast forward to today and it’s an entirely different story. Dave has previously won the Michigan State Sectional as well as other Level 2 matches and consistently finishes first place at local club matches. At the national level, in 2022, he finished within 16% of the champion. Prior to reaching out to teach in the Law Enforcement community, he has spent 7 years teaching in the civilian market, while honing his teaching skills and working out ways to get students to fully understand the “why” and “how” to properly shoot their pistol. As a result, what he has learned from almost every student he has taught, is that regardless of their skill set, they all needed work with the fundamentals in order to get to that next level of shooting performance.
Much of his teaching style has been adopted from techniques used by top National and World Champion pistol speed shooters. Even the military is reaching out to this market of competition shooters to help train their soldiers because it is recognized that in order for a competition shooter to operate at a high level, they have to learn to master the fundamentals of shooting. Everything else builds off of that basic fundamental. His commitment to his training is just as important to him as his commitment to the students that he gets the privilege and honor to work with.