Bunch of related stuff, putting here as a core dump.

Caution:
You may want to grab coffee before you dive into this one.

***

Per John Lott, as of 2017 there are 16.3 million concealed carry permit holders in the US.

According to Claude Werner’s best guesstimates as of a couple-three years ago, there are probably 15,000 class slots every year (this includes NRA’s PPOTH and everyone else he could think of on the defensive handgun side of the market, plus some generous padding). Just to be on the safe side, I would double Claude’s number to 30,000 class slots.

This means that if every person with a permit decided to take ONE class other than / over and above the state-required ccw permit-getting class, we’d still have people standing in line more than 500 years from now. My doubled estimate could be off by an order of magnitude and we’d still have people in line five decades from now.

To say that we have not even begun to tap the potential market for training is a severe understatement.

Keep in mind, most training slots are mostly filled by the same people, year after year. Training junkies like us, people who’ve taken multiple classes from multiple instructors. We all swap those same students around and compete for their training dollars.

And that’s my starting point: we in the training world are an Itsy Bitsy Tiny Little Blip on the radar for most people who own guns and carry them for self defense.

To most gun owners, the entire training industry barely even exists. That’s key.

***

To people who have not taken a class from a pro trainer, the state-required permit class itself is Advanced Training. This includes the craptastic ones that do nothing more than run people through online diploma mills or the live ones that require them to shoot a whopping ten untimed rounds at a piece of cardboard twice the size of Texas. No matter how contemptuously we might look at a program like that, for the vast majority of permit holders it’s still far more training than any of their gun-owning friends have bothered to get — or ever even heard of. That makes it, and them, Advanced.

How utterly arrogant are we, to say that our definition is the real one, when our version of ‘beginner’ doesn’t even start where most shooters have finished?

(“And what do you mean, someone has to be taught how to use a holster? Dude, it’s not rocket surgery. It’s a bucket that holds a gun. You put the gun in, you take the gun out. D’oh! How stupid do you think we are??”)

For these folks, a Beginning class is almost certainly measured by the standard of NRA Basic Pistol: hours of sitting in a classroom, learning to name the parts of a gun. That’s just a stupid waste of time, even for people to whom the names of the gun parts are a revelation. So how dare you offer us a Beginning class in your school of gun-fu! We are obviously — obviously! — beyond that! We’re not Beginners anymore. We’ve been shooting for years, you know.

***

On this scale, being a non-Beginner — an Intermediate shooter — might mean that a person knows how to make the gun go bang. It probably means they can hit the target more often than not, at least as long as the target is big enough, and as long as we define hitting it as ‘somewhere on paper.’ They can load the gun by themselves.

To us, whatever process they use to get rounds into the gun may look sloppy, slow and clumsy; to them, it’s just loading the gun and how else would you do it? They can load and fire the gun without any help, thanks.

Plus maybe they even know how to get the gun running again when it hiccups. (“First wait at least 30 seconds in case there’s a hang-fire, then tilt your head to one side as you bring the gun up toward your face so you can look in puzzlement at the side of the gun. Then look down the barrel, probably with your finger still on the trigger. Stare at the barrel for a few seconds, then sloooooooowly unload the gun and fiddle with it for ten minutes before you finally shrug and reload it…”).

No matter how ridiculous the process might seem to us, eventually they can fire the gun again so they do know how to clear a malfunction and thus – obviously! – don’t need an instructor to teach them how to do that.

So that’s Intermediate.

***

On this same scale, being Advanced means you got your concealed carry permit. It means you took The Class. (There’s really only one, you know — the one that allows you to get a permit. No other classes exist.)

Or — and here’s the Great Leap Forward — being Advanced is being invited to shoot on the Super Squad in USPSA or being the top shooter on a reality show.

There’s no level of Advanced between those two points on this scale. It either means you got your carry permit or that you’re a USPSA Grandmaster. Other than those extremes, everything else will be shades of Intermediate.

And for most, Intermediate was reached the day after they held a gun for the first time.

***

Had a talk awhile back with a group of women, all of whom had been shooting for less than five years and all of whom had recently received NRA instructor certifications. They were (justifiably) proud of those certs, because it had taken real effort and work for them to get them.

If I had said to that group of people that this cert – the one that they worked so hard for and which to them represented the be-all, end-all apex of all possible firearms achievement – was actually just a basic place to start and otherwise an incredibly low bar for anyone who thinks of themselves as an instructor, not only would I have been being a jerk, but they would have looked at me as if I were… Um.

The picture that springs to mind is of a glowing humanoid creature, dressed in spotless white robes, with beautiful white feathered wings fluttering behind her, with a halo on her head, saying, “So who’s this Jesus fellow you’re talking about? I’ve never heard of him…”

You can almost see the little “TILT!” sign popping up in the listeners’ eyeballs, like some old Warner Bros cartoon.

Even if they were able to set aside the social offensiveness of it, the actual message would not have gotten past the TILT sign.

***

Had a conversation with a group of skilled shooters awhile back. One of them proposed, “Maybe we shouldn’t say, ‘intermediate’ or ‘advanced’ but we should just define them by what we can do at each level. A beginner can load the gun and hit the target … so let’s make a list! What’s a beginning level of skill?”

The others looked at her and at each other, and … well. Here’s where we run immediately into Dunning Kruger [pdf]. Because did you ever play the game, in school or maybe in some touchy feelgood teambuilding seminar, where one person is given a complex picture to look at, and then must use words only (no gestures or facial expressions!) to tell another person what to draw in order to create the same picture? The other person is not allowed to ask questions, or to make any noise or even wiggle their eyebrows. They simply must draw whatever the other person tells them to draw. No eye contact allowed.

The problem with this set up quickly becomes hilariously obvious to the spectators, but — up until the big reveal — both participants think they are communicating clearly. The sender thinks they are explaining well and being very precise and providing good instructions, and the receiver thinks they are doing exactly what the sender is telling them to do. They are both right, and they are both absolutely wrong. And the resulting picture never looks much like the one the sender intended.

So when you and I set out to make a list, and we say, “A beginner should be able to load the gun by herself,” we both have a very specific picture in our heads of what that looks like. It does not involve the shooter fumbling around or doing stupid-clumsy things with it, like picking it up left handed off the bench to put the magazine in with the right hand, then awkwardly juggle-bumping it from one hand to the other, forgetting to rack the slide and never putting the safety on. And so on.

We also have a picture in our heads that definitely does not include the person pointing the muzzle at one of their own body parts. But how often have you worked with a “grew up around guns” shooter who had an obviously longstanding habit of doing exactly that — and didn’t even know they were doing it?

People don’t know, literally cannot know or step outside themselves long enough to see, that kind of thing. If they could, they wouldn’t need us. So asking them to self-assess in our absence is bound to end badly. (“Of course I know how to load a gun! What are you, stupid? I can shoot!”)

Even a good solid objective standard (five shots in a five-inch circle, at five yards, in five seconds or less) leaves room for all of that problem with definitions to happen anyway. It narrows the gap, sure. But it doesn’t fix it, because we only measure the result without actually seeing the process that got them there. Did they muzzle themselves at any point in the process? Keep the finger off the trigger except when actually shooting? Hold the gun in a dangerous way, with the thumb precariously behind the slide, and only escaped getting slide-bit by sheer dumb luck? They don’t know. And unless we are there watching while they shoot the objective test, neither do we. When we’re there in person, we can see. When we’re not, we can’t.

That’s the weakness of long distance communication without immediate feedback. We can’t see the process people use, only the recorded result.

Oooh, fun rabbit hole there. Does the process matter more than the result? Or does the result matter more than the process? (My answer may not be congruent with yours. Set it aside to discuss sometime!)

***

More.

All communication leaves the obvious unsaid. It has to. There’s not enough time in the universe to spell out every single one of the assumptions inherent in any given conversation. We take almost everything for granted, and communicate only in a very narrow band.

But what’s obvious to a generic me isn’t necessarily obvious to a generic you. For complex ideas (and especially those that may activate the monkey brain) we need a feedback loop to check if each individual part of the message is getting through, because sometimes it doesn’t. People bridge this gap in personal conversations all the time (or think they do), mostly by using and analyzing each other’s movement patterns, facial expressions, and vocal cues that don’t quite rise to the level of language. We set up a continuous feedback loop so we can check if the message has been sent and received — and we do it so fast and for the most part so subconsciously that we don’t even realize we’re doing it. (Well, except for the poor broken ones of us who have to do it consciously all the freaking time. That’s a deep hole too.)

So the complete communication process is a feedback loop, a spiral, where participants constantly send unspoken messages from one to the other and back again so fast and so continuously that we don’t usually realize how often we change our speech based on those messages. We’re constantly correcting misperceptions and reframing and adding additional information that we might have left unsaid if it weren’t for the microexpressions of doubt or confusion or disbelief that we didn’t consciously see but that we reacted to anyway.

Here’s the kicker — all of that feedback is completely missing in written communication. Nearly all of it is missing in pre-recorded video and audio formats. That is why we need an in-person class for a lot of this stuff.

There’s the book you write, and the book they read. They are not the same book.

(Heh. From when I was a small child, I have a vivid memory of my grandpa, shaking his fist at another driver and shouting, “Where’d you learn to drive? Correspondence school??!” — an elegant insult I finally understood about ten years later.)

So I’m doubtful of any attempt to quantify beginner, intermediate, advanced with a list or set up an objective qual that involves students self-assessing or self-reporting, in the absence of a qualified other who can look at them and report what’s actually happening. Because Dunning Kruger.

Discouragingly, with all those factors in mind, I’m not even sure we can make such a list. Failing to carefully define terms would result in a misfire, while striving to define them carefully enough would almost certainly drown out the signal.

***

Oh, and there’s more. All advanced shooting is simply the fundamentals: Alignment, trigger, follow through. That’s all good shooting is and all it ever has been. ‘Advanced’ to me really just means being able to execute the fundamentals in a wider variety of more challenging circumstances. That’s it and that’s all.

All of the finicky stuff we quibble about (how do we hold the gun? how should we stand? at what point does the finger go to the trigger during the drawstroke? what exact shape does the path of the gun look like, as it moves from holster to target?) — ALL of it is simply designed to help us execute those fundamentals in faster, safer, or more reliable ways. The fundamentals are the thing that matters, not all the window dressing that helps us achieve them.

And yet we get students who think they are advanced because they have had some particular experience, such as having gone through a shoot house or shot at a moving target or in low light or in competition.  As if simply making the gun go bang is “advanced” (when even a monkey can do that much), as long as making the gun go bang happened within some specific venue.

Hmmm. Pinging hard on that thought. Because — all advanced stuff always circles back to the fundamentals. But I think at the beginning of the process, we tend to think that being Advanced is not just being better at the same skills, but actually doing different skills, than the Beginners. Beginners stand on a “static square range” but Advanced people are allowed to move — so obviously, if I’ve ever moved while shooting, I’m advanced.

The question isn’t, in how many different circumstances can you make the gun go bang. It’s have you learned to reliably and consistently apply alignment, trigger, and follow through despite challenges and distractions, despite added variables or missing ones.

Thus even a beginner might be able to experience a shoot house, or do low light work, or have a fun experience where they shoot from a downed position. And to some extent, they probably should. But doing those things does not make them advanced shooters, and their fear or comfort level with the added activity has nothing to do with their actual skill level. Their actual skill level is measured in their ability to safely and reliably execute alignment, trigger, follow through in those venues.

It all starts with being able to perform the fundamentals in the first place. That’s the key. There are a lot of places where the emphasis is on the experience, not on the … um. The thing that makes the experience work or be meaningful.

To the extent that those other experiences don’t harm the process of learning the fundamentals, they’re good and beneficial. But those activities, too often, turn into distracting clutter that makes you think you’re further down the road than you actually are. (It’s hard to learn anything when you already know everything.) Sometimes having those experiences actually stops you from learning because you turn your attention from performing the fundamentals correctly into thinking about everything else except the fundamentals. Or because you think you’re finally past paying attention to the fundamentals, too good for that now, when nobody ever really is. ¹

Once you do have a grasp of the fundamentals, then it’s not just reasonable but required for your personal development, that you should seek out as many different shooting experiences as possible. More circumstances and more challenging circumstances will help you here. That’s when the shoot houses and scenario training, movement and multiple targets and oddball positions and all the rest of it really come into play. Because once the fundamentals are there, we can finally enjoy just working with the gun.[*]

That’s when the gun games become much more meaningful and fun. Before you’ve learned the fundamentals, shooting practice performed during a competition are as likely as any other shooting experience to engrain bad habits rather than good ones. Even though supervised games do have the advantage of correcting bad and obvious safety errors, ²all by themselves they will not fix equally-bad and equally-obvious shooting errors. After the fundamentals are well in hand, those added experiences definitely improve your ability to execute them faster and more reliably in more challenging circumstances.

But before you can reliably apply fundamentals in challenging new circumstances, you have to be able to do them in the first place. And too many people entirely skip that step.

***

[*] Oh, here’s a fun little side trail. Of course you can enjoy fiddling around with the gun before you know anything about the fundamentals. This is more-or-less in the same way that a child might enjoy going to the skating rink before he can skate well. He enjoys wobbling around the rink while clutched fearfully onto the handrail, and feels a great sense of accomplishment when he’s made a single circuit all by himself.

But how much more enjoyable it is to whiz along with long and confident strides! To go fast enough to lift a breeze in your hair! To move smoothly with and through the crowd, unafraid of spills and able to watch the other skaters at the same time! To begin learning to spin and jump and do tricks!

All of these joys are out of reach from the beginner, who thinks he’s having fun (and he is) — but the limited and hesitant fun that he’s having is not to be compared to the more expansive fun being had by the skater who has the fundamentals under control.

***

Related, maybe. Had someone say to me in class, awhile back, that she was shooting poorly because we were shooting slow. “I shoot better fast!” — That was her reason for not slowing down when we were doing precision work, and also her excuse for doing very badly at it.

Well, okay, lady; show me that you can get highly precise one hole groups at your chosen speed, the same size as the other students are getting as they press the trigger in slow motion right now. But I’m willing to lay money on the table that if you learned to run a trigger better from the ground up, which includes having the humility to slow down and learn what I’m trying to show you in slow motion, you’d be shooting even better when you shoot fast than you can right now.

Sadly, we’re never going to know. Because you’re insulted that I’m asking you to do something that feels to you like a Beginner skill, shooting in slow motion, when you think you’re ready to do Advanced stuff like jumping out of a flaming helicopter with a knife between your teeth.

And here I don’t even have a helicopter, let alone one I’d be willing to set on fire.