Yes, and I have outlined them in several posts above.Originally Posted by GardoneVT
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Jim Higginbotham, Lynn Givens, Tiffany Johnson and Vicki Farnam were also part of the conversation. Mas Ayoob was as the event, but wasn't present for the group discussion. I think Chris Fry was there, but I'm not certain. I'm pretty sure that Chuck Haggard, Wayne Dobbs, and Darryl Bolke were part of it too.
I had an ER nurse in a class. I noticed she kept taking all head shots. Her response when asked why, "'I've seen too many people who have been shot in the chest putting up a fight in the ER." Point taken.
Worth quoting again. There are, maybe, five guys I can think of locally who have trained with those folks. This is in an area of 500k folks. Chris Costa and Instructor Zero have more pull than the trainers JLW mentions. Sad.I know it might seem hard to believe, but to the average person the local club NRA instructor has exponentially more credibility than any of those names you just listed. Gun shops don't know who they are, either.
It's a social media world. Costa, Yeager, Zero and others have a huge social media presence.
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The downside to all of the truly good instructors not playing the social media game is that they abandon those platforms to the derp.
On the other hand, if they venture into the social media game, they will face everything they post attracting a swarm of Serpa wearing derp wanting to argue.
In the old days, they used to just have to battle the gun rags. Now they have to battle everyone with an interweb connection.
I had an ER nurse in a class. I noticed she kept taking all head shots. Her response when asked why, "'I've seen too many people who have been shot in the chest putting up a fight in the ER." Point taken.
How does that old saying go (brutally paraphrased here) about even if you're the baddest ground fighter on the scene with an A+ BBJ game, there's still no future in grappling street skells with Tuberculosis.
The crema will rise to the top of the espresso, to murder another old saying. That's why we all became connoisseurs.
There's a difference between a bad instructor and a flagrantly dangerous one.
I've been involved in discussions about a national accreditation/certification option other than the NRA several times. It just does not seem workable.
Ken Hackathorn's name has been used in this thread, so I'll use him as an example. I have known Ken since the late 1970's. He is one of the best trainers in the business and is a friend of mine. He was approached about joining such an organization and flatly refused. He said, basically, that it could do him no good, he had all the business he wanted, and all the credibility he needed. A lot of his peers feel the same way. That leaves a bunch of well qualified trainers outside the organization, and lesser trainers in it. If someone notes that Ken is not a member of the "We're Really Qualified Trainers Association", are we saying he's not qualified?
As to people flocking to an association as consumers, I think someone has an inflated idea of the size of the serious training community among gun shops and shooting ranges. I moved to a new town/state a few months ago. There are two indoor ranges in the town. I visited both to see if they were suitable for my own practice. I asked if I could work from the holster, shoot rapid fire drills, etc. No one at either shop had ever heard of me or Rangemaster and didn't know me from Adam's housecat. I've been in this business over 40 years and gun shop operators don't know my name at all.
This. Most of the weekend warriors in my area know who Yeager is. Some aspire to drive a thousand miles to train with him. Sometimes I suggest they stop at Pat Goodale's a quarter of the way there and call it a weekend. Blank stares.
To echo what Tom writes, Shane Gosa and I brought in Tom Givens, Craig Douglas, Claude Werner, William Aprill, and Erik Lund for a our state association's conference in 2015. One of the other board members said these words to me, "I don't who all these people are that you and Shane are bringing in, but I'll put (association member) up against any of them."
The first open enrollment class I attended was in April of 2014. I recognized over half the people in the 2015 Paul-E-Palooza group photo. The group of people who actually seek out quality training is small. PF has a concentration of those people, and this discussions here are not representative of gun owners as a whole.
I had an ER nurse in a class. I noticed she kept taking all head shots. Her response when asked why, "'I've seen too many people who have been shot in the chest putting up a fight in the ER." Point taken.
On the same weekend I had Craig Douglas in town, one of the local gun shop guys drove six hours to take a Yeager class.
I had an ER nurse in a class. I noticed she kept taking all head shots. Her response when asked why, "'I've seen too many people who have been shot in the chest putting up a fight in the ER." Point taken.
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