This past week I had the great privilege to assist Ernest Langdon with his final class. Ernest has unfortunately (for us) decided to stop teaching and focus completely on Langdon Tactical. I met Ernest 20 years ago, through TLG of course. We shot together while living in VA, but when I moved out west, I wasn’t able to hang out and shoot with Ernest, so TLG and I took a class from him shortly before TLG died. It was an excellent class, and I was pleasantly surprised at just how similarly we looked at various concepts.
Fast forward to the creation of LTT, and Ernest and I discovered that we really do approach shooting and teaching in a very similar way. LTT became a sponsor of Pistol-Training.com, and I have competed with LTT guns for the past couple of seasons. Last year Ernest told me he was planning to stop teaching in 2024, and so we made tentative plans to teach together before that happened. We were not able to make that happen until now. Ernest’s final class.
The class itself was excellent, which should come as no surprise to anyone. Ernest is one of the better teachers in the field and it shows. In the first 5 minutes of shooting, Ernest was able to demonstrate how to quickly and correctly identify a shooter’s problem, show that shooter (and the rest of the class) how to fix it, and then let them practice the fix. After that though, the weather did not want to cooperate with us, and it was cold and rainy for most of the rest of the day. Nonetheless, we adjusted the schedule and finished out with a very good night shoot.
The second day of class was pretty special. Aside from more excellent instruction, Aimee Langdon, Ernest’s better half, came out to the range and recorded us while Ernest ran the class through the FAST test. Amazingly, 5 people earned their advanced pins, and 2 people earned a FAST coin! That is a record setting class as far as I know. When the class was over, Ernest passed the FAST coin back to Pistol-Training.com. To say I’m happy and honored to have the coin back at Pistol-Training.com is an understatement. Going forward, the FAST test will be a feature of Pistol-Training.com events. Speaking of which, a new page on the site will detail the available courses, so look for that soon.
Ernest was a tremendous friend and mentor to TLG, and has been a supporter of Pistol-Training from the very beginning. That has continued to this day and we wish him and everyone at LTT the greatest success going forward.
