Let us talk gun training.

Mike the dipshit and not really a gun guy wrote an opinion piece for the Huffington Post called Want To Be A Gun Nut? Move To Kansas.

According to him, Kansas sucks because:

“Not only can you wander around anywhere in the Sunflower State with a gun in your pants, you don’t even need any kind of training or licensing at all. If you are what my friends in Fairfax call a ‘law-abiding’ person, go into a gun shop, buy a banger, stick some ammo into it and you’re ready to defend yourself and everyone against all enemies – foreign, domestic or anything else…

Then in 2015 the same bunch of fools in the State House erased the law which required anyone applying for CCW to first take an eight-hour training course, as if sitting around in someone’s back yard and talking about the last time you shot a squirrel or a skunk constitutes training of any kind.”  

Mike has a boner for training.  Back in July, he posted on his blog just how terrible it is that 40% of CCW permit holders have no formal gun training.  He then goes on to criticize most of the training available.

“Know where the word ’training’ comes from as it applies to guns? It’s a word first used by the NRA which was actually founded as a ‘training’ organization in 1873. Not only does the NRA continue to promote themselves as America’s premier gun-training organization, but they have launched a new training effort focusing on CCW techniques called Carry Guard, which they refer to as a “first-rate, elite program” aimed (pardon the pun) at people who lead the ‘concealed-carry lifestyle’ and want to be ready for ‘real-life situations you must be prepared to face.’

This isn’t training – it’s a sham. It’s used to entice people to purchase an insurance policy which will allegedly pay all their legal fees after they shoot someone, assuming they don’t get convicted for some kind of felony committed while they were using their gun. Along with this training program, the NRA now offers its standard training programs on video, and these programs are used by most CCW-issuing authorities in states where pre-CCW training is still required. What’s the difference between NRA video training and video games like Call of Duty that you can play on your X-Box?  There is no difference.”

Mike started that post with this statement “I have decided that it’s time for Mike the Gun Guy to become a little less polite (imagine – Mike the Gun Guy ‘less’ polite).”

So, I feel emboldened to be a little less polite myself.

Ahem…. fuck this guy.

First and foremost, the Second Amendment says that the “the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.”  I believe that the “and bear arms” part means the right to carry in public, and the Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals agreed in Moore v. Maidgan.

The Ninth Circuit came to the opposite conclusion, but keep in mind that the Ninth Circuit is the Captain Peter “Wrongway” Peachfuzz of the judiciary.   If you want to know what the constitution really means when it comes to civil liberties, take any decision by the Ninth and do exactly the opposite.

While I am willing to accept some standards for CCW (e.g. background checks) and being told the CCW laws of the state, I am wary of restrictions.  I lived in Chicagoland when Moore was decided and I remember quite clearly how the legislature wanted to make the standards for training so high and so expensive that most people couldn’t obtain a permit.

The goal was to implement a concealed carry equivalent to the impossible literacy standards tests used to deny black people the right to vote.

What is up with Democrats using testing as a way to deny people their civil liberties?

That is all principle.

Let’s talk pragmatics.

What constitutes enough training for CCW or for gun rights in general?  Moms Demand Action bemoans that people can get guns without training.

What is their standard?  How many hours at the range and how many rounds will satisfy them?

The NYPD firearms qualification is notoriously low in its standards but officers still fail it because it is “something that is not taken seriously.”  Which is why the NYPD are notoriously shitty shots prone to hitting bystanders with a hail of bullets.

Would requiring citizens to match “America’s premier law enforcement agency” be sufficient?  I doubt it.

Beyond the appeal to authority fallacy in regards to training, there is the fact that I have never met someone who just decided to go out and get a CCW and a gun and never shot it.

In my experience, CCW is something obtained after years of familiarity with guns, be it hunting, competition shooting, or just good ‘ol target practice.

I have the feeling that Mike and the MDA crowd would strenuously object to my having an Alabama CCW permit, which required no training at all.  They would explain that without the magical blessing of goverment bureaucracy I’m an incompetent boob who is more dangerous to myself than anything else.

Now I know that no simulation is a sufficient substituent for the real thing, but I’d put my IDPA skills up against any NYPD or LAPD qualified beat cop (except last Saturday, I don’t know what happened but I had a bad week).

But of course that isn’t blessed with the magic pixie dust of goverment so the 300 rounds or so a month I throw downrange in the pursuit of accuracy at speed doesn’t count.

They, like all statists, do not trust us to be the responsible, self disciplined people that we are.  They want to impose their literacy tests training standards to keep us all where they think we belong, under the Democrat massa’s thumb.