Our Story
A Permit Isn't Readiness: Why 2717 Defensive Concepts Exists
In 2004, I was working in Rankin, Pennsylvania. My shift started early. I'd be arriving around 3 or 4 in the morning. The company I worked for was great. The neighborhood wasn't. There were mornings I didn't feel safe walking in.
So I sought out concealed carry training. I lived in West Virginia, but I took my class in Ohio (both states required a class to get a permit), and the Ohio class gave me broader reciprocity with other states. The class was two days long. We fired about 100 rounds. One target, five yards away, standing still. No drawing from a holster. Not once.
A week later, I bought a CCW holster, outside the waistband, nothing fancy. I put it on and stood there thinking: how do I draw this thing safely? I genuinely didn't know. There were no YouTube tutorials to fall back on. This was 2004. I didn't even have internet or a phone that could have shown me if there had been. I'd been around firearms my whole life, but carrying one, concealed, on my body, with the expectation that I might need it, that was a completely different mindset than anything I'd learned.
I didn't carry it. Not because I didn't want to. Because I didn't trust myself with it yet, and I had no way to close that gap.
Dave Durisio and the Years That Built My Foundation
A few months later I mentioned all this to my uncle. He said he knew a guy who competed in some kind of pistol shooting sport, and had him give me a call. That guy was Dave Durisio, a USPSA Grand Master who competed nearly every week.
Dave took me under his wing. He taught me how to actually draw. Target transitions. Shooting on the move. It felt like a live-action version of a game that didn't exist yet, before Call of Duty, before any of it. I was hooked. I started competing, and I kept at it for years, culminating in 2009 when I earned a slot at the USPSA National Championships in Las Vegas. It's still one of the best experiences of my life.
Around that same time, I got remarried, and my wife and I built a blended family, three children, all around age 9. Life took over, the way it does. Training and competing paused. My last match was in 2011.
Time went on. I stopped carrying altogether. Between the kids' activities and all the places that didn't allow firearms, taking it off and putting it back on became a hassle I didn't want to deal with. Looking back, I don't think I fully weighed what that decision meant. I just let it fade.
My Brother, and the Flame Coming Back
Fast forward to 2022. My brother, who never grew up shooting or hunting and never had much interest in firearms at all, started asking me questions. About carrying. About holsters. Things he'd clearly been thinking hard about, because his questions went deeper than "how do I get a permit."
He told me something had happened close to home. His wife worked in real estate, and between what she was seeing in the field and what was happening around our area, they didn't feel safe anymore. Getting a firearm, to him, now made sense.
I told him what I'd tell anyone: getting your CCW is not the finish line. I told him my own story: the two-day class, the 100 rounds, the holster I didn't know how to draw. He got his permit anyway, and not long after, started working part-time at Alexander Armory. We started training together, and eventually got permission from the range owner to practice drawing live from the holster. I walked him through everything I'd learned competing, my whole philosophy on firearms and safety, built over years of matches and mentorship. That was enough for him to commit to training the right way, not just the required way.
That relationship kept growing. Eventually I found myself helping train 10-to-17-year-olds on firearm safety, alongside him. Something in me, a flame that had gone quiet since 2011, started to grow again.
With the state of the world, I found myself carrying consistently now, not just owning a permit. And training itself had changed since my competition days. YouTube and the internet had opened up a world of instruction that simply didn't exist when I first tried to learn on my own in 2004. For the first time in my life, I went looking for professional-level training designed specifically for defensive carry, not competition.
My brother knew a USCCA rep and asked where to find intermediate or advanced training. That question led me to my mentor, Kerry Dugan of Archangel Defense. Training with Kerry reopened my eyes to concepts I'd never considered, even after years of competing. I was locked in. I wanted to become an instructor myself.
I took Kerry's Defensive Pistol Program, and it was everything I'd hoped for. I kept taking more advanced classes, pushing further. In late 2024, Kerry asked if I'd be interested in taking the Defensive Pistol Program Instructor Course. This was the moment I'd been circling for years without knowing it. I said yes, both feet in.
2025 threw some obstacles at that plan. Health issues, both mine and my wife's, forced a postponement. But I finished the course in October 2025.
The 3.5-Second Draw
Somewhere in the middle of all that training with my brother, we started tracking something simple: how long it took him to draw from concealment and get a first accurate shot on target. When we started, it was 3.5 seconds.
Over four months of consistent, correct training, that number came down to 1.3 seconds.
3.5s → 1.3s
That's not a stat pulled from a course manual. That's my brother, the guy who'd never shot growing up, who got his permit because he and his wife stopped feeling safe, standing in front of a target with a stopwatch running. If you've seen the video on our home page or on the after-your-CCW-class landing page, that's him.
That transformation is the whole reason 2717 exists.
Why 2717 Defensive Concepts
Between my own path (the class that taught me nothing about drawing, the years with Dave, the years I let it all lapse, and coming back through Kerry Dugan's program) and watching my brother go from a fresh permit to a 1.3-second draw, I kept landing on the same gap.
A CCW class gives you a permit. It does not give you readiness. It was never designed to. Most classes cover the law, the fundamentals, maybe a static qualification course, and that's it. No draw from concealment under any real pressure. No follow-up shot. No movement. That's not a criticism of those classes; it's simply not what they're built to do.
2717 Defensive Concepts exists to close that gap, the one I lived through myself for eighteen years before I ever found the training that actually closed it. Faith. Discipline. Defense. Iron sharpens iron. If you've got your permit and you've never actually drawn from concealment under time pressure, you're not alone. I wasn't either, for a long time. That's exactly where we start.
If your permit is the only thing standing between you and being ready, let's talk about it.
Comments