buckhorn cortez,
Thanks for giving me a chance to elaborate and explain what I meant.
It's not surprising that someone who first began looking at ways to carry in women's clothing 30 years ago would have settled on purse carry. There were a lot fewer options for women back then! Many of the best and most innovative products for women are really less than five years old, or at least more recent than 7 or 8 years ago. There's a much bigger world of possibilities now than there were in years past, but unfortunately a lot of good information about those choices is just now slowly trickling down to women at the local level -- and even so, it's tough to find a lot of these options in local gun stores.
Women who are involved in (some!) of the women's chapter-based shooting clubs have access to good carry info, but even some of those organizations actually get in the way of their members learning about options that their headquarters doesn't sell, and others will even actively discourage their leaders from sharing non-profitable carry options with their members. It's a tough situation to be sure.
So it's not surprising when any one woman hasn't seen or hasn't had opportunity to try a lot of the newer choices out there, or when someone who settled on a method that worked for her 30 years ago just isn't comfortable switching to a different option that doesn't feel as familiar to her as something she's been doing for a long time.
When I referred to people who are "well-trained," I was definitely not referring to someone who has had only NRA training, not even an instructor credential. The NRA provides wonderful opportunities for people to get started with learning about firearms and the shooting world, but it definitely isn't the place to stop with one's learning.
The NRA requires only a single 16-hour class to get a Basic Pistol Instructor credential. That's really not much.
Compare this to a pistol instructor credential from a long-established independent school, which requires its prospective instructors to attend and pass a minimum of 100 hours of class time from sources outside the school, as well as at least 100 hours from within the school, and also pass an extremely tough shooting test before they will certify someone to teach.
Someone who is well-trained will have gotten their information from more than one school, more than one franchise, more than one instructor -- and they will be deeply committed to staying current with whatever they know. They will keep learning, keep taking classes, keep growing, keep digging deeper, keep practicing, and keep comparing what they already know against the new information they keep studying.
But I really wasn't railing against any of that. I was talking about the fact that a lot of women settle for purse carry, not even knowing there are other options. Sometimes this is because they haven't heard there are other choices. Sometimes it's just a default assumption: "this is how women carry." Sometimes it's because they think carrying on-body would mean dressing like a tactical hobo complete with the ridiculous flappy competition tac-vest. Or because they don't like to wear belts and don't realize there are non belted products available.
It's one thing to choose a purse because you like purses or prefer them after you've seen the wonderful variety of other good choices; it's quite another to feel as though this is the only possible thing you can do.
pax