"If you're going to quote me, then write this down." I'm on the range early on the first morning of a two-day class with Dave Harrington, and I haven't even finished my coffee yet.

I've been to a lot of firearms classes. In some I've nearly filled a looseleaf folder with notes. At a class last year, a buddy and I not only filled a folder each and had to start on a second one but were still jotting notes on the drive back.

Not so with Dave Harrington. My notebook has three pages of the class, with the first one being the details we'd need to know in case of a medical emergency.

Lest you take that as a comment on the safety of his class, I've been running into more and more classes where the medical briefing is the start of the class. For Dave Harrington it is simply part of the reality of living in the world. Guns are for shooting bad people. Sometimes the result is that good people get shot by bad people. You'd better know the location of the closest hospital beforehand and not be trying to do an internet search on your Blackberry while leaking blood.

Bring a gun that works (or two or three), a lot of ammo and all your working magazines. You’ll need them.

Dave comes to firearms instruction from real-world experience. He spent 23 years in the U.S. Army, 16 of them in Special Forces. Judging from his presentation, none of those years was spent on a classic firearms competition range.

Do not think from that description that he is a poor shot or poor instructor. Far from it. While most of the time I was thinking to myself "I can do that," Dave is quite a skilled shooter and will perform shooting tasks that you will be hard-pressed to equal. He's a "been there, done that" kind of guy.

No, the difference you'll get with Dave Harrington is that he's not at all interested in winning contests, unless the contest is to see who goes home at night, the good guy or the bad guy.

As a consequence, you should not go to a Dave Harrington class expecting to learn the fine points of trigger control and how to analyze just what your finger is doing. Nor focus on this grip versus that, or this stance versus that. You aren't going to learn how to tear down, analyze and game out an IPSC or IDPA stage. You won't spend time discussing speed differences of various holsters.

What you will be doing is learning how to shoot a firearm in such a way as to increase your chances of being the guy who survives. From my observation Dave is the kind of guy who learns by doing. Some learn by reading, others by watching, but most learn by doing. So Dave has you doing what you need to know.