Enough
How much firearms training is “enough”? And who gets to decide? Following the internet reaction surrounding the St. Louis couple who recently defended their home with firearms, it would seem that there are an awful lot of self-appointed arbiters out there.
But I’ll go ahead and stick my neck out and make a statement guaranteed to stir the puddin’…
Stirring it up…
You do not need training to successfully and lawfully defend yourself with a gun. The whole, entire reason that a gun is such an excellent tool for defense is because it is so simple to operate. Heck, one of the prime arguments of the anti-gun crowd is that guns make it too easy to kill. Of course, when we point out that that’s exactly why we want one for self-defense, they start hollerin’ about how they’re too difficult to use properly without specialized training. And now what do we do? Pick up that premise ourselves and run with it. Actually, in the case of the St. Louis couple and others like them, we don’t just run with it…we pick it up and beat them over the head with it.
Tactical enough for you?
I have quite frankly been stunned at the number of internet gun experts who have spent the last couple of days completely trashing these people. Don’t get me wrong: I will absolutely stipulate that the couple involved were clearly untrained and committed some obvious safety violations. It absolutely would have been better if they had more training. But I will also point out that they were 100% successful in defending their property. We can speculate all day long about what might have happened had they not come out with guns in hand…but we’ll never know how that hypothetical would have played out. But what we do know with full certainty is that when confronted with even ineptly handled guns, the mob decided they had the wrong address and moved on.
This case is one more example of the fact that although proper training absolutely betters your odds on any given day, statistically speaking you do not need training to successfully defend yourself with a firearm. Training is great, and it would be wonderful if all 150-200 million gun owners in the country had “enough” training. But you and I both know that is NEVER going to happen. NEVER. The first problem is deciding what exactly “enough” training is, and who gets to decide. It is undefinable except at a completely arbitrary level. The second problem is simply the availability of training. We like to go on about how widely available training is these days, but let’s be real. It is one hell of of an undertaking to provide professional training to something on the order of 150 million gun owners. Heck, to even provide a one day class to all those gun owners would take…you guessed it…150 million training days. To reduce that number a bit, that’s a mere 410,959 years of training.
410,959 years of training? Gonna have to put in some overtime.
We can and should encourage proper training (and even provide it), but the fact of the matter is that approximately 2 million times per year, an armed citizen (like the couple in St. Louis) uses a firearm in defense SUCCESSFULLY and LEGALLY, and the vast majority likely have little to no professional training at all. In a recent social media discussion I was involved in, a well-known firearms instructor suggested that this wasn’t actually relevant, as most of the time (as in the St. Louis incident) armed citizens didn’t actually have to fire their guns, and if you wanted to prevail in an actual shooting, you did in fact need training. I would point out two things in response. First, there’s nothing wrong with not having to shoot anybody. That’s wonderful, actually. And second, in the minority of cases where the armed citizen did have to shoot, they still succeeded the vast majority of the time, and the similarly vast majority of those people had no professional training. Shoot or no-shoot, the truth is that the (mostly untrained) armed citizen almost always comes out OK, and that is a good thing. (The unarmed citizen typically fares much more poorly.)
While we hear tales in the news from time to time about the gun person who uses their gun illegally or has a tragic accident, they are news specifically because they are the anomaly, not the norm. Believe me, if even 1% of those 2 million defensive gun uses resulted in in the defender being charged with a crime or accidentally injuring themselves or another, we'd know about it. The truth is that although they may not be trained to our liking, the armed citizen usually does it right.
So we “gun people” have REALLY got to stop dumping on people just because they don't have the amount of training we think they ought to have. If these two folks in St. Louis were to see how the gun community is piling on them, do you really think they’d join hands with us? Do you think they’d seek training from the instructor who ridiculed them with a meme or some internet rant on how stupid he thinks they were? Or do you think they might conclude that those "gun people" are a bunch of pretentious assholes? I wouldn't blame them if they did...because we sure as hell can be. We really, really need to be cutting the new and inexperienced gun owners out there a break. They may not be perfect, but they’re good enough.
