The Cornered Cat
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Her name is Legion
May 12, 2014

At SHOT Show back in January of this year, I had the same conversation at least a dozen times. I’m not exaggerating. Many different people said essentially the same things to me. Let me share a very typical interaction with you. The person below is a composite, not a specific individual, and her name is Miss Legion.

Kathy: “What do you do for a living?”

Miss Legion: “I’m a firearms instructor.”

Kathy: “Excellent! I love that! What kind of classes do you teach?”

Miss Legion: “I teach beginners’ classes, and I also teach advanced and tactical classes.”

After listening to her explain her classes for a few minutes and getting to know Miss Legion a bit better, the conversation would continue.

Kathy: “What kind of firearms training have you had? What’s your background?”

Miss Legion: “Well, apart from my instructor class I haven’t had any other training. But I’ve been shooting a long time – at least two years.”

Sometimes at this point, Miss Legion would say something like this: “I’m a certified instructor.” Let me translate that one. Being a certified instructor usually means she’s had a single two- to four-day class from an organization that has given her permission to read their material to her students, as long as she stays strictly within their curriculum and teaches it their way. Given this reality, my new friend would often add, “I have my certification through [organization], but I like to teach my students a lot more than that organization’s classes do.”

(I love that answer! It means that Miss Legion recognizes that there are a lot of important skills that her students need. It also means she knows her students need things that will be found outside the very basic curriculum she’s trained to teach. Good on her for realizing it!)

Kathy: “How did you get into teaching firearms classes?”

This is where my new friends would say, with intensity, that they have a real passion for teaching women how to shoot, or a real passion for getting other women into the firearms world, or a real passion for helping women learn how to protect themselves. This hit exactly the right note for me, because you know I share that same passion. Helping women learn to defend their lives has become a heart project of mine, just as it has for these new instructors. So Miss Legion and I have a lot in common, and I love exploring that commonality with a new friend.

At the same time, there’s another passion that I have that I’m eager to share with my students. It’s a passion I would love to share with Miss Legion, too.

Contagious Passion

My heart passion is to learn as much as I can about the art and science of self defense. I want to know more about how to effectively protect myself with a firearm. I want to know how to defend the people I love. I want to absorb as much information as I can possibly get about violent crime and about effective ways to avoid it or deal with it when it happens. I want to know when people need to use their firearms, how they use them, what happens under stress, how the laws interact with the human right to self defense. All of these things. I want to know them all!

Not only this, but I also have a passion for becoming a better teacher. I want to know as much as I can about the process of teaching. How do you successfully communicate your ideas to adult learners? How can you best coach a non-athlete to do well in a physical skill? How do you deal with difficult students? How do you get people engaged with your material and keep them learning? What are the best ways to keep groups of people safely engaged in learning difficult skills on the range?

Passing it on

Here’s where the rubber meets the road: I think that for self defense trainers, having the passion to learn is every bit as important as having the passion to teach.

Why? Because whenever you stand up in front of a group of students, your students will catch your passion, whatever it is. If your passion is simply to be the one standing at the front of a classroom, then that’s all your students will take from your class: that you like to be in the boss slot. Some of them will catch that vision, and will themselves want to be the one at the front of the room. If your passion is simply to get guns in the hands of other people, that’s what your students will take away from your class: that just having the gun is enough and that’s all they need. They won’t have any desire to take your next class, to practice what they’ve learned, to come back to learn more, or to improve their skills in any meaningful way. They won’t stay engaged with your teaching business, but will just take that first class and wander off, maybe deciding to invite their friends to come shoot with them next weekend. After all, that’s what they caught from you: a passion to get people to the range. They did that much, and they’re done. They won’t come back for your next class.

But it’s different if your own passion is to learn. If you have a passion for learning, you’re doing two important things for your students.

First, your passion to learn means you’re assuring them that you will always give them the absolute best you have to offer. You’re not just dialing it in. It’s not guesswork. You’re not just making it up as you go along or repeating an untested rumor you heard from some guy at the gun shop. Every day, you are doing your homework. In every class you teach, you are bringing your A Game into the room for your students. Your students can trust your information you give them because you’ve done the hard work of making sure you found the best and most current information for them. They can trust the skills and techniques you recommend, because you’ve studied as many different teachniques as you could get your hands on, and you’ve found the ones that work best within the scope of your intended use. You don’t have to drive this point home in order for students to see it. Your trustworthiness will ooze out of every pore! They’ll naturally trust what you have to say, because they will see the honest confidence you have in your material even if they don’t directly see the hard work you put into building it.

Second, when you have a passion for learning, you’re contagious! Your passion will shine through everything you do, and your students will naturally catch your vision. They’ll be motivated to study and learn more for themselves. You become the model for them of what it looks like to be a lifelong student of the defensive arts. When they look at you, they understand what it means to learn these life-saving skills. They will be more motivated to come back for the next class, to take the next step, to practice what they’ve heard from you, to try your ideas out on others around them. They will naturally stay engaged with your teaching business because they will catch that same passion you have for learning. They will catch your passion to learn more and to grow as a person through what they’re learning.

Do you believe that knowing how to use a gun can keep people alive when they would otherwise die? So do I! That’s why I want to learn everything I can about defending myself and the people I love. It’s why I have a passion to learn as much as I can about how to effectively teach self-defense. I’m saving people’s lives here! That’s not hyperbole. It’s the simple truth, and it’s what drives my desire to learn more and to constantly seek out the best information in the field. If my students are going to bet their lives on the information I give them and the skill set I teach them, I’d better be sure that the information I give out is the best I can offer and that the skills that I teach are the best I can find.

A simple passion to teach, without an equal passion to learn, might be easier and good for my ego, but it wouldn’t be good for my students.

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Knowing the tune but missing the music
May 11, 2014

When my husband and I were newlyweds, we visited a church where the worship leader had recently introduced one of our favorite songs. The song was an upbeat, bouncy tune, and we were happy when we saw its title in the morning bulletin. Finally, a fast-paced song we could tap our toes to in church! But as the first few notes drifted softly and slowly out over the congregation, my husband and I looked at each other in confusion. Was this even the same song? The melody was the same, and the words were right, but the timing was all wrong.

Talking to the worship leader after church, we discovered that he had never heard the song anywhere else. He’d simply seen it on a sheet of music one day, liked the words, and taught himself how to play it based on what he’d read. The poor guy had no idea — literally no idea! — how badly he had butchered the song for his people. He did not know how that song was supposed to sound, but he believed that he did know. In reality, he had simply read the written notation and then guessed at what he thought it should sound like. He was happily, confidently wrong in his idea. (We didn’t tell him, either. We simply smiled politely at his excitement, and moved on to other subjects.)

Like playing a piece of music, shooting a firearm is a physical skill with a big informational component. You can get a lot of good information from books and websites like this one. You can get a little more from videos and DVDs. But the real learning, the best learning, will always take place on the range and in person.

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Advice to new firearm instructors
May 10, 2014

Some advice here for people who want to become better handgun instructors. Sometimes, some people act as though getting the credential means they have already learned everything they need to know in order to do a good job for their students. Hate to burst anyone’s bubble, but that’s not necessarily the case. Being a good self defense instructor, a good handgun trainer, a good teacher of shooting skills — all of those things take more work and more exposure than a simple weekend class can possibly give you. You’ll need to commit to ongoing training.

The interesting thing is, even people who agree with this basic idea sometimes believe that they will benefit only from “instructor” classes now that they are instructors themselves. This is emphatically not true!

To continue your development as an instructor, you really need to spend many more hours in basic shooting classes than you would expect. Yup, that’s what I said: the best teachers in the defensive handgun training world have spent a lot of time learning from other good teachers in beginning classes. They aren’t shy about starting in the base level classes and working their way up, and neither should you be.

Take those classes from the best and most professional trainers you can find, and never take one just to “punch the ticket” so you can brag about where you’ve been or who you’ve met. Take them to learn! Focus your attention on all the things you don’t yet know. Dedicate yourself to finding, and then studying, the things you still need to learn.

What do you as an instructor still need to learn? And how can you find those things in basic-level classes?

First and perhaps most important, you need to continue developing your skill as a teacher. If you want to become a better instructor, model yourself after qualified others. Spend time watching master trainers as they deal with novice students. How do they set up their classes? How do they maintain order for safety? How do they explain basic ideas to new shooters? In some cases you will want to adopt or adapt a particular instructor’s method of dealing with questions. Maybe you will hear a new way to explain some foundational ideas, or be struck by the strategies the trainer uses to keep the class moving smoothly. You might focus on the ways an experienced teacher connects with the difficult student, the struggling student, the student more advanced than the class is intended to reach, the physically challenged or aging student. Focus on these important teaching skills and grab every possible opportunity to model yourself after good teachers you have seen in action.

As a shooter, you can also use very basic classes to develop your shooting skills in a more rounded way. How can this be, if you’re already past the stage the class is designed to teach? Simple! Take the class with an unfamiliar gun – with a revolver if you’re normally a semi-auto shooter, or with a semi-auto if you normally prefer revolvers. If you’re normally a right-handed shooter, buy yourself a left-handed holster and take it through a class from a good instructor, running your gun just as if you were a left hander.

Research tells that that between ten to twelve percent of Americans prefer to use their left hands for most tasks. Every left-handed shooter deserves an instructor who can teach them the ins and outs of running the gun left-handed. Do you know how to rack the slide as a lefty? What about reaching the slide stop lever, or the safety, or dropping the magazine? Can you perform an efficient revolver reload as a lefty? When you work with a lot of students, you will occasionally come across a left-handed revolver shooter. Are you completely up to speed with the most efficient gun manipulations that student will need to learn? You can use the shooting drills in basic classes to stretch your ability to coach and demonstrate for your left-handed students.

It’s even more critical that you take some classes with your non-dominant hand if you yourself are a lefty, as I am. Left handers are a minority in this world! Although you might prefer to shoot with your left hand at other times, you will need to demonstrate gun handling skills as a right hander for your right-handed students – who will, after all, make up the majority of the students in every class you teach. Running through a few basic classes as a right-hander will give you the confident gunhandling skills every trainer should be able to demonstrate on demand.

Just as our students benefit when we know how to demonstrate for both left- and right-handed shooters, they also benefit when we learn how to run many different types of guns. Many of your students will bring guns to class that are unlike the one you carry. They will bring semi-autos and revolvers. They will bring double-action guns with decocking levers, and single-action guns with manual safeties, and striker-fired guns with miniscule little grip safeties that lock up the slide if you don’t press them firmly while racking. No matter which gun type you prefer for your personal use, you will have students who prefer a different type for their own use.

This means you and your students both benefit when you learn to run different types of guns, especially when you build your skills with those guns inside the structured environment of a basic class designed to build gunhandling skills in a sequential way. So while you’re building up your mental models of how different good trainers work with their students, take one of those different gun types through the entire class with you. Learn how to use that gun as efficiently and effectively as you can use the gun type you prefer. Then do it again, with a different type of gun. Keep expanding your teaching horizons.

By taking – and continuing to take! – basic classes from excellent instructors, you will learn a variety of things you can learn in no other way. You will expand your repertoire of teaching techniques, and improve your ability to connect with your students. When you take basic skill-building classes with different types of guns or different gear, you develop a stronger sense of good techniques that apply to a broader spectrum of students in a wider range of circumstances. By shooting the drills as if you were a lefty (if right-handed) or as a righty (if left-handed), you improve your ability to work with shooters of different backgrounds.

Keep learning!

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Ignorance Is Not a Dirty Word
May 9, 2014

Something interesting about American culture over the past generation or so: we’ve decided that ignorant is a nasty word. There’s no quicker way to make someone feel angry at you than to say, straight up, that they are ignorant of a given subject. It doesn’t seem to matter what the subject is, either; it’s just as insulting to say “Chris is ignorant about rocket science” as it is to say Chris doesn’t know much about home repair, or fashion, or self-defense.

Despite this, not everybody knows everything about everything. Will Rogers spoke truth when he said, “We are all ignorant, only on different subjects.” There’s no shame in it, because it’s a normal human condition.

The things I don’t know fill vast acres of bookshelves in warehouses on Amazon and my local library. They’re crammed into millions of Wikipedia pages and discussion groups and informational websites like this one. They’re all over my house. (Related bleg: Does anyone know how to find a sink stopper that actually fits well enough to hold a sinkful of soapy water for 30 minutes or more?) The things I don’t know fill my world, and that’s okay.

When you tell me I don’t know much about a subject, that’s going to pull me up short. Then I’m going to smile, sit down, and say, “Teach me about that!”

“Seize the moment of excited curiosity on any subject to solve your doubts; for if you let it pass, the desire may never return, and you may remain in ignorance.” – William Wirt

“No man really becomes a fool until he stops asking questions.” – Charles Steinmetz

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Can you hear me now?
May 6, 2014

“Speak up! Nobody can hear you when you mumble.” That’s what my Grandpa used to say to me when I was a kid and would visit him and Grandma on a Sunday afternoon. “Kids these days, they all mumble,” he would complain. So obligingly, I would repeat my sentence, often at the top of my lungs — because, as Grandma knew when she winked at me, it wasn’t my speech but his hearing that was at fault.

Grandpa’s hearing had been damaged by a lifetime of loud noises. He worked as a commercial fisherman and often spent time in the engine room of his diesel boat. Inside that room with metal walls and hard surfaces everywhere, the unmuffled engine would roar so loudly that you could feel the vibration throughout your entire body, rattling your fillings and putting a permanent buzz into your bones. That’s loud. And, of course, he never wore ear plugs when he was working in the engine room or in the hold. Nor did he protect his hearing while he was hanging out at the drag races with his friends, or shooting with his buddies. Nobody did, back then. Ear protection wasn’t a thing.

We know better, now.

To get the skinny on electronic ear protection for shooters, check out Trevor’s article here: Gun Science – Active electronic ear pro. Good work, there.

(Hat tip: Tamara)

 

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Classes cost money
April 30, 2014

The usual objection to taking a really good shooting class is that good classes cost money. Sometimes, a lot of money. So with the economy the way it is right now, how can anyone afford to take a class?

The reality is exactly the opposite. Given the cost of ammo right now and the bad economy we’re experiencing, I’m amazed that everyone in the entire shooting community does not immediately jump into every available professional training class they can find.

Why? Because math. Even though every specific complex motor skill is a little different, and so is every human body, we know that for most people learning most skills, it takes at least ten times as many repetitions to erase a previously-learned bad habit than it does to ingrain a good, new habit from the beginning. Sometimes it takes even more than that, especially if it’s something you’ve been doing your whole life or at least for a number of years. But “ten times more repetitions” is a good baseline rule of thumb, according to human performance experts such as Richard Schmidt in his classic reference book, Motor Learning and Performance.

Ten times more work. Ten times as much ammunition…!

In other words, if it would ordinarily take you around three hundred shots to perfect your excellent trigger control when you start from scratch and work on the right things from the beginning, it would take you at least three thousand shots to erase the incorrect trigger pull you’d learned and practiced on your own.

If it would take you six hundred repetitions to create a safe and efficient drawstroke once you know what to do, it would take you six thousand repetitions for you to erase an unsafe or inefficient draw you’d developed on your own without good training.

Simply put, the more you practice bad or simply inefficient habits, the more ammunition and time and work – and money! – it ends up costing when you finally decide to truly study the subject and learn better skills. Better skills, of course, are skills that are more likely to save the lives of people you love.

That being the case, how can anyone afford not to invest in good training?

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NRA Convention 2014
April 29, 2014

So the NRA Convention went well. We flew out there on a Thursday night, arriving in Indianapolis around midnight and grabbing our rental car just before the counter closed. The weekend went past in blur, as I signed Cornered Cat books at the Galco booth in the morning and at the ACLDN booth in the afternoon most days.

By the way, the guys at Galco are good people making some good products. I had fun pointing several women to the contour-cut belts on display a few steps away from the autograph table. Here’s the hint for those who wonder: it’s far easier to conceal and comfortable to carry a gun in a bad holster on a good belt, than it is to carry in even a great holster on a bad belt. If you carry on a belt, the belt is an integral part of the concealment system, so don’t neglect it! (And contour cut belts? They’re the bomb.)

For much of the show, my partner in crime at the autograph table was Tom McHale, author of the Insanely Practical Guides to … practically everything gun-related. His Insanely Practical Guide to Gun Holsters made me laugh, hard, in several spots. Despite the wonderful vein of humor evident throughout the books, Tom keeps a close eye on the overall seriousness of the subject. He knows his stuff and I can firmly recommend his works.

We also occasionally shared the table with Britney Starr of Starr and Bodill African Safaris, who’s also an editor at Women’s Outdoor News. Britney is indeed a star of the highest order. And, it turns out, she’s a master of something else entirely. Don’t believe me? Check out this picture:

KJ and Kelly photobombed

Hah! For those who don’t recognize his face, the giggly fan-boy with his arm around me is Kelly Grayson, whom the online legions know and love as Ambulance Driver. As part of his trip, on Saturday morning off-site, he taught a (rumor has it, excellent) class on what shooters should know about treating gunshot wounds. But who cares? Our friend Britney stole the show from him with her awesome photobombing skills. Well played, indeed.

Long time writer Mike Detty could also be found at the Galco booth. Mike’s book, Guns Across the Border, details political skullduggery in high (and low) places. Worth the read for sure.

At the ACLDN booth, I had a chance to catch up with more people doing good stuff. Of course, Marty and Gila Hayes are local to me in Washington state, but we don’t always stay current on how the Network is getting along. Marty and (Network whatever) Vincent Schuck brought me up to date on all things ACLDN, including phenomenal growth in the war chest available to members in need.

Another special treat at the Network booth was spending some time with Massad Ayoob and Gail Pepin. Gail is the producer and editor (preditor) of the excellent ProArms Podcast, and Mas refers to her as his adult supervisor. Mas was, of course, signing books for his many fans – as was my mentor and pal, Gila Hayes. Gila’s most recent book, Concealed Carry for Women, picks up where her excellent Personal Defense for Women left off.

Speaking of special treats, it was a pleasure to touch bases again with Dennis Badarina of Dragon Leatherworks. Dennis makes beautiful, well-constructed custom holsters – actually, “beautiful” barely begins to cover it. They’re really works of functional art, and I was thrilled to hear how well his business has been going. Have to confess that I feel a certain almost-maternal pride at Dragon Leatherworks’ success, since I had the privilege of handling one of Dennis’ holsters very early in his holstermaking career and then giving him a boost through the magazine I was editing at the time. So there’s a special joy for me in seeing what a solid business he’s managed to build since those early days.

Had to stop in and see my old friend Doug Ritter of Knife Rights. Doug has quietly built a small but powerful force to be reckoned with in the blade community, driving for important changes to state and national laws. Think it doesn’t matter? Beg to differ! If you ever drop a pocketknife into your purse or pocket, you benefit from statewide preemption laws and nonrestrictive blade laws. And if your state’s laws have recently loosened up in those areas, you probably have the Knife Rights movement to thank for it.

Can’t finish this up without mentioning the bloggers and assorted online riff-raff I enjoyed spending some time with: Tamara (who has made some great inroads into the print world over the past couple of years, if you didn’t know), MattG, OldNFO, Erin Palette,  EMS Artifact, and I should not have started typing names because of course I can’t list everyone and I’m sure I’ve left out a dozen or more people I love.

Funniest part of the weekend? At the airport on the way home, we bumped into Caleb and Shelley Giddings of Gun Nuts. Then into Kelly Grayson a few minutes later. When the airline paged my travel buddy, my phone popped up with an immediate text from Gail Pepin, wanting to know if all was okay since she and Mas had heard the name over the intercom. Then I hopped onto Facebook and found that I’d walked past not one, but two other people who’d recognized me without me seeing them. Small world and what a hoot!

Of course I should be detailing the cool products and nifty guns, holsters, and gear available at the show. And you know there was plenty of that stuff. But for me, this year? It was all about the people.

So what’s the point, here? Simply this: When some political yammerhead tries to tell me about the evils of the gun industry and culture, I think about the wonderful small business owners I know who bust their buns every day to turn their dreams into reality. I think about Sharon from The Concealment Shop, with her custom-made leather holster purses and her small operation. I think about Galco, a “big” medium-sized company with hardworking good people making it run. I think about Lisa Looper, who invented the Flashbang Bra Holster, and her third-generation family business. And I think about the many rugged but quirky individualists who drive the gun blogger community, coming to events like this on their own time and their own dime so they can share their hobbies and obsessions with the world.

Bloomberg’s millions might buy a handful of protestors carrying professionally-made identical signs in a tiny astroturfed protest outside the walls, but the real story is in the 70,000 good people doing good work inside the buildings. Far from being the monolithic bogeyman that paid protestors love to hate, America’s gun culture survives and thrives on a rich vein of diversity, integrity, and hard work. I’m proud to be part of it.

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Practicing for Pregnancy
February 26, 2014

If you and your partner intend to start a family or to expand your family within the next few years, now is the time for you to develop your shooting skills to a comfortably high level. Why?

First of all, because you will want the ability to defend your child when he or she arrives. When you need to protect someone else’s life, you may need higher skills than you would if you were just protecting yourself.

You may need strong confidence that you can shoot accurately at longer distances, as one woman found when an attacker shot her husband as he got out of his car in their driveway at home. She saw the encounter from an upstairs window and used her handgun, at a distance of over 15 yards, to stop the attacker before he was able to kill her husband. (Listen to the full story on Tom Givens’ excellent DVD, Lessons from the Street.)

When you need to protect someone else, you may need to fire very accurately at a small target that moves rapidly and erratically, as one woman found when an assailant tried to kidnap her baby. As the attacker ran out the door with her baby, that mom fired from a distance of over 10 yards. She successfully stopped the running kidnapper who was taking her child. (Read the details of this 2011  incident in the news article. Also, here’s my take about shooting a fleeing kidnapper: Personal Boundaries.)

As stories like these show us, protecting another person may require much higher skills than simply protecting yourself. And as every good mom knows, protecting your child’s precious life is the greatest privilege and responsibility of parenthood.

Although you will need strong skills by the time your pregnancy is over, during pregnancy and for some time immediately after, you will probably find it tough to get to the range for live practice. No worries! As long as you start from a good solid baseline, it is relatively easy to keep your strong skills in tune using dry fire alone. That makes dry practice ideal during pregnancy. The downside? It is not easy to learn things for the first time using only dry fire. For this reason, you’ll want to develop the strongest shooting skills you can before you get pregnant, because your doctor may want you to stay away from the noise and lead exposure of the range while the baby remains inside your womb. (For more about shooting while pregnant, see Julie Golob’s excellent short e-book, Shooting While Pregnant.)

Not only is it difficult to learn something for the first time using only dry fire, it’s also much more difficult to maintain weak skills than strong ones. Weak skills tend to vanish over time, no matter what you do. They also tend to be associated with poor visualizations, making it much harder to get good value from dry practice. But strong skills provide more wiggle room from the start and also help you create better visualizations to avoid losing ground.

Again: to develop a strong baseline of good shooting and gunhandling skills, you need to shoot real ammunition on a live range. From a comfortably strong starting place, during pregnancy you can keep your core abilities sharp with a disciplined routine of regular dry practice that includes good visualizations. Then you can return to the range after pregnancy to add live fire back into your routine whenever opportunity presents.

To prepare for one of the most basic responsibilities of parenthood – protecting your child – the best time to build strong shooting skills is before you get pregnant.

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