Ben DeWalt | OnSight Firearms Training

Ben DeWalt is the founder and lead instructor of OnSight Firearms Training, a New York-based organization providing defensive pistol, rifle, shotgun, permit, private, and related skills training across the United States. His professional identity combines firearms instruction, martial arts, continual cross-training, and the practical work of building training opportunities for students throughout the Northeast.

DeWalt is both a traveling instructor and a training host. He teaches OnSight programs in multiple states while also bringing established instructors into regions where access to nationally recognized training was historically limited. That combination has made his contribution broader than any single class or technique: he teaches students directly, develops other instructors through collaboration, and builds the logistical connections that allow a larger training community to grow.

Professional Background

DeWalt grew up around firearms and began shooting .22 rifles as a child. He took up martial arts and karate during adolescence, establishing a coaching and movement background that would later inform his approach to defensive skills.

After high school, he worked as a DJ, security employee, and nightclub manager in New York City. He later became a booking agent and coordinated tours for bands. Although this work preceded his firearms career, the skills transferred directly to professional training: securing venues, coordinating schedules and travel, promoting events, managing people, and assembling viable audiences.

DeWalt subsequently worked as a range safety officer and firearms instructor. He also held a customer- and product-service role at Kimber, where his work included test-firing repaired firearms and gunsmithing 1911 pistols. As his involvement in professional firearms education increased, he and his wife chose to concentrate on OnSight as a full-time training business.

OnSight Firearms Training

OnSight Firearms Training offers group live-fire courses, one-on-one instruction, private group programs, and state permit training. Its live-fire curriculum spans pistol, rifle, and shotgun, with classes designed for students ranging from first-time gun owners to experienced armed citizens and law-enforcement personnel.

Although rooted in New York, OnSight operates well beyond a single home range. Its current schedule includes courses across the Northeast and in states throughout the country. This traveling model exposes DeWalt to students working within very different laws, equipment restrictions, range environments, and levels of prior experience.

OnSight’s public course descriptions emphasize learning new skills, refining existing skills, and applying fundamentals in the context of self-defense. The organization also offers New York’s required 18-hour pistol-permit course and assistance with resident and nonresident permit processes in several states.

Building a Northeast Training Network

One of DeWalt’s most significant contributions is his work as a host and organizer for visiting instructors. A traveling instructor needs more than a curriculum: a successful class requires a suitable range, local coordination, scheduling, registration, communication, legal familiarity, equipment planning, and enough enrolled students to support the event. DeWalt’s earlier experience organizing tours proved unusually relevant to those demands.

OnSight has repeatedly brought outside instructors into the Northeast and handled the logistical work needed for them to teach. Instructor Alex Hartmann, for example, credited OnSight with managing the behind-the-scenes requirements for a traveling shotgun class, allowing him to arrive and teach a full group. Independent reporting has similarly documented DeWalt maintaining an East Coast circuit for nationally known instructors.

During P&S ModCast 461 — Open Enrollment, Scott Jedlinski credited DeWalt with helping bring many prominent instructors into the Northeast. This reflects an influence that extends beyond OnSight’s own curriculum. Students gain access to outside expertise, visiting instructors reach a viable regional audience, and the local training community becomes more connected.

Continual Cross-Training

DeWalt does not present OnSight as the only source from which students or instructors should learn. He and the OnSight staff have a longstanding practice of attending courses taught by other professionals, evaluating what they learn, and bringing useful lessons back to their own students.

In a 2021 interview with Riding Shotgun With Charlie, DeWalt described extensive training through organizations including the SIG Sauer Academy and Tom Givens’ Rangemaster. The interview also documented his practice of retaking classes, learning from different instructors, and improving both his shooting and teaching skills.

That approach remained visible in 2026. After traveling and co-teaching seven classes with Erick Gelhaus, DeWalt immediately returned to the role of student in a combined program taught by Jared Reston and Scott Jedlinski. The sequence captures a central feature of his professional approach: teaching does not mean learning is complete.

Martial Arts and Defensive Context

DeWalt’s martial-arts background gives his firearms instruction a broader physical context. Defensive firearm use can involve movement, balance, distance, physical contact, weapon access, retention, and decision-making. A firearm is one component of the problem rather than a substitute for understanding those factors.

Martial arts also provided DeWalt with an established model for coaching: demonstrate a skill, allow meaningful practice, observe performance, correct specific problems, and gradually add resistance or complexity. Student accounts of OnSight classes frequently describe this kind of progression and individualized attention.

Defensive Pistol and Accuracy

Defensive pistol is a central part of OnSight’s curriculum. Programs progress from safe gun handling and core marksmanship into presentations, manipulations, movement, positional work, use of cover, and more demanding accuracy and decision problems.

DeWalt’s Defensive Pistol — Accuracy and Accountability course makes the standard explicit. A miss in a defensive setting is not merely a lost point on a score sheet; every projectile has a consequence. Students must learn to produce the necessary accuracy within relevant time constraints and understand the limits of their current ability.

This approach avoids treating speed and accuracy as opposing absolutes. Speed without accountable hits is inadequate, but accuracy that cannot be produced within the available time may also fail to solve the problem. Training provides a controlled environment in which students can explore and improve that balance.

Defensive Shotgun

Shotgun instruction has been a substantial part of DeWalt’s professional work for years. Independent documentation of OnSight defensive-shotgun courses dates at least to 2017, and later reports describe his work with both pump-action and semiautomatic platforms, including the Remington 870 and Beretta 1301.

His instruction treats the shotgun as a complete defensive system. Students work on safe handling, loading and unloading, ammunition management, recoil control, patterning, manipulation, positional shooting, and solving realistic problems. The platform has particular relevance in restrictive jurisdictions, but DeWalt does not reduce it to a legal workaround; it remains a capable system whose advantages and limitations require dedicated training.

Rifle and Carbine Training

OnSight’s rifle and carbine programs address zero confirmation, accuracy, manipulations, movement, positional shooting, use of cover, sling management, and equipment validation. The classes allow both shooter limitations and equipment problems to emerge under structured repetition.

An optic that loosens, a sling that interferes with a manipulation, or a technique that fails under time pressure becomes useful diagnostic information. In this model, completing the course is not the only goal. Students should leave with a clearer understanding of what they can do, what their equipment will tolerate, and what they need to improve next.

Student-Centered Instruction

Independent reviews of DeWalt’s courses consistently emphasize his ability to work with different experience levels in the same class. Rather than forcing every student into identical performance expectations, he observes the individual, identifies a limiting factor, provides a specific correction, and raises the challenge from that student’s current level.

Students also describe an environment built around safety, positive correction, and the absence of performative instructor ego. Demonstrating instructor skill has limited value unless it produces better student performance. OnSight’s strongest reviews focus instead on useful explanations, individual attention, and measurable improvement.

Collaboration and Instructor Development

DeWalt’s work with other instructors is not limited to hosting. He has co-taught pistol-performance material with Erick Gelhaus of Cougar Mountain Solutions, with discussions addressing speed and accuracy, dry practice, learning through failure, growth mindset, and continued professional education.

Failure in this context is information. A miss, slow manipulation, unsuccessful drill, or equipment problem gives the instructor and student evidence to evaluate. The productive questions are what caused the result and what should change. That diagnostic approach supports both student development and better teaching.

Areas of Expertise

Defensive pistol, rifle, carbine, and shotgun instruction
Accuracy, accountability, and performance-based firearms training
Individualized coaching and shooter diagnosis
Martial arts and integrated defensive-skills concepts
Open-enrollment and private firearms instruction
Training-event development and visiting-instructor logistics
Instructor collaboration and continuing education
Equipment validation through structured training
State firearms-permit instruction and armed-citizen education

Primary & Secondary Involvement

DeWalt is a member of the Extended Primary & Secondary Network and appeared on P&S ModCast 461 — Open Enrollment with Chris Bean, Caleb Giddings, Dave Simerly, and Matt Landfair. The panel discussed open-enrollment instruction, communication, coaching, student needs, instructor judgment, and the realities of public-facing firearms education.

His experience as a student, instructor, traveling teacher, host, event organizer, and collaborative instructor gives him an unusually complete perspective on the open-enrollment model.

Current Work

DeWalt continues to lead OnSight Firearms Training, teach throughout the country, host outside educators, collaborate with other instructors, and return regularly to the student role. His professional impact is both instructional and structural: he develops the people on his firing line while helping create access to a much wider training community.

Sources and Further Reading

Profile last reviewed: September 10, 2026. Biographical details and professional affiliations were checked against the sources listed above.