Teaching New Shooters

For a decent sized segment of the people I know, I am "The Gun Guy".  I am the only person they know who owns a gun (that they KNOW; they'd be surprised...).

That means I get a lot of never-fired-a-gun-before questions.

I do my best to answer them honestly and simply.

Then we progress to going to the range and letting them shoot one of my guns.  I let them pick what they would like to shoot from my collection and bring a couple I like too.

If they have fun with that (most do) most of the time they progress to buying their own gun.

This means a trip to the gun show.  I advocate that they handle every single gun in the category of firearm they are considering and pick the one that feels best.

The evaluation by feel in the gun shop or show might not be a good indicator of how well that gun performs for an individual at the range; BUT it's nearly impossible to get a new shooter to buy a gun that feels wrong there.

It's only later, after they've been shooting a while, that they start considering other factors.

I'm not a super high end trainer.  I'm just the guy all my friends know is into guns.  With only a handful of exceptions, the ones that keep shooting after buying their first gun are no longer shooting that first gun.

I've noticed that most new shooters need to learn one thing at a time.  "This feels wrong" is too big of a distraction at first to let them learn.  Later once they've learned things like breathing and how to align the sights can you demonstrate why the "feels wrong" works better.  As was said here; "feelings lie."