The Value of Shooter Training
Dr. John Woods 08.26.19
Buy a gun, get some training. Sounds like a no-brainer, doesn’t it? It should, but unfortunately so many people will buy a gun and then just store it away waiting on the S to HTF.
When the emergency sirens go off, they pull it out and immediately wonder how it works, how to load it, where the safety is and so forth. The owner’s manual now lost or misplaced into a black hole somewhere, but it’s way too late anyway.
Placing a value on shooting training is like putting a value on good health or health care. It’s essential. As another forgotten writer said long ago, “Training to shoot a gun well increases the odds of walking away.” What better way to explain the necessity for shooter training?
Like so many other acquired skills, the ability to shoot well, if left unattended, will likely become weak or be lost altogether. Shooting a gun with repeated successful accuracy is nothing like riding a bike. Once you learn the balance to master a bike, it seems to last a lifetime. This is not so with shooting a firearm.
This is why law enforcement officers and military troops are regularly required to shoot at a range to requalify with their firearms. If left unpracticed too long, they will decline or get rusty around the edges.
For some folks, shooting well may be an intuitive act, but for most of us training is mandatory as is practicing on a regular basis.
So, how much training is enough? Really, there will never be enough, but no gun owner should go without some level-one training followed by repeated practice. Those gun owners without even some rudimentary gun orientation training will never learn the fundamentals of correct shooting and gun handling. You can’t learn it from a book or get it by watching a video and never going to the range to pull a trigger.
For the everyday prepper, gun training should include a thorough introduction to the gun(s) you intend to use for protection and self-defense. Some skills may be transferable between a handgun, rifle, or shotgun, but each has unique operating features that they must be learned separately to be confident in their use.
The value of shooter training cannot be tallied until the results pay off one day in surviving an incident that required you to ply those skills. Remember, years later you might still fall off that bike.
