Originally Posted by
ToddG
I think it's beneficial to have an instructor who at least "accepts" DA/SA guns, for lack of a better term. An instructor who wants to spend class time telling you that the gun is holding you back is not going to give you the best result. Will you still learn stuff? Sure. But it's not the same.
My firearms teaching career started, as it does for many, with CCW classes. I was part of the NRA Range's "Senior Firearms Instructors" aka SFI and we taught a class each month. The class included one hour of one-on-one range time for each student. Of all the instructors, I was the only one who carried and competed with a DA/SA gun. The head instructor, during his shooting lecture, would even tell students that a DA/SA gun is harder to shoot and less effective and just generally icky. New shooters trying to learn their DA/SA guns with the other instructors who didn't understand how to run a DA/SA gun tended to struggle... a lot. The students who ended up with me passed our informal shooting program without a hitch. That's not because I was an awesome instructor, it's because I knew how to operate the gun properly and I spent our time telling them how to shoot instead of telling them to buy a Glock.
I've taken many, many classes from instructors who didn't appreciate DA/SA guns. They were still good instructors and good classes. But I learned the most about the actually shooting part from folks like Langdon who really knew what they were doing with a DA/SA gun in their hands.