The whole bang your head against the wall thing referred directly to how hard it is to convince people to embrace skills and training over
things. I did not phrase it as that is what you should do (get frustrated with folks choosing material goods over immaterial skills). Then I wrote about how nice it is to actually embrace skills and training and wrote the entire post as encouragement for PF members to remember that and to never grow complacent. In fact, I started out the whole post specifically addressing the PF community. If you don't remember, trying parsing it again:
This is not needed at this time but as PF grows (it actually does steadily grow), we must always remind ourselves never to become complacent.
I did my best not to lapse into negativity (such as you imply regarding CQBR SOPMOD Block II clones) but (again) I was addressing
our community.
Only on the internet would
"Always be humble, always seek to better yourself, and for the sake of our rights, and our culture, take a newbie shooting, and keep the right of self preservation alive" be taken as something negative. It's mind boggling the amount of negativity that folks can read into something. Truly, it is. I thought it was a positive post in which I reminded people not to
assume that everyone has their level of knowledge and I tried to really encourage skills and training for our community. Instead, I'm apparently "forcing" people into training, carrying tourniquets everywhere I go, obsessing over what newbies do, sneering at clone builders, and so on.
So, is a list of what folks could or should recommend for newbies verboten? What would make you guys happy since even the mention of recommendations gets turned into the implication that we are wasting our time and forcing people into something they don't want to do.
Negative little back and forths like this are silly, a waste of time, and they drag you down a few levels. It's what I get for daring to suggest training and skills, though.