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Over on the Mom with a Gun blog, Tammy put up an excellent post about talking to the police after a self-defense incident.
Although it’s true that “it’s better to be judged by twelve than carried by six”, it’s also true that surviving a deadly force encounter only to lose your liberty and your family’s financial future to the jaws of the legal system is something of a pyrrhic victory.
So very true! Go read the whole thing.
As an instructor, you are in a position of authority over your students, but that authority is voluntary, limited, and temporary.
It is voluntary because your students choose to enroll in your classes. The students who end up in your classes get there because they have made a choice to do that. They have lots of other things they could have done this weekend, but they chose to rearrange their time to spend it with you. They have lots of other things they could do with their money, but they chose to buy a class from you. You have to treat them with the same respect a shopkeeper would give a customer, because that’s what they are—customers.
Your authority is limited. You can tell them what to do for the duration of your class, in your presence, on the range you control. But you don’t have even a tiny bit of authority to tell them what to do outside of class. Unless you do a good job selling your ideas, your safety procedures, and your techniques, your students won’t take your ideas home with them no matter how much they paid you to share them. You have to be a good salesperson to help your students get the most out of your class.
Your authority lasts exactly as long as the class lasts. It is temporary. As soon as the class is over, the tables turn. When your students are done with class, they will go home and hop on the internet to tell other potential students about you. At that point, they will have all the power they need to make or break you as an instructor. If you provided solid information in a safe and enjoyable format, you’ll be in good shape. If you didn’t, you won’t.
The Second Amendment Foundation (SAF) does good things for human rights. Since 1974, SAF has been integrally involved in the fight to keep the most basic right of all—the right to defend your own life—available to every person who wants to protect herself or himself. Every year since 1986, SAF has sponsored the Gun Rights Policy Conference (GRPC), an event that brings together human rights activists from all over the country. At the GRPC, these leaders compare notes and discuss the ways they are defending human rights in their own states and local jurisdictions. Sometimes the news is exciting, as when the Heller vs. DC case came out of the Supreme Court, which recognized the individual right to own and carry weapons. Other times the news is a bit more discouraging, as it was the year Illinois moved to require every gun owner to register with the state. In recent years, the victories have been many and the setbacks few, which makes the GRPC an exciting place to be.
This may seem like a no-brainer these days, but twenty or thirty years ago, protecting human rights as they relate to firearms was a losing battle on many different fronts. One of the fascinating people I met at the GRPC was a feisty redheaded woman who was actually the only woman in attendance at the very first GRPC in 1986. Continue reading
Okay, I’m about to slaughter a sacred cow here. I’ve held my peace about this (most of the time) for years, but the time has come to speak out. Women do not naturally make “better shooters” or “better students” than men do.
There are three reasons I dislike hearing people repeat the old myth that women do make better firearms students than men do. Continue reading
As I write this, I’m on my way home from a month of travels that began in northern Virginia and ended up at the Gun Rights Policy Conference in Orlando, Florida. Want to see some highlights? Continue reading
Yesterday, one of Cornered Cat’s Facebook fans asked:
What in particular makes a good female firearms instructor? And how does that differ from just ANY firearms instructor?
Although these questions sound simple, they really are not. Let me start with the obvious factors that apply to everyone. A good instructor knows how to teach, and has the skills to reach a wide variety of students who each have specific learning styles and personal needs. (That one sentence has a whole world of factors hidden inside it. Another post, another time!)
On the character side, a good instructor should be both patient and brave. You have to be patient enough to provide basic learning blocks in small, steadily increasing doses until the students reach advanced levels of proficiency; patient enough to work compassionately with slow learners, even when the students need the work repeated again and again and yet again; and patient enough to explain thoroughly to people who need thorough explanations. You also have to be brave enough to speak the truth as bluntly as necessary to blow away the fantasy thinking that often surrounds self-defense subjects; brave enough to push your students to learn more and do more than the students believe they can; and brave enough to risk making mistakes in front of the class when you demonstrate skills for the students to imitate. You have to be brave enough to give students honest feedback, every time. The more seriously you take your responsibility as an instructor, the more bravery you will need.
There are lots more basic building blocks that go into making a good instructor in general. I’ll talk more about those in later blog posts and articles. (Hoo boy, do I have a lot to say about that!)
But for now, here are a few things you should know about teaching female students. Continue reading
Who are your favorite bloggers and why?
(And yes, I mean it: I really do need help building the list of people and places to link. Feel free to promo your own site in the comments.)
Over on the Cornered Cat Facebook page right now, there’s an active discussion about something someone said to me at the Gun Rights Policy Conference last weekend. (Go read the discussion; there are too many comments to summarize here.)
Don’t want to re-open that discussion here, but do want to focus on something one of the commenters said. She wrote,
… I don’t think women have to be taught by women. I’ve had great instruction from hard core former military men, but they never once reminded me I was a woman or talked down to me. Did they change some things because I was a woman? Probably, but it was not a point of conversation. This guy that Cornered Cat mentions has a really bad attitude, and I’d want nothing from him. But frankly, I want women to learn good shooting technique and I’ve seen too many women taught poorly by other women.
It’s that last, bolded part I wanted to talk about today, because this is exactly what drove me to drop my other sources of income so I could concentrate solely on building Cornered Cat as a training business. There’s a huge number of women out there right now who have a desire to reach out and to work with other women, but too many of these women have not yet developed the skillset to do that well. I want to come alongside and help those women grow their skills and their businesses.
I’m always impressed when I talk to women who have a heart to help other women get into the firearms world, and especially into the self-defense corners of that world. I love that! I love it so much that it thrills me to see it being done well. I love to watch competent women at work and I love to meet women who work hard to learn what they need to know in order to reach others even more effectively.
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