Thoughts on self defense training, Part 5: you can't get there from here.

Wednesday, October 21, 2009 Filed in: Self defense, Techniques & Training

Most people go to Gun Skool because they believe it will teach them "how to be safe." As I opined last time, learning to shoot does not necessarily make one safe; learning how to identify and avoid conflict does. These folks are simply asking more of the institutions than they're able to provide.

As I noted in one of the first installments, the market for firearm training is quite small relative to the number of gun owners. If a firearm trainer wants to stay in business, he/she must provide what the market demands, and the market demands SHOOTING!

In class after class I've seen student evaluations come back with a consistent complaint: "not enough!" They want more shooting, more "super ninja warrior secrets", and more talk about 9mm vs. .45ACP. Gun Skools respond by upping round counts and shoehorning in more techniques ("we'll show you 53 different ways to perform a tactical reload!") to satisfy the preoccupation with hardware. This leaves precious little time for teaching any of the 'soft' skills that would actually keep the students safe.

Consider this: the typical class is 2 days long, usually over a weekend. I once roughed out a syllabus for a very basic class in observational skills, one designed to improve the student's ability to gather and analyze the information that abounds in the world around him/her. That's a pretty narrow focus, but even given that - and a reduced number of skill building activities - it still wouldn't fit in an 8-hour day. (I'm very big on actually building skills in class, not just introducing a topic and then dashing off to another topic.)

Now imagine a Gun Skool offering a self-defense class where the students spent more than half their weekend working on things that don't go "bang", are never going to go "bang", and in fact are all about NOT going "bang". I can confidently guarantee that the students would complain to high heaven: "I came to shoot, not sit in a classroom!" A few sessions like that, and the Gun Skool would be out of business.

Because of the hardware-centric curricula, whatever proactive/preventive elements that could be covered usually get reduced to a short and ambiguous lecture about 'awareness' (remember what I said last time?) and a presentation of the Cooper Color Codes (which I abhor - but that's another article for another day.) Again, they are providing what the market demands.

There are also limitations on what they are capable of providing. Sadly, in my experience, most Gun Skool instructors just aren't conversant enough with the concept of proaction/prevention to do it any justice, even if their students would allow them to try.

In order to properly address the issues, an instructor needs to have familiarity with a wide range of fields related to how the brain acquires and uses information: neuroscience, psychiatry, cognitive development, neuropsychology, and emerging fields such as neural hermeneutics. It requires him/her to know about things like thin-slicing, pattern matching, mirror neurons, and conscious and unconscious functions of the brain. That's just for starters.

How many 'gunnies' do you know with that breadth of knowledge, and how many of THOSE are capable of transferring that knowledge in usable form to a student? Not many - if any - I'll wager.

It's the chicken and the egg: without a good institution to teach those topics, there is no place for other instructors to learn them to teach the next generation of trainers. Instead, they focus on what they already know: hardware. The result? More classes that teach people 53 different ways to reload their pistol.

That 'other stuff' is intellectually challenging to study, difficult to present, and on top of that isn't terribly sexy. That's a tough sell.

More to come...stay tuned.

-=[ Grant ]=-

Tags:

© 2011 Grant Cunningham Click to email me!