jtward01 said:
Remember, I watched a CWP student point the gun down range, close her eyes, turn her face away and then pull the trigger. She still got her certificate of completion for the class.
And what did
you do the first time you fired a handgun, JT?
The first revolver I fired as an adult, I walked the darned barrel back and forth over a pretty wide arc, certainly well off each side of the paper of a close target all through the loooong trigger pull and it leapt in my hand like a live thing when the hammer fell; the first autoloader I fired, I darned near took off a thumbnail! I didn't get much better very quickly, either, though I did manage to stop injuring myself.
In a state with carry restrictions for the unlicensed, a class of the sort you describe can easily be a person's first time (or second or third) to the range and is almost certainly the first time there's anything at stake.
Beginners at anything often look like hell doing it. They're scary and clumsy and inappropriate. This tells us little or nothing about how much they can learn or how much they will learn. It tells us nothing of their motivation.
All we're learning about in the incident you're so fond of relating is your own aesthetic sense and your lack of trust in the instructor and range master. Such trivia might be of interest but it is not of any use. Still, thanks so much for sharing; your fear of other people is palpable.
jtward01 said:
Are you saying you'd like to be walking to your car in the mall parking lot with your children when this woman pulls out her carry gun to fend off a carjacker and starts blasting away with her eyes closed?
I would not
like to be in proximity to any gunfight; nobody would, especially those who have. But I have been, you may be; and we can be pretty sure that at least one side in any such battle has little training and no permit or license to carry. The odds of taking a stray round are actually rather low (and will be even lower with me laying on my belly under a Caddy -- I ain't that brave!), so low that adding the dubious benefit of some mandatory training to one participant doesn't change them significantly. It may even make it worse: police officers are about
five times as likely as armed, honest civilians to injure bystanders instead of bad guys in a gunfight. Statistically, I would be
less safe if the cops rode to her defense!
I would really like to know how you could be sure her eyes were shut unless you were on the wrong end of the range or hovering way too close to a noob under instruction, by the way; but no matter. She started her learning the day you watched her with the supercilious horror of the better-trained, when few if any of her rounds went where she wanted them to go. Of course, carjackings happen at close range; if she gets a couple shots off at arm's length, she already got the guy without needing to aim, just point and blam!
...You keep dreaming up scary hypotheticals. They're just dreams! Try to remember that as an EMT, you were handed a seriously skewed sample of the amount of stupidity, bad luck and violence any one person is likely to be directly subject to. Most folks do have a smattering of good sense and we trust them with all manner of dreadful instrumentalities, from automobiles to electricity, from weedkiller to MAPP-gas torches. Granny
may confuse the plaster of paris with confectioner's sugar and poison us all! --But you'd win a lot of bets wagering against it happening.
There
are risks in our lives; it is up to each of us to evaluate the risks we face and act accordingly. Your evaluation of the risk to others from "untrained" citizens exercising their natural and fundamental right of self-defense is quite out of keeping with the actual risk. If it wasn't, Vermont would be a bloodbath.
--Herself