I am sure that you also want to grow your hair out just to pull it out when you see this question....."where can I get my ccw cheap?".....followed by at least 3 instructors with a combined experience of 12 months racing each other to offer the class for less than $100! Wow that never gets old
No kidding. Particularly when I see that one of them talks about their class starting at 2pm and being finished by 5pm.
If I was a professional auctioneer I couldn't cover the required material in that amount of time, much less including the range time!
I have this schizophrenic attitude towards the required NE CCW class, really.
On the one hand, I'm not thrilled that people need to jump through hoops and spend lots of money so that they are "allowed" by the state to carry tools for effective self-defense. Plus, much of the material taught in the class should already be KNOWN prior to anyone carrying. The legislatively-mandated curriculum seems to want CCW instructors to first teach the NRA Basic pistol course, then teach a Handgun Skills Course, follow that up with a Legal Issues course, and then have a range qualification.
Plus some extras.
That's incredibly stupid. People have to come to the class with an appropriate handgun and gear, and be able to use it---yet the class is supposed to teach people 1) appropriate handgun and gear choices, and 2) safety and technique with said firearm. Either we should be teaching it to them, OR they should know it in the first place. Pick one!
...and yet, at the same time, since there is a mandated curriculum, I want to make sure that if my students have to sit through it, I want to do a good job of giving them good information. And so, to my mind there is a certain minimum amount of time this class is going to take, because if the instructor is
going to do their job teaching the mandated curriculum, it WILL take awhile to cover everything in a useful fashion.
So hearing about people's 3-hour classes, taught by folks who don't demonstrate good safety habits (example: everyone remember Great Plains Firearms Training's picture we saw awhile back with students pointing real guns at the backs of each other's heads?), who can't really shoot themselves (hint: if your grip looks like any of
these, your stance looks like any of
these, and you can't define the difference between a bowling draw and a fishing draw...), giving poor advice about gun selection and carry habits (condition three? NO.)---and worst of all, comes from people who don't understand effective
teaching (which is based on the level of student understanding)....
...yeah, that annoys me. Greatly.
[sigh]
Of course that gets followed up by students saying how great the class was, and how much they loved it, and how much they learned---because they don't have anything to compare it to, and have no idea what a
good class is like.
Hm. Yeah, that's one of my pet peeves. You may have noticed.
the first and most important question they should ask, would be to there wife, CAN I BUY A GUN! I am on several face book pages and cannot believe how many people are selling guns that are only 2 months old, Ive asked a few, mostly its, the wife got pissed!
I have the opposite problem---whenever I want to buy a gun, my wife is fine with it as long as she ALSO gets a new gun. And her gun tastes are more expensive than mine, most of the time!
(She also keeps picking calibers that I don't shoot. At least now she is reloading her own ammo for her Open gun...)
