Deference To Expertise

Channeling my inner Willard here.

Have you ever noticed how many expert trainers have absolutely zero time in an actual gun fight?

Because they are universally bad at explaining what their class contains before one actually attends, you've got no idea where they got their ideas.

Something they are universally good at is convincing people who get paid to write to publish articles telling people to attend their class.

Being generally more comfortable with my autodidactic ways, it took someone else paying for it for me to actually go to a class.

I noticed a couple of things wrong at the carbine classes I took.

What about cover and concealment?

Nothing.

A lot about being a better shooter and getting faster about it.

I took the classes with the shit I had and ALICE gear worked just fine.

To read about it, I'm going to die for sure because I didn't drop substantially more money on my gear.

By the way, ALICE web gear has a handy belt for a canteen.  The chest rig/plate carrier doesn't.  That mattered down by Myakka...

While speed is nice, it's not paramount.

What's that old line?  Slow is smooth, smooth is fast?

It's related to "a steady pace wins the race."

The articles advocating for these, expensive, clinics (they aren't really schools) always talk about the split times and being on the clock.

I will not say that the classes I took were useless.  I did learn something from them.  I even learned some stuff they were trying to teach!

If you have the means and the time, go ahead and take one.

But...

What they tend to teach is more geared to a 2-gun match.

In my experience anyways.

If they're teaching you something for use after a hurricane wipes out the area, they and the gun writers are not conveying that information to you before you attend the class.

Never forget, the same group of people advocating universal training and insurance also extolled the virtues of the Colt 2000.

Always be skeptical of the press, even "our" press.