Recycled words...

I spent a bunch of my word output this morning elsewhere, so I'll recycle it here while I look for something to make fun of. The topic was "gun school for people who you know won't go to gun school".

Someone had brought up that John Farnam teaches students a thing he calls "the zipper". This is where the student draws and cranks off a couple rounds unsighted as he's bringing the pistol up to eye level, on the theory that these will hit the bad guy maybe in the jimmy and the belly button, or somewhere at any rate, plus you're going to be panicking anyway. To which I replied:

I dunno.
Ideally, if a loved one came to me and said "Okay, I'm only going to take one gun class for the rest of my life, and you get to pick it," I'd probably send them off to MAG-40. It's not really all that much of a shooting course*, per se, but they'll leave confident that they can pass a police-style qualification course and have a pretty good grounding in the whys, wherefores, legalities, and ramifications of busting caps in fools.

If they're not going to take a multi-day class, I saw Tom Givens do a one-day course for a bunch of gun bloggers that looked like it gave a solid grounding in the fundamentals, including how to draw from the holster without shooting your foot off and a bit of shooting from retention, and was certainly worth a recommendation. I don't know if that's a regular offering of his or a Reader's Digest Condensed Version of a two-day class, though.

If they're not going to commit to even that, I'd rather just spend a couple hours making sure that they know how to safely handle, load, and unload a firearm, and then give them the confidence that they can, whenever they want to, pick up a gun and put a bullet in an eight-inch circle twenty-one feet away. One-on-one, or at least in a small class, it has been my observation that this can usually be done with all but the most physically inept individuals. I wouldn't even refer to the target as a "bad guy" or anything like that; I'd just want them walking away with the confidence that they can pick up a gun and hit what they want to hit.

It seems like, when you start introducing stuff like "the zipper", you are front-loading this person's mind with the expectation that they're gonna go all to pieces and squeeze off rounds at the bad guy without being able to aim.

NOTE: Deletions indicate apparently incorrect assumptions on my part, based on discussion elsewhere.

*Given the audience at that forum. If you haven't been to formal gun school that involved drawing from the holster and shooting from as far as 15 yards, then it's a hell of a good shooting course. If you're even a casual USPSA/IDPA competitor, it's unlikely you'll find yourself struggling to keep up, though, and that's as it should be in an entry-level class.