The gun lesson
Apr. 10th, 2005 10:03 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
thebratqueenSo you wanna know about my gun lesson...
To answer the oft-asked question of "Dear God, why?" I took a day-long lesson in the basics of guns because my dad, like me, has the goal of always trying to learn new things. A few months ago he decided to give pistol shooting a whirl and asked if I wanted to join him. I did not have the specific yearning desire to dedicate my life to being a sharpshooter, but, like my dad, figured it could be fun to try for the hell of it, plus if nothing else it'd make for good story research. Dad then added the magic words of "I'll pay for everything." which helped to seal the deal.
The place we went to was surprisingly yuppie like in nature. I say this not because of a preconceived bias towards gun stores per se, but because this particular store was located, literally, right next to some train tracks. I figure when the 50/50 odds of you being located on the wrong side of the tracks boil down to a difference of approximately five feet, deciding what shade of teal to employ to best highlight your various forms of lethal devices is not going to be high on your list of priorities.
But no, it was a nice, well-lit place run by some of the gayest men I could imagine. Which, come to think of it, possibly explains the teal. Not that these boys were flaming, but on a scale of Brian Kinney to Emmett Honeycutt I'd say there was a Michael, a Vic, and even a Justin. Very possibly not that flamboyant out in the wild, but in the setting that they were in and doing they job that they were doing, it did provide a bit of a contrast.
The store owner himself was not gay, but did work the Lyle, the effeminate heterosexual vibe fairly hardcore. He came up to me and Dad fairly quickly and introduced himself as - my apologies to anyone of a similar background if I'm spelling this wrong - So How Soon Are You Getting Your Gun Permit? Yeah, to say that this guy gave a hard sell to the gun permit thing is like saying that Dubya had only mild interest in getting us all on board with his Social Security program. Every single conversation with him swung back to the permit thing. I get that permit = gun purchase = money for his store but jeez, back off Charlton Peston.
Dad and I were given a tour of the shop which had various forms of pistols, rifles, knives, hunting equipment, and two shooting ranges (one long, one short). The teal of the shop was decorated with various items, the most notable of which was shooting gallery targets that were pictures of Saddam "Not that there are NRA stereotypes" Hussein and Osama "That the use of these pictures for target practice would fulfill" Bin Ladin, and the most common of which was copies of the Second Amendment, the latter of which was posted approximately every five feet, just on the odd chance that you'd forgotten it in the previous 59 inches.
When Mr. Did I Mention That It Can Take Three Months To Be Given Your Permit So Really You Should Fill Out The Paperwork Now had to scamper off to do whatever it is he does - I presume pressure someone else into getting a gun permit - the Justin of the store came over to answer the various questions my dad had about purchasng a gun for target shooting, should he decide to go that route. This then covered the various ways that dad could legally buy a gun that day, sans permit, and keep it within the store's facilities:
Justin: Yeah, so you could buy the gun, keep it here, come back and shoot, and leave it here when you go, all without a permit. You just can't clean it here.
Me, wondering what weird-ass law from the colonial days makes it so that you can't store and clean a gun in the same location: Why is that?
Justin: Oh, because it stains the carpet.
Finally we had our gun lesson. Our teacher was a guy who, unlike all the other employees of the store, did not give off a femmy vibe, but on the other hand he did resemble a shorter, stockier Jim Ellison. That is, if Jim was a bit fanatical about his gun and also not especially attractive.
Before I get into the class itself I want to emphasize here that obviously this small sampling of people that I met can not provide an accurate picture of all the members of the NRA. Plus one has to assume that when the store owner, Mr. What Do You Mean You Haven't Teleported Over To Your Local Police Department And Filled Out Your Permit Forms Yet, has some very obvious views on his feelings about permits and gun ownership it's likely that he's going to want to hire people who agree with him. That being said, these guys were who they were and were pretty clear about the beliefs they had and did what they did, and made sure that we all knew they were not just proud members of the NRA, but also recruiters. Proof that there's some truth in stereotypes or a sign that even the NRA has members that make the more rational ones wish they'd stop being on their side because they're making their side look stupid? I haven't met enough NRA members to make that call. All I can tell you is what the class was like.
The class itself was an NRA sponsored one which, if passed, gives you a certificate that you need to take to your local police department to, as the store owner himself subtly hinted at, get your gun permit. Now to be fair one thing that was made expressly clear at the start of the class is that there is being legally qualified to buy, own, and operate a gun and then there's being actually qualified to buy, own, and operate a gun. Legally qualified means having the piece of paper that allows you to take the next step to jump through the hoops for the permit. Actually qualified covers such things as being able to wisely judge when, where, how, and more importantly if you should shoot. The teacher could not have made it clearer that in his personal opinion the class in no way made anyone actually qualified to own a gun. Actual qualification comes from a lot of practice and training, which he encouraged us to take if we seriously wanted to become gun owners.
He also made it incredibly clear how incorrect it was to assume that gun ownership means you are now protected, and that all your problems are solved. Much like, I'm told, they do in martial arts classes he went into a lot of detail about how having a gun means you must never be the agressor, that it must only be used defensively, and that depending on what your problem was a gun might not be the answer you're looking for (he gave the example of women in his self-defense class who had been raped and thought that carrying guns would make them feel safe, pointing out that the gun was not going to help them with the psychological aftermath of being attacked). He also demonstrated how easy it would be to still be hurt - or even worse, to be hurt more by trying to use a gun to protect yourself in an attack situation. He spent a lot of time on this.
That being said... I don't know that you can really say he effectively squashed the idea that you buy a pistol and now you can go around as your own personal vigilante system. Yeah, he went into the problems, but first off the main problems were things like "So if you go to kill someone, here's all the legal hassle you have to deal with" as opposed to, say "So if you go to kill somebody maybe you shouldn't commit murder."
I mean yeah, sure, if you're actively being raped (as was, to be fair, one of the examples) by all means do whatever you have to to protect yourself. But it's one thing to talk about the example of being actively raped, another to repeatedly and wistfully talk about how much fun it would be to kill people who may or may not have twigged your spidey sense as being a possible threat. So for all that we had a lot of detail, the real feeling that you got out of the lecture was not "Guns Are Not The Answer" but more like "The NRA Would Never Officially Tell You To Kill A Human Being But Just On The Odd Chance You Felt Like It Here's Some Advice On The Best Way To Win The Subsequent Court Case" complete with NRA sponsored books that help give you a primer on the way the laws vary from state to state.
Plus it's hard to believe that the real joy of guns is supposed to be hunting and sharp shooting when the first chunk of the class is taken up by the teacher showing disinterest in any form of permit other than the concealed carry one, and then getting into a long discussion about the various ways you can conceal a weapon and then use said weapon to hurt another person - complete with props and demonstrations of the right moves to use. Now for me as a writer this was great stuff to know. But for Playskool's My First Gun lesson... let's just say that if this was part of the official NRA requirement for the class, they're really not helping to counteract any of their bad press. Even the concept of contests paid only quick lip service to sharpshooting and then went immediately into IDPA, which is where you go through pretend scenarios of shooting at people. Yeah, they're just paper targets, but again we can't seem to shake that connection that if we have a gun we only do so because we'd like to be one-up on our fellow man.
And then we had the digressions into the teacher's personal viewpoints. As for example, did you know that when crime rates go down the only reason for that is because of more people legally carrying guns in those states? But when the crime rates go up that's only ever due to a million other factors, up to and including the economy at the time and - I'm not kidding - the activity of our solar system?
All of that was also part of a long diatribe on the teacher's part about how people overreact to the danger of guns ("If I put a loaded gun on that table it's not going to get up and run around the room and kill people.") and how gun laws were stupid because you had to go through all these hoops to get a pistol permit, but any one of us could've walked out of that room, bought a rifle with no permit, waited 14 days, and taken it home. Which okay, fair point on that last one, but to me the logical conclusion is not so much get rid of the pistol requirements as it is to up the rifle requirements.
To be fair, one woman in the class (there were four women, including me. The other 10 students were men and one guy was so Gareth Keenan as to be hysterical) did try to point out the opposing viewpoint, but she was a case of me wanting to ask her to stop making my side look stupid. She kept arguing for more gun laws by pointing out that nobody needed a personal arsenal. Which on the one hand: kinda true. But on the other if you are a competative sharpshooter then yes, you do need multiple kinds of guns for the various events you shoot in. So this then led into a stalemate where she couldn't effectively argue for the point she wanted to make, the teacher easily shot her down (no pun intended) by pointing out the competative shooting thing, and they went back and forth on that. For, approximately, forever. And not that any of that wasn't an interesting discussion to have, but perhaps not during class time when we had other things we needed to be doing. (Though allow me to mention the one student who snarkily interjected "You can only shoot one gun at a time, so what does it matter?" because, of course, that was the point.)
Now, granted, I'm new to all this, I know next to nothing about these classes, maybe I've got the wrong end of the stick. Plus, again, there's always the chance that I just have a bad sample group here. So I can't say that this class exemplifies what the NRA believes and stands for. But what I can say is that if this guy wanted to do a good showing of how the NRA stands for responsible gun ownership, boy are there better ways to go about it.
Here's the thing: Yes, legal qualification != actual qualification. But for all that, why not try to get as much actual qualification into the class as possible? Sure it's a drop in the bucket, but by definition that's going to be infinitely more than we had before, right?
And I will say this: based on the discussion of how the law views somebody who has a permit, I can see how it would be a pain in the ass for someone who was a responsible gun owner to deal with the fact that they are now considered to be a half step closer to being a criminal and and viewed as being wrong in every legal argument simply because knitting was not the hobby that called out to them. I honestly do. On the other hand, you can deal with that by trying to encourage responsible gun ownership and finding ways to make the difference between the responsible gun owners and the irresponsible ones more obvious, or you could deal with it by passive-agressively slumping your way through the legal requirements. Guess which method this class used?
As for example: the written test. You needed at least 80% on the written to master the first requirement for your gun permit. Fair enough. Except the test was open book. You get this little NRA book in the mail before the class begins, and you get to use it during the test taking. So you come up to a multiple choice question like "A misfire is:" look up "misfire" in the index, flip to that page, and then select the answer that is word for word what the book defines it as.
Now granted that did not make it impossible to miss a question, but the questions you could miss were trick questions. For example - and I got this one right but I could've just as easily gotten it wrong - there was a True/False question that was worded something like "You should breathe slow and steadily before you pull the trigger." This relates to breath control. Breathing makes you move, which affects your aim. What you are supposed to do is take a nice, easy breath in, let out half, fire, then finish exhaling. Based on the wording of that question, is it true or false? You might think true, since the breath in/half breath out is done slow and steadily, but it's actually false because it's going for the bit where you don't breathe at all . So now we have people getting messed up because of semantics, and not based on whether or not they know what they're doing.
But the real thing that bugged me was the actual handling of guns.
After the test, we went out to the shooting range. Only six of us could go at a time, so the instructor went in with the first six and the other eight of us waited behind the bulletproof glass and watched them.
Now the release you sign prior to the class lets you know that you won't get your certificate if you get less than 80% on the test, and you won't get it if you also fail during the portion of actually handling the guns. This was written a bit vaguely, however, so I began to worry that my bad eyesight might affect my performance.
Luckily for me Mr. So How 'Bout Those Gun Permits, Huh? showed up to keep us company. At this point I was, in spite of some of the eye-rolling nature of the class, still interested in the possibility of getting a permit, so I decided to ask him some questions. My feeling at the time was that I didn't know if I ever wanted to own a gun, but OTOH if it turned out that I liked shooting maybe I wanted to keep my options open. So I asked him how soon after the class should I go to apply for my gun permit:
Him: Because you asked, I'm going to say a week.
Me: Does the certificate expire? Do I have only a week to work with or is it a month?
Him: Because you keep asking me, I'm going to say a week.
Me: Okay, but I'm busy this week.
Him: We're all busy!
Me: Yeah, but I'm actually busy so how long are we talking about?
At which point my dad stepped in and I don't know if it was my dad being a guy, my dad being older, or my dad simply clarifying the week vs. month expiration issue, but then we found out that there's no expiration per se but that the police might require somebody to retake the class just for shits and giggles if, in their mind, you waited too long, and "too long" could in fact be defined as a couple of months.
Fair enough. I then asked about the shooting range, and would my ability to get the certificate be affected by me possibly having bad aim? To which I was told that no, nobody was expected to be a sharpshooter at this stage of the game. The class wasn't about marksmanship, it was about the safe handling of guns.
Now the sharpshooter thing is more than fair. I've got no objection to that. But as for the safe handling of guns.... here's where I've got an issue.
See the first part of the class did sort-of kind-of cover that. The whole bit on concealed carry and ways to stay out of legal trouble wasn't exactly on the test, but it did still talk about a form of gun safety. And the basics of general gun safety in the abstract were certainly checked on the test if not totally in the class (eg "Who can call out 'cease fire' on a gun range?") But apparently the last part about gun safety was can you load, shoot, unload (as needed), reload, and shoot a weapon? Which hey: fair question. The answer to which was covered with about, if I round up to an even number, five minutes of instruction from the teacher. Ten if you include him going over it quickly in the class via him doing it in the front with an unloaded weapon, pointing to infintesimally small black things on a black handgun and saying "so you push that there and then do this". The five minute part was covered on the range itself, where we all gathered in a circle with our ear protection on - which means everything is muffled - hear him Charlie Brown "Waa wah wah wa wah wah" his way through showing us how to work a revolver and a semi automatic, and then wee! Go to!
And to me it's just - well, wouldn't you want a little more hands on with the actual weapons thing? Like okay, no giving the newbies actual guns until they're on the shooting range and can only hurt themselves. I get that. But you can't hand out fake plastic guns in class and have people touch and see the general concept from there? Wouldn't you want to? Why go from zero to deadly weapon with only a quick primer?
Which, again: might have just been this teacher, and this location. It's entirely possible that the NRA encourages that kind of baby stepping and these guys skipped over it. Of note to me was that in the end the first part of my Hey Let's Get You Started On That Permit Paperwork Before You Walk Out The Door included a notation that I had ten hours of gun lessons. I had six. Including the breaks. So clearly somewhere along the line somebody thought that people at this level should be having ten hours worth of classes - I don't know if that's the government or the NRA or both - and somebody else decided that six would do it. Maybe that someone else was the NRA, maybe that someone else was this specific establishment. I don't know. But again, if these guys wanted to give the impression of being behind responsible gun ownership, I don't think that was the way to go about it.
So there's all the negative.
The positive was that the actual shooting part was fairly fun, once I called the teacher over and forced him to walk me through the loading and unloading where I could see and understand him clearly. We did a total of six rounds split between a revolver (ie six shooter, a la every Western you've ever seen) and a semi-automatic pistol (ie ohmygodWesissosexy). With each gun you did one round with two hands, reload, one round with your right, reload, one round with your left, then put the gun down and switch or just step away if you're done.
The targets were two small paper targets, bullseyes on the other side as per the recommendation for beginners, put at a distance of approximately No, Seriously Even Mr. Magoo Couldn't Fuck This Up. The semi I liked, even if I inadvertently didn't understand how many shots I was supposed to fire with it (I did less than I could have, which makes me pouty. But I'm a blond so it comes with the territory.). The revolver not so much. Basically with the revovler you have the option of doing double action, which in laymen's terms means you can fire away until you're all out, or single action where you're cocking the weapon by hand prior to pulling the trigger. Double action is faster, but less accurate. Single is more accurate but requires more fiddling with the gun prior to shooting. It was the latter part that I didn't like, because I wanted to focus my control on where the thing was pointing. So having to constantly adjust made me nervous. I'm sure this is the kind of thing that's fine once you practice it, but I don't know that the concept of the revolver appeals to me enough to want to practice it.
With the semi, on the other hand, once you're loaded you're basically good to go, which means you can focus your concentration on your grip and your aim. I liked that much better and I wish I'd finished with the semi instead of the revolver. Doing it as I did left me with a bit of a nervous feeling.
My dad, for what it's worth, had the opposite reaction. He didn't like how easy it was to fire off the semi so he found greater comfort in the slow and steady nature of the revolver. So it all depends, really.
Once all was said and done we got to keep our targets, then we got our certificates and our paperwork, and we were free to go.
On the way back Dad and I both agreed that if we'd been teaching the class (we've both taught before - not guns but still teaching) we would have structured it much differently. We both enjoyed the shooting range, but felt it was too much hassle to get the gun permit. You don't need a permit to go shooting at the range, however, so we may do that again and simply rent guns while we're there. If it ever turns out that we like it enough to want to buy guns we can always take the class again, but for now we're content.
And I believe that covers it. Any questions?
To answer the oft-asked question of "Dear God, why?" I took a day-long lesson in the basics of guns because my dad, like me, has the goal of always trying to learn new things. A few months ago he decided to give pistol shooting a whirl and asked if I wanted to join him. I did not have the specific yearning desire to dedicate my life to being a sharpshooter, but, like my dad, figured it could be fun to try for the hell of it, plus if nothing else it'd make for good story research. Dad then added the magic words of "I'll pay for everything." which helped to seal the deal.
The place we went to was surprisingly yuppie like in nature. I say this not because of a preconceived bias towards gun stores per se, but because this particular store was located, literally, right next to some train tracks. I figure when the 50/50 odds of you being located on the wrong side of the tracks boil down to a difference of approximately five feet, deciding what shade of teal to employ to best highlight your various forms of lethal devices is not going to be high on your list of priorities.
But no, it was a nice, well-lit place run by some of the gayest men I could imagine. Which, come to think of it, possibly explains the teal. Not that these boys were flaming, but on a scale of Brian Kinney to Emmett Honeycutt I'd say there was a Michael, a Vic, and even a Justin. Very possibly not that flamboyant out in the wild, but in the setting that they were in and doing they job that they were doing, it did provide a bit of a contrast.
The store owner himself was not gay, but did work the Lyle, the effeminate heterosexual vibe fairly hardcore. He came up to me and Dad fairly quickly and introduced himself as - my apologies to anyone of a similar background if I'm spelling this wrong - So How Soon Are You Getting Your Gun Permit? Yeah, to say that this guy gave a hard sell to the gun permit thing is like saying that Dubya had only mild interest in getting us all on board with his Social Security program. Every single conversation with him swung back to the permit thing. I get that permit = gun purchase = money for his store but jeez, back off Charlton Peston.
Dad and I were given a tour of the shop which had various forms of pistols, rifles, knives, hunting equipment, and two shooting ranges (one long, one short). The teal of the shop was decorated with various items, the most notable of which was shooting gallery targets that were pictures of Saddam "Not that there are NRA stereotypes" Hussein and Osama "That the use of these pictures for target practice would fulfill" Bin Ladin, and the most common of which was copies of the Second Amendment, the latter of which was posted approximately every five feet, just on the odd chance that you'd forgotten it in the previous 59 inches.
When Mr. Did I Mention That It Can Take Three Months To Be Given Your Permit So Really You Should Fill Out The Paperwork Now had to scamper off to do whatever it is he does - I presume pressure someone else into getting a gun permit - the Justin of the store came over to answer the various questions my dad had about purchasng a gun for target shooting, should he decide to go that route. This then covered the various ways that dad could legally buy a gun that day, sans permit, and keep it within the store's facilities:
Justin: Yeah, so you could buy the gun, keep it here, come back and shoot, and leave it here when you go, all without a permit. You just can't clean it here.
Me, wondering what weird-ass law from the colonial days makes it so that you can't store and clean a gun in the same location: Why is that?
Justin: Oh, because it stains the carpet.
Finally we had our gun lesson. Our teacher was a guy who, unlike all the other employees of the store, did not give off a femmy vibe, but on the other hand he did resemble a shorter, stockier Jim Ellison. That is, if Jim was a bit fanatical about his gun and also not especially attractive.
Before I get into the class itself I want to emphasize here that obviously this small sampling of people that I met can not provide an accurate picture of all the members of the NRA. Plus one has to assume that when the store owner, Mr. What Do You Mean You Haven't Teleported Over To Your Local Police Department And Filled Out Your Permit Forms Yet, has some very obvious views on his feelings about permits and gun ownership it's likely that he's going to want to hire people who agree with him. That being said, these guys were who they were and were pretty clear about the beliefs they had and did what they did, and made sure that we all knew they were not just proud members of the NRA, but also recruiters. Proof that there's some truth in stereotypes or a sign that even the NRA has members that make the more rational ones wish they'd stop being on their side because they're making their side look stupid? I haven't met enough NRA members to make that call. All I can tell you is what the class was like.
The class itself was an NRA sponsored one which, if passed, gives you a certificate that you need to take to your local police department to, as the store owner himself subtly hinted at, get your gun permit. Now to be fair one thing that was made expressly clear at the start of the class is that there is being legally qualified to buy, own, and operate a gun and then there's being actually qualified to buy, own, and operate a gun. Legally qualified means having the piece of paper that allows you to take the next step to jump through the hoops for the permit. Actually qualified covers such things as being able to wisely judge when, where, how, and more importantly if you should shoot. The teacher could not have made it clearer that in his personal opinion the class in no way made anyone actually qualified to own a gun. Actual qualification comes from a lot of practice and training, which he encouraged us to take if we seriously wanted to become gun owners.
He also made it incredibly clear how incorrect it was to assume that gun ownership means you are now protected, and that all your problems are solved. Much like, I'm told, they do in martial arts classes he went into a lot of detail about how having a gun means you must never be the agressor, that it must only be used defensively, and that depending on what your problem was a gun might not be the answer you're looking for (he gave the example of women in his self-defense class who had been raped and thought that carrying guns would make them feel safe, pointing out that the gun was not going to help them with the psychological aftermath of being attacked). He also demonstrated how easy it would be to still be hurt - or even worse, to be hurt more by trying to use a gun to protect yourself in an attack situation. He spent a lot of time on this.
That being said... I don't know that you can really say he effectively squashed the idea that you buy a pistol and now you can go around as your own personal vigilante system. Yeah, he went into the problems, but first off the main problems were things like "So if you go to kill someone, here's all the legal hassle you have to deal with" as opposed to, say "So if you go to kill somebody maybe you shouldn't commit murder."
I mean yeah, sure, if you're actively being raped (as was, to be fair, one of the examples) by all means do whatever you have to to protect yourself. But it's one thing to talk about the example of being actively raped, another to repeatedly and wistfully talk about how much fun it would be to kill people who may or may not have twigged your spidey sense as being a possible threat. So for all that we had a lot of detail, the real feeling that you got out of the lecture was not "Guns Are Not The Answer" but more like "The NRA Would Never Officially Tell You To Kill A Human Being But Just On The Odd Chance You Felt Like It Here's Some Advice On The Best Way To Win The Subsequent Court Case" complete with NRA sponsored books that help give you a primer on the way the laws vary from state to state.
Plus it's hard to believe that the real joy of guns is supposed to be hunting and sharp shooting when the first chunk of the class is taken up by the teacher showing disinterest in any form of permit other than the concealed carry one, and then getting into a long discussion about the various ways you can conceal a weapon and then use said weapon to hurt another person - complete with props and demonstrations of the right moves to use. Now for me as a writer this was great stuff to know. But for Playskool's My First Gun lesson... let's just say that if this was part of the official NRA requirement for the class, they're really not helping to counteract any of their bad press. Even the concept of contests paid only quick lip service to sharpshooting and then went immediately into IDPA, which is where you go through pretend scenarios of shooting at people. Yeah, they're just paper targets, but again we can't seem to shake that connection that if we have a gun we only do so because we'd like to be one-up on our fellow man.
And then we had the digressions into the teacher's personal viewpoints. As for example, did you know that when crime rates go down the only reason for that is because of more people legally carrying guns in those states? But when the crime rates go up that's only ever due to a million other factors, up to and including the economy at the time and - I'm not kidding - the activity of our solar system?
All of that was also part of a long diatribe on the teacher's part about how people overreact to the danger of guns ("If I put a loaded gun on that table it's not going to get up and run around the room and kill people.") and how gun laws were stupid because you had to go through all these hoops to get a pistol permit, but any one of us could've walked out of that room, bought a rifle with no permit, waited 14 days, and taken it home. Which okay, fair point on that last one, but to me the logical conclusion is not so much get rid of the pistol requirements as it is to up the rifle requirements.
To be fair, one woman in the class (there were four women, including me. The other 10 students were men and one guy was so Gareth Keenan as to be hysterical) did try to point out the opposing viewpoint, but she was a case of me wanting to ask her to stop making my side look stupid. She kept arguing for more gun laws by pointing out that nobody needed a personal arsenal. Which on the one hand: kinda true. But on the other if you are a competative sharpshooter then yes, you do need multiple kinds of guns for the various events you shoot in. So this then led into a stalemate where she couldn't effectively argue for the point she wanted to make, the teacher easily shot her down (no pun intended) by pointing out the competative shooting thing, and they went back and forth on that. For, approximately, forever. And not that any of that wasn't an interesting discussion to have, but perhaps not during class time when we had other things we needed to be doing. (Though allow me to mention the one student who snarkily interjected "You can only shoot one gun at a time, so what does it matter?" because, of course, that was the point.)
Now, granted, I'm new to all this, I know next to nothing about these classes, maybe I've got the wrong end of the stick. Plus, again, there's always the chance that I just have a bad sample group here. So I can't say that this class exemplifies what the NRA believes and stands for. But what I can say is that if this guy wanted to do a good showing of how the NRA stands for responsible gun ownership, boy are there better ways to go about it.
Here's the thing: Yes, legal qualification != actual qualification. But for all that, why not try to get as much actual qualification into the class as possible? Sure it's a drop in the bucket, but by definition that's going to be infinitely more than we had before, right?
And I will say this: based on the discussion of how the law views somebody who has a permit, I can see how it would be a pain in the ass for someone who was a responsible gun owner to deal with the fact that they are now considered to be a half step closer to being a criminal and and viewed as being wrong in every legal argument simply because knitting was not the hobby that called out to them. I honestly do. On the other hand, you can deal with that by trying to encourage responsible gun ownership and finding ways to make the difference between the responsible gun owners and the irresponsible ones more obvious, or you could deal with it by passive-agressively slumping your way through the legal requirements. Guess which method this class used?
As for example: the written test. You needed at least 80% on the written to master the first requirement for your gun permit. Fair enough. Except the test was open book. You get this little NRA book in the mail before the class begins, and you get to use it during the test taking. So you come up to a multiple choice question like "A misfire is:" look up "misfire" in the index, flip to that page, and then select the answer that is word for word what the book defines it as.
Now granted that did not make it impossible to miss a question, but the questions you could miss were trick questions. For example - and I got this one right but I could've just as easily gotten it wrong - there was a True/False question that was worded something like "You should breathe slow and steadily before you pull the trigger." This relates to breath control. Breathing makes you move, which affects your aim. What you are supposed to do is take a nice, easy breath in, let out half, fire, then finish exhaling. Based on the wording of that question, is it true or false? You might think true, since the breath in/half breath out is done slow and steadily, but it's actually false because it's going for the bit where you don't breathe at all . So now we have people getting messed up because of semantics, and not based on whether or not they know what they're doing.
But the real thing that bugged me was the actual handling of guns.
After the test, we went out to the shooting range. Only six of us could go at a time, so the instructor went in with the first six and the other eight of us waited behind the bulletproof glass and watched them.
Now the release you sign prior to the class lets you know that you won't get your certificate if you get less than 80% on the test, and you won't get it if you also fail during the portion of actually handling the guns. This was written a bit vaguely, however, so I began to worry that my bad eyesight might affect my performance.
Luckily for me Mr. So How 'Bout Those Gun Permits, Huh? showed up to keep us company. At this point I was, in spite of some of the eye-rolling nature of the class, still interested in the possibility of getting a permit, so I decided to ask him some questions. My feeling at the time was that I didn't know if I ever wanted to own a gun, but OTOH if it turned out that I liked shooting maybe I wanted to keep my options open. So I asked him how soon after the class should I go to apply for my gun permit:
Him: Because you asked, I'm going to say a week.
Me: Does the certificate expire? Do I have only a week to work with or is it a month?
Him: Because you keep asking me, I'm going to say a week.
Me: Okay, but I'm busy this week.
Him: We're all busy!
Me: Yeah, but I'm actually busy so how long are we talking about?
At which point my dad stepped in and I don't know if it was my dad being a guy, my dad being older, or my dad simply clarifying the week vs. month expiration issue, but then we found out that there's no expiration per se but that the police might require somebody to retake the class just for shits and giggles if, in their mind, you waited too long, and "too long" could in fact be defined as a couple of months.
Fair enough. I then asked about the shooting range, and would my ability to get the certificate be affected by me possibly having bad aim? To which I was told that no, nobody was expected to be a sharpshooter at this stage of the game. The class wasn't about marksmanship, it was about the safe handling of guns.
Now the sharpshooter thing is more than fair. I've got no objection to that. But as for the safe handling of guns.... here's where I've got an issue.
See the first part of the class did sort-of kind-of cover that. The whole bit on concealed carry and ways to stay out of legal trouble wasn't exactly on the test, but it did still talk about a form of gun safety. And the basics of general gun safety in the abstract were certainly checked on the test if not totally in the class (eg "Who can call out 'cease fire' on a gun range?") But apparently the last part about gun safety was can you load, shoot, unload (as needed), reload, and shoot a weapon? Which hey: fair question. The answer to which was covered with about, if I round up to an even number, five minutes of instruction from the teacher. Ten if you include him going over it quickly in the class via him doing it in the front with an unloaded weapon, pointing to infintesimally small black things on a black handgun and saying "so you push that there and then do this". The five minute part was covered on the range itself, where we all gathered in a circle with our ear protection on - which means everything is muffled - hear him Charlie Brown "Waa wah wah wa wah wah" his way through showing us how to work a revolver and a semi automatic, and then wee! Go to!
And to me it's just - well, wouldn't you want a little more hands on with the actual weapons thing? Like okay, no giving the newbies actual guns until they're on the shooting range and can only hurt themselves. I get that. But you can't hand out fake plastic guns in class and have people touch and see the general concept from there? Wouldn't you want to? Why go from zero to deadly weapon with only a quick primer?
Which, again: might have just been this teacher, and this location. It's entirely possible that the NRA encourages that kind of baby stepping and these guys skipped over it. Of note to me was that in the end the first part of my Hey Let's Get You Started On That Permit Paperwork Before You Walk Out The Door included a notation that I had ten hours of gun lessons. I had six. Including the breaks. So clearly somewhere along the line somebody thought that people at this level should be having ten hours worth of classes - I don't know if that's the government or the NRA or both - and somebody else decided that six would do it. Maybe that someone else was the NRA, maybe that someone else was this specific establishment. I don't know. But again, if these guys wanted to give the impression of being behind responsible gun ownership, I don't think that was the way to go about it.
So there's all the negative.
The positive was that the actual shooting part was fairly fun, once I called the teacher over and forced him to walk me through the loading and unloading where I could see and understand him clearly. We did a total of six rounds split between a revolver (ie six shooter, a la every Western you've ever seen) and a semi-automatic pistol (ie ohmygodWesissosexy). With each gun you did one round with two hands, reload, one round with your right, reload, one round with your left, then put the gun down and switch or just step away if you're done.
The targets were two small paper targets, bullseyes on the other side as per the recommendation for beginners, put at a distance of approximately No, Seriously Even Mr. Magoo Couldn't Fuck This Up. The semi I liked, even if I inadvertently didn't understand how many shots I was supposed to fire with it (I did less than I could have, which makes me pouty. But I'm a blond so it comes with the territory.). The revolver not so much. Basically with the revovler you have the option of doing double action, which in laymen's terms means you can fire away until you're all out, or single action where you're cocking the weapon by hand prior to pulling the trigger. Double action is faster, but less accurate. Single is more accurate but requires more fiddling with the gun prior to shooting. It was the latter part that I didn't like, because I wanted to focus my control on where the thing was pointing. So having to constantly adjust made me nervous. I'm sure this is the kind of thing that's fine once you practice it, but I don't know that the concept of the revolver appeals to me enough to want to practice it.
With the semi, on the other hand, once you're loaded you're basically good to go, which means you can focus your concentration on your grip and your aim. I liked that much better and I wish I'd finished with the semi instead of the revolver. Doing it as I did left me with a bit of a nervous feeling.
My dad, for what it's worth, had the opposite reaction. He didn't like how easy it was to fire off the semi so he found greater comfort in the slow and steady nature of the revolver. So it all depends, really.
Once all was said and done we got to keep our targets, then we got our certificates and our paperwork, and we were free to go.
On the way back Dad and I both agreed that if we'd been teaching the class (we've both taught before - not guns but still teaching) we would have structured it much differently. We both enjoyed the shooting range, but felt it was too much hassle to get the gun permit. You don't need a permit to go shooting at the range, however, so we may do that again and simply rent guns while we're there. If it ever turns out that we like it enough to want to buy guns we can always take the class again, but for now we're content.
And I believe that covers it. Any questions?
