True Story

I'll go shooting in the rain.

I've found I'm fairly waterproof.

But there's various degrees of "the rain".

Here in sunny Florida, there's a rain that's not unpleasant and while you're wet, you're not really miserable because the air is warm enough you don't feel cold.

We get this kind of rain fairly regularly here on the Gulf side.

The Army has a slogan, "If it ain't rainin' we ain't trainin'".  It seems like much of the time I was in the field we were cold, wet and miserable.  Taking one-station-unit-training (OSUT) in winter in Kentucky didn't help either.

The Army experience has made me very adverse to being cold, wet and miserable.  I am a tool using monkey and shelter is a tool.  Air conditioning is a tool.

Good news for most trainers is I know what a cranky bitch I am so I don't subject them to my money much.

For civilian training, I'm going to refuse to be treated like a soldier.  One, been there done that, got the medal, lost the leg.  Two I have vastly different expectations from a teacher I am paying to teach me.  I expect the environment to be conducive to learning.  Three, what's this applicable towards?

Outdoor training, the weather gets a vote.  I'm stoic enough to account for it.  I'm gutting past my throbbing leg just standing there; what's a little hurricane strength wind and torrential downpour?

For me to risk being cold, wet and miserable or hot, sunburned and miserable... can you, Mr Trainer, tell me what I am going to be learning a little better on your web-page?

Good web pages must really be expensive because the places that seem to do a good job explaining why you should part with your hard-earned sure want a lot of my hard-earned.  Actually, the places with bad web pages don't really seem to want less money, they just tend to lack a blogger taking the time to document the place.

I occasionally wonder if the whole point of many training places is to give a military fantasy experience to people who regret never serving.  They then impart what any graduate of basic training learned and everyone walks away happy.

In one of the shitty little carbine classes I took, I was giggling to myself about how most of this group preparing for WARRE would be lost and starving in the wilderness because shooting is such a small part of soldiering.  Never mind that training your shooting to the latest Army standard forgets that Big Green is a gigantic organization with a correspondingly large number of people doing things that are more akin to what Fed-Ex does to make sure that the boots on the ground don't have to carry a campaign's worth of stuff.

In this case it's Preppers 1; Gun-Campers 0.

Where can I be a-shooting my carbine for reals?

Well, hurricane apocalypse is one scenario.  That's not move-and-shoot house clearing drill.  That's defend the bunker, supplies and wimmins!  Why is it defend the bunker?  Because Law will return and when they come you're going to have to justify every fucking round fired while they were on vacation evacuated.  Preppers 2; Gun-Campers 0...

So far I've yet to see someone talking about a GUN-course that will pertain to this sort of scenario.  I've seen, through Erin, several prepper places that talk about the being prepared for hurricane and tornado disruptions to law enforcement.  Thankfully, humans really don't descend to lowest-common when confronted with disaster most of the time.  We tribe-up and work together.  Barbarity is the exception and that's what I want to take a class on.

If I knew more, I might even teach that class!

Now there's an idea!