In case you’ve not noticed, there is a lot of simply awful information about personal defense (particularly regarding defensive shooting) rolling around in this world. How can you identify (and avoid) getting duped?

Melody, who pens the Limatunes Range Diary, recently wrote about an early experience she had with bad information in the shooting world. It’s happened to all of us, but in her case it came early on and resulted in a re-assessment of her beliefs and her sources of information. To her everlasting credit, she used that experience as motivation to seek out good information in the shooting world, but more importantly she used it as a blueprint for how to avoid bad information in the future.

In her article she shares her five-step process to prevent being suckered in by people with faulty information. It’s a good article, and you should definitely put it on your reading list!

Melody’s first step is “question everything.” That’s great advice, but how do you do so in a field where idol worship is rampant and questioning is tantamount to heresy? Not everyone is right all the time, and even if someone’s reputation is unblemished (no one’s is, except to his or her rabid fans) that’s no justification for blindly accepting what you’re told. I make a concerted effort to verify what I share and what I teach, but even I might be wrong from time to time. Anything I tell you, anything anyone else tells you, can be wrong; it’s up to you to be a good consumer of information and verify for yourself what is valid and what isn’t.

Should you need to? In a perfect world, no; everyone would do their best to verify information before they shared it and nonsensical ideas would die from lack of acceptance. This isn’t a perfect world, however, which is why it’s necessary for you to develop your own brand of skepticism. (If it were a perfect world there would be no need for self defense and this blog wouldn’t exist!)

Of course this goes well beyond defensive training and shooting; it’s a valid outlook for every aspect of your life. Questioning what you’re told, what you’re sold, what you see and what you hear is yet another defense mechanism to keep you safe — because bad information can be dangerous to you and those around you!

-=[ Grant ]=-