I give my review of the Green Ops Advanced Covert Carry Skills class.

Bottom Line Up Front: Take this class!!!

Mike Green has spent a bunch of time overseas, in plain clothes. He worked in environments where being armed was somewhere on the spectrum between unusual and unacceptable. Sounds a lot like the civilian context. And that’s the main reason I signed up for this class.

This isn’t SFAS. Nobody’s yelling at you or making you do push-ups, and it’s not designed to turn you into a steely-eyed gunfighter. The curriculum is based on the same material that Mike uses to get diplomatic staff and other OCONUS State Department-type folks to a capable level with a handgun, should the need arise.

Mike also draws from his overseas experience to discuss the mechanics of concealment. I liked that his block on gear selection focuses as much on clothing and how to wear it correctly as it does on gun and holster choice.

Day 1 aggressively focused on the gritty details of shooting mechanics and demonstrations of what matters when and why. Every single exercise is shot from concealment. This is an even more challenging prospect when you’re wearing three layers to deal with the sub-30-degree temperatures and wet weather. This culminated with a practical exercise in the form of a USPSA stage.

Day 2 built off of Day 1’s foundation and started incorporating more complexity in terms of movement, positional shooting, and support hand manipulations. What’s interesting is that all of the “skill tests” that are used are rooted heavily in competition shooting.

Alex Sansone took his first formal pistol class in 2009, and has since
accumulated almost 500 total hours of open enrollment training from many of the nation’s top instructors including Massad Ayoob, Craig Douglas, Tom Givens, Gabe White, Cecil Burch, Chuck Haggard, Darryl Bolke, and many others.

Spending his professional life in the corporate world, Alex quickly realized incongruities between “best practices” in the defensive world, and the practical realities of his professional and social limitations.

“I’ve never carried a gun professionally. I’m just a yuppie suburbanite that happens to live an armed lifestyle.

Having worked in the corporate arena for the last decade, I’ve discovered that a lot of the “requirements” and norms of gun carriers at large aren’t necessarily compatible with that professional environment.

I also have a pretty diverse social background, having grown up in the Northeast, and there are many people in my life that are either gun-agnostic or uncomfortable with the idea of private gun ownership.

This has afforded me not only insights into how we are perceived by different subcultures, but how to manage and interact with people that may not share your point of view without coming across as combative or antisocial.

This is why my focus is the overlooked social aspects of the armed lifestyle.”

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