Many people who are unfamiliar with firearms, which includes many people who work or volunteer for gun control organizations, don’t really understand shooting as a skill. They tend to want to treat is as knowledge. Knowledge is beneficial, but it can’t make one a proficient and safe shooter. I’ve spent my whole life in pursuit of some form of skill based discipline at one time or another, and I find shooting to be most accurately compared to playing the piano, in terms of what it takes to achieve proficiency. Actually, piano is much much harder, but it’s learned the same way, just piano takes much more self-discipline to master.
I took concert piano from the time I was four years old until my junior year in college. I was far more proficient at that than I am, and probably ever will be at shooting. But ask me to play something now, and I’d be lucky to clunk out the first movement of Beethoven’s Moonlight Sonata (if you listen to the Wikipedia recordings of it, they are appalling, just to warn you). At one time, I could play all three movements. The last piece of music I ever played in public was this one, my junior year in college. I couldn’t even begin to play it now, despite a working knowledge of the piece, knowledge of how keys are laid out on the piano, what the pedals do, and knowledge on how to read sheet music. Why? Because when I quit piano, I really quit. I never went back to it, and that skill I spent all those years building up has been purged from whatever part of my brain controls muscle memory. Granted, if I picked the piano up again, I would pick up the skill much faster than someone who had never played piano, as my brain rebuilt all those connections from long term memory.
Shooting is the same. I can spend an afternoon and give someone enough knowledge to go out and become a safe shooter, and that’s really all training can do. Shooting, and shooting safely, is a skill. Skills must be practiced, over and over again, until they are muscle memory. Firearms training is a good thing, because it can impart knowledge, and help you on your way to skill, just like piano lessons can help you learn how to play piano. But proficiency, and safety in the case of shooting, are entirely up to the person to develop. If you aren’t committed, and don’t practice, you’ll never be any good at either piano playing or shooting.
Some might try to argue that this means no one except police should carry a firearm, but police aren’t immune to this problem either, and many of us who’ve been shooting long enough have a story about cops at the range who have appalling shooting skills and gun handling practices. And those are the ones who at least practice some! Imagine how bad the ones are who only ever shoot their qualifier? I can put someone in training for twenty or forty hours, and I won’t make a good shooter. I can promise you over that time they will improve, but that won’t last long once they head out the door if they aren’t committed to polishing and maintaining the skill on their own.
This is why I say training is a good idea, but shouldn’t necessarily be a requirement. I think we should teach the basic knowledge of gun and shooting safety in schools as part of PE requirements. But I am about as much in agreement that legally mandating a training requirement for firearms ownership or carry will result in safe and proficient shooters as I am that mandating taking a piano lesson as a condition to buying a piano will result in more concert pianists. People who believe that don’t get the difference between knowledge and skill.
I can almost hear the gun control crowd now, “But Sebastian, aren’t you concerned with all those people who might carry a gun and have no idea what they doing with it?” No more than I worry about cops. The people who will end up carrying regularly are going to be, far more often than not, the people who are committed and serious about their skills. The person who gets a permit for the macho/cool factor or some other bad reason is going to very quickly tire of it once the novelty wears off, and once they realize that carrying a gun around with you is a pain in the ass. Most people who get toters permits don’t stick with it, and even if they renew their permits, they aren’t carrying very often if at all. It makes sense even in a musical context. If you see a guy on the subway every morning with a violin case, I’m going to bet you serious money he can play. He might not be Itzhak Perlman, but I’m going to bet he can play well. He wouldn’t be carrying it if he wasn’t committed. I’d be willing to take the same bet with a guy who carries a gun every day on the subway too.
