Blue Train said:
I disagree. A piano is not a good comparison. But what about a car?
When you finally are old enough to get your learner's permit or driver's license, you probably haven't had one minute of professional instruction or even a single word of advice from your parents.
In Washington state, in order to even apply for a learner's permit, teenagers have to be signed up for a driver's training class. They cannot get a permit until they have signed up for the class, and the permit will become active within one week of the time the class starts. They can't get a permit before that.
To get the license, they have to finish the driver's training class (which in addition to a bunch of classroom time, also includes a minimum of 6 hrs behind the wheel being formally instructed by a professional trainer). *AND* they have to spend a minimum of 50 hours behind the wheel (10 of it at night) being supervised by an experienced driver who has been driving at least 5 years.
But you've been sitting next to them for the previous fifteen years learning to drive. Is driving difficult? No, not really, although your parents may still not let you have the car on Saturday night.
When he was 17, after going through the process above and finally getting his license, my second-born son rolled his vehicle, which eventually came to rest upside down. When I arrived on scene, he was crouched in the middle of the street, crying over the body of his best friend and saying over and over to the responders, "Have you seen my brother? He was in the truck too. Please find him!"
The first responders looked at me and gestured helplessly to the completely flattened passenger compartment. One of them said, "We're looking for your other son, ma'am, but ..."
We found his brother ten long minutes later.
Don't talk to me about how easy it is for young people to learn to drive.
Is shooting a handgun at a target across the room difficult? No, not really. You don't have to go through a box of ammo every weekend to become proficient.
That's quite true. As long as you have abysmally low standards and aren't under any stress whatsoever, shooting is easy.
No, you won't do very well at the local practical shooting match or the target shooting match no more than you'd do very well at the local dirt track with your stock car on Saturday night. They don't really drive stock cars in a stock car race, though, do they? But you drive back and forth to work every day in all kinds of weather with nary a problem.
Right. Carrying the gun around isn't that hard. Using it with reliable efficiency in a moment of life-threatening stress --
that's hard. Which is why action pistol games are somewhat more challenging than just standing in a booth and putting rounds more-or-less somewhere in the general vicinity of the paper.
That's also why 16,000 people a year (that's one every half hour or so) show up at hospital emergency rooms seeking medical treatment for
unintentional gunshot injuries. This doesn't include suicides or homicides or assaults. Just arrogant ignoramuses who think they know how to handle a gun, because it's not that hard.
I realize it's only logical for a professional trainer to tell everyone they need all the training they can afford but it's a little like asking a barber if you need a haircut. But your last line says volumes. Ultimately, you have to be mentally prepared to kill someone. The mechanical part is easy.
Right. The only reason I might suggest other people get training is because I'm a professional trainer. (You know, I remember back in the days when "capitalism" wasn't a dirty word; it was what made America great. And I'm not really that old.)
And the only reason John Farnam might suggest that other people get training is because he's getting rich on it.
(Hint: there's no fortune in firearms training.) His experiences in Vietnam, and the anger fueled by watching his friends die from the horrendously inadequate training they received before being sent into harm's way, had nothing to do with it. He's obviously on the make.
(Note for the humor-impaired: find a sarcastic friend to explain this paragraph to you.)
But let me tell you a little about my background, and how I became one of those eeeeeeevvvvillll people who make money teaching other people how to protect themselves and the people they love.
When I first started shooting more than fifteen years ago, my husband and I had five young children at home, and our family lived entirely on my husband’s low-end salary. Not an easy life, just the one we deliberately chose in order to rear our own homegrown children. Neither time nor money were easy to come by in those years, but when I decided to keep a defensive handgun on my hip, I made the decision to do whatever it took to get good training. A family friend purchased my first class for me, as a gift and as an encouragement. Bless him!
After that, I worked my tail off to learn as much as I could possibly manage, despite our financial circumstances. I scrounged and I wheeled and dealed and I just plain worked at finding ways to do it. I owe a deep and abiding debt to the friends who worked out three-cornered barter deals with me to get me into classes. I sorted and recycled brass, worked grungy weekend jobs, traded babysitting with friends (since I had five and most have two, those swaps always took far more of my time than a straight across swap could have done). To save money on ammunition, I learned to reload even though I hate reloading. I volunteered as an RO so that I could be the fly on the wall in other people’s classes. I started writing articles for magazines so that I could beg for comp-spots in classes that weren’t quite filled. Then I turned around and used my “spare time” (hah!) to volunteer and help train others so I could pay my karmic debts as well as my personal debts of gratitude. And I remain very, very grateful to several specific people who saw my plight and took pity on me and helped me learn what I needed to learn.
Gun people are some of the best, most generous people in the world. If I state this more strongly than others might, it’s because I have more reason to know it than others do.
All of the above means that I do understand how hard it is to get training when you’re broke. I know something about not being able to buy classes outright, and having to get there “creatively.” I know about having to make hard choices and I know about the guilt that goes with making those choices. I know about being crunched for time and not having the resources you’d like to have in order to get the training you think you need. I know how embarrassing it can be to ask friends for ideas, and I know how eagerly good people will help when they see that you’re serious.
Finally, because I have had such depressingly
thorough experience at being broke, I can tell you this much with brutal honesty: If something is important to you, you can find a way to do it, no matter how broke you are. If it’s not, you can always find an excuse not to.
pax
