Tuesday, July 18, 2023

"What is your major malfunction, numbnuts?"

The title of this post, delivered by R. Lee Ermey in Full Metal Jacket, is the sort of thing some people are afraid of encountering in formal firearms training classes. 

You can't exactly whisper on a range.

While I've no doubt that there's the occasional instructor living out their "I coulda joined, but..." fantasies via their part time gun school side gig, the vast majority of trainers of my acquaintance know that's a way to lose customers. You have to talk loudly to be heard on a range, but you can do that and still treat clients with respect.

This doesn't mean that safety reminders might not be delivered abruptly, as Jo Deering relates in this column for NRA Women:
"So, if you experience a criticism during a shooting lesson, ask yourself a couple of things. One, is whatever you’re doing creating a safety concern? Shooting sports are incredibly safe because we work very hard to keep them that way, and there’s no time for mincing words when someone is being unsafe at the range. If you’re doing something unsafe, you should expect to be corrected, and you can even expect that the correction will be swift and maybe not super nice.

Two, is the criticism or correction based on something you are capable of doing correctly but for whatever reason, you just aren’t? If so, you’re probably not being picked on but are being pushed to help you move to the next level. If you’re getting criticized for something out of your control, that’s another story.
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This is not to say that there aren't instructors out there who do pick on students, and Ms. Deering discusses how to handle those problems in her column as well. You should go read the whole thing.

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