Your decisions need to be your own.

Monday, March 15, 2010 Filed in: Techniques & Training

After last's weeks column on school rivalries, I was reminded of an email I received some time back. The writer had asked my opinion on training with a specific instructor. He was concerned because, though he'd researched the instructor's program and thought it worthy of attending, something he read in a forum gave him second thoughts.

He sent me a link to the discussion, and it boiled down to something like "where's he been? What's he done? Nothing." There was no consideration of the program itself, or of the instructor's ability to communicate effectively with students. It boiled down to, once again, "my Dad can beat up your Dad."

The premise of the discussion was that having a certain number of years of military/police service was somehow essential to being able to teach defensive firearms use, and those who didn't possess such experience were unqualified to approach the subject. That struck me as illogical, and a quick search provided a proof: the "what's he done?" guy had once commented on a course given by an Israeli shooting instructor, calling it - in essence - nonsense.

If you've made "experience" a litmus test, intellectual honesty says that you can't cherry-pick the experience to include. In the case of the Israeli course, it was taught by someone with an operational background - that is, he's shot at people. Yet that experience wasn’t sufficient to earn the commenter’s approval.

Fast forward to the current discussion, and suddenly the instructor in question didn’t have “experience”, so he too was disqualified from consideration. So, you not only have to possess experience, but it has to be the right kind of experience - experience that doesn’t conflict with what the critic has already been taught.

Do I find the various incarnations of Israeli shooting instruction (of which I'm passingly familiar) useful? No. There is precious little there that has any direct application to private self-defense in this country. It serves the Israelis well, but for us it's a curiosity. The point I'm making is that their techniques, even though borne out of experience, are of no use in our context; their experiences are theirs, not ours. Their techniques have no validity relative to our needs, but if your only basis for comparison is “experience”, you’d have to give them due consideration.

How much better it would be to base an evaluation of any instructor or program based not on some arbitrary standard of where someone's been or what he's done, but rather on objective and rational analysis: does it make sense; do the techniques reflect reality; is the curriculum the product of hard data, or simply wishful thinking; is there more innuendo than fact in what’s being taught; most importantly, can the person actually teach?

Those are the questions I'd ask long before I'd concern myself with an idiosyncratic curriculum vitae. Remember the Israeli example: just because someone has "been there and done that" doesn't mean it's somewhere you'll be going, or something you'll be doing.

-=[ Grant ]=-

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