WVsig ~
Good training is necessary, but not sufficient. That doesn't mean it isn't necessary.
Practice is necessary, but without training you will practice the wrong things and fail to practice some of the right things. A good mind set is necessary, but without training you're unlikely to develop that mindset to its full... and if you do begin developing the proper mindset, the very first thing you'll do is seek out training.
As for the cost factor: Yes, training can be expensive. But ignorance is far more expensive, and often tragic.
I say this as a woman who raised five children on almost nothing, during years when we were so broke we would have had to save up to be called "poor." We weren't quite broke enough to eat boiled dishrag soup, but scraped icebox was indeed on the menu. My husband and I deliberately chose to rear our own home-grown children, and that means we lived entirely on his salary ... which was always less than $35k a year, sometimes a lot less. We have been broke and even more broke than that, but we have never taken government assistance nor asked anyone else to help us feed our children.
When I decided to arm myself against a dangerous world, I had to find ways to buy ammunition out of that too-tight grocery budget. A friend of ours bought me my first training class (and bless him for it!) At that time, I discovered that simply owning the firearm was really not enough if I wanted to be able to stay safe and keep my family safe. The gun, by itself, doesn't do anything. It needs someone behind it who knows what she's doing.
It would have been very easy to say, "Well, that was all I could do" and to quit learning right there. But that class really showed me that I needed to learn more if I wanted to be well-prepared to protect myself and my little boys. So I worked my tail off to keep learning more: I scrounged brass, worked out three-cornered barter deals, worked weekend jobs while my husband was home, traded babysitting hours with friends so the kids would be taken care of while I was at school, borrowed books, shamelessly used every friend who knew more than I did. Eventually I'd learned enough that the three-cornered barter deals turned into straight barter deals: "We'll let you take the next class if you'll work on the line for this last class." It took a very long time to reach that point and it only happened because I was bound and determined to make it happen.
Now when people hear how much training I've had, they say stuff to me like, "Well, that just means you're rich! You could just throw money away on classes like that!" When I encourage others to get training, they retort that training is for rich people. They tell me that regular people can't afford it and that anyone who says people really need training is either an elitist or a snob.
That really hurts, because it's not true. What I know, what I've learned, what I've studied ... I worked for that. For every class I took, I sweated hours in the hot sun or the freezing rain on a weekend construction site. Or I humiliated myself grabbing other people's garbage to recycle. Or I left my children with someone else's mom so I could work a mind-numbing, boring seasonal job tagging Christmas trees. Learning more was a high priority for me and I acted like it.
Most of the people who complain that training is expensive, actually have far more resources than I ever did. And at that, I ended up with far more training than most really need.
When I say to you that people need training, and the more training they get the safer and better off they are -- I believe that, with all my heart. I have put my sweat and sometimes my tears into that belief. I believe so strongly that good training can save lives that I've poured the last ten years of my life into helping others get that training too.
If you have the means to get training -- and nearly everyone in America does, one way or the other -- but you don't do it, you're being very foolish and short sighted. Firearms don't protect you by themselves. They aren't magic. They don't defend your family for you. They cannot be effectively used without skill, and skill only comes to those who work for it.
pax