By Jeff Vrabel

Gary Glemboski has been shooting for 50 years and practicing martial arts for 46, long enough to become a seventh-degree black belt. He’s received a Medal of Valor from his police department for climbing a Savannah TV tower during a nighttime thunderstorm to pull down a potential jumper, and he’s been awarded a Silver Star for an operation in which he and his fellow officers were shot at about 80 times.

He knows what he’s doing. And he wants to teach it to others, often by showing them how they don’t.

“I’ve had guys tell me, ‘Man, I’ve been shooting for 25 years, but you’ve taught me more in three hours than I knew in all that time,” Glemboski says, hanging out at a gun range in a Midway forest well south of downtown. “But I say, ‘No, that’s probably not true. You were unconsciously incompetent. You really didn’t know what you didn’t know.”

Glemboski’s Global Tactical Training Group — he’s the founder and director — has been instructing Savannah residents (and those in more exotic locales) in self-defense, shooting and the martial arts for five years. He’s a tall guy, speaks directly and very fast and; it’s not easy to believe him when he says he’s 59 years old, even when starts talking about his hip replacements. But he’s also an expert in the way that you can tell he knows things, is planning things, is a few steps ahead of you tactically, at all times.

As an instructor, he says, his job isn’t to make someone a stronger shooter. Shooting a gun, he says, is nothing, it’s something anyone can do badly. “My job is to make you fail. To push you to point where you can no longer operate. We want you to fail, your guns to fail, everything you bring with you to break. Because that’s when you start learning. From a self-defense standpoint, hitting a target consistently, and at a speed that’s combat-effective, is what you need to be able to do.”

Read more about Glemboski, his team and what they offer in the current issue of South.