Episode Details

In this episode of Iron Sights, Scott sits down with Anthony Coley of Aegis Consulting at the Texas Tactical Police Officers Association Conference in Round Rock, Texas to unpack one of the most detailed, honest, and actionable roadmaps for changing firearms culture at the agency level you will ever hear.

Anthony walks through everything: the professional class taker problem, how competition shooting cracked open his understanding of real-world performance, and why getting bit by the PCSL bug turned into a mission to drag as many officers with him as possible. He does not pull punches about the resistance he faced from inside his own firearms unit, the admin conversations he had to be fully loaded for, and why good enough has never been good enough to him. This is the debrief you wish you could have with the guy quietly grinding in the background of every department while everyone else is doing the bare minimum.

And then Kim Pastore Pastore walks in. The founder of the Jorge Pastore Foundation joins Scott and Anthony live on the floor to drop a major announcement: Anthony Coley is officially the Foundation's new Director of Training. The conversation that follows is equal parts raw and inspiring, built on a shared belief that the ripple effects of good training touch officers and families in ways you will never fully see. The legacy match, the PCSL monthly shoots at Texas Shooting Academy, the nationwide reach: it is all coming. And this episode is where it starts.

In this episode:
• The professional class taker trap: Anthony explains how taking course after course without deliberate instructor-mode observation turns into diminishing returns, and how flipping that lens into instructor development makes every class exponentially more valuable
• Competition as a gunfight simulator: Anthony breaks down hit factor math from his first match, showing exactly why a slower shooter with cleaner hits still loses to a faster shooter with acceptable hits, and why that calculus maps directly to real threat encounters
• The survey before the pitch: before approaching administration, Anthony personally talked to every officer in the agency one on one, built a spreadsheet of who had red dots, who had zero formal training on them, and compiled case law on liability before walking into the chief's office armed with an answer for every possible question
• The cookie cutter problem in firearms instruction: Anthony's baking analogy makes the case that a single teaching method guarantees you will always produce students missing an arm, and that instructor development means accumulating 20 different ways to explain the same concept
• Inside the Red Dot class: 400 rounds, five hard-fought hours, aggressive trigger manipulation drills starting cold with zero classroom warmup, self-diagnosis doubles, and a final volley at 25 yards where exhausted officers shoot the best groups of their lives
• Building up instead of down: Anthony explains why he went to line-level officers first, then patrol shift lieutenants, then commanders, then administration, so that demand for training was already visible before he ever made a formal ask
• The Legacy Match origin story: a customer service mistake on an optic plate, a single giveaway stage, 24 brands cold-called into donating prizes, and a sold-out 100-person law enforcement only PCSL match that spawned a monthly series at Texas Shooting Academy in Florence, Texas

Chapters:
0:03 Episode intro and Scott's mission statement
0:59 Setting the scene: TTPOA Conference
1:26 Introducing Anthony Coley and Aegis Consulting
2:20 Anthony's background: CHP, Texas, canine, and the training gap
5:20 The professional class taker problem
9:08 Getting into competition shooting
12:25 Competition as a gunfight simulator: hit factor explained
15:35 Confidence, competency, and isolating deficiencies through competition
22:32 How the L