The very best teachers (and there are too few of these, in my experience) understand what they’re teaching, where it fits, and why it is (or isn’t) applicable in any given circumstance. There are a lot of law enforcement trainers out there, for instance, who can’t fathom that there’s a difference between being awakened in the middle of the night by someone breaking through a patio door and getting a dispatch for that guy who just broke through that door. There’s a huge difference in how each person needs to respond even if the catalyst for the event — the bad guy — is the same.
via What’s with all the infighting in the defensive shooting world? | Training talk.
Nothing new here if you have been following this blog for a while. I think a lot of the infighting has to do with trying to capture clientage which is not a bad reason to come up with some new twist or cool move to set you apart from the others. But I also see it as a losing proposition: The bigger the Ninja stuff, the less Regular Joe is gonna be attracted and the instructors will not make that money.
Instead of Cool Ninja Moves, we need MANY instructors that teach the Basics on each of the guns: Pistol. Shotgun & Rifle. A two or three-day class covering from basic operation to basic defensive use. No rappelling down a building or shooting your rifle while doing 50 mph in the highway, just your basic instructional on how to safely operate and defend yourself and your family.
Take most rifle classes. They are touted to be tactical rifle/carbine or Defensive rifle/carbine but what 90% of them mean to say is tactical/defensive training with an M4. And not any M4 but one with about 4 car payments worth of crap attached to the rails and another year worth of mags, dump pouches, harnesses, chicken plates tactical 5.11 wardrobe and whatever sunshades are officially cool this week. No, if you are an instructor, you should be able to teach a line of students with rifles ranging from a lever-action to a SCAR up and including a Mosin Nagant sans pig sticker. You are hired to teach basic & defensive rifle and not show how much you know about the M4 with really cool keymod magnesium rails. Maybe that is the reason why Appleseed is kicking butt and generating more proficient rifle shooters than anybody else.
If you keep it simple, they will come.
Exactly right. It seems now days that you sort of get looked down upon unless you’re toting the latest and greatest AR platform weapon with a holo sight device equal to my house payment.
Your comment about teaching someone with what weapon they have is spot on. I know it’s shocking to hear, but some of us do not particularly care for the AR’s. **Gasp!!”
I’d love to take a class to get some training but I don’t have the correct 5.11 pants or Under Armour shirt so I can fit in with those high speed, low drag, guys.
Joe
What’s fun is to take a defensive carbine course, show up in Wranglers and toting a Mini-14, go through the first couple of lessons, and then casually mention somewhere during the course of the day that
“Yeah, Iraq in 2008, Afghanistan in 2010, and Korea in 2012. CIB, and a bunch of fruit salad.”
Pig-sticker training. THAT’S what we need more of!
I can do a fairly quick reload on a S&W 22A (yes, that’s a .22LR plinking pistol). Why? Because when I discovered the concept of “tactical” mag changes, that’s the gun I had. I simply practiced with the gun I had.
Practicing the same thing on a Glock would have been next to useless to me, as I didn’t own a Glock (still don’t). Training for low-light tactics using pistol-mounted lights won’t help me as I don’t have any pistol-mounted lights (nor do I plan on getting any), but I’ll happily learn and practice tactics that stress one-handed shooting, with a flashlight in the support hand. A normal flashlight of sufficient luminosity, not the latest-greatest $250 whiz-bang micro-tactical wonder-light (which somehow, despite its uber-greatness, still burns through a set of batteries in 1.5 hours).
And when I get an AR, it will probably be mostly stock; I simply can’t justify (or afford) putting enough mods on a rifle to triple (or quadruple) its out-of-pocket cost and which only marginally increase its utility, and I’m not interested in an everlasting “project gun”. Assuming a good rifle, I need: sights/scope, magazines, ammo, maybe a weapon-mounted light (justifiable on a rifle; I don’t have extra hands). If you can’t get the job done with that, it’s not your equipment that’s the issue.
I think a much larger issue is that there are far more trainers than the market can realistically support, so the marginal ones, ie most of them use gimmicks to try and drum up business. The echo chamber effect of the gunblogosphere tends to greatly exaggerate the number of gun owners who are interested in or actually attended any sort of organized training. It is probably generous to guess that even 2% of gun owners are in the market for training at any given time, the real number is probably closer to a fraction of one percent and the explosion of “expert” instructors offering their services is out of all proportion to the available market forcing them to do ridiculous things to draw attention to their businesses.
To quote the great Tam: “Any trainer who doesn’t encourage you to walk the earf and seek all kinds of training, and instead tells you his Kung fu is the only Kung fu, isn’t trying to teach you something, he’s trying to sell you something.”