Shall Not Be Questioned

There seems to be a lot of passion for the Appleseed Project from instructors, and I feel like I’m doing a lot of nitpicking over problems I have with the program, that in the big picture, are relatively unimportant.  Defenders of Appleseeed have consitently stated that it is not for newbie shooters, which was a misperception I had of the program, and if that’s the case, would drop a lot of my objections to their training method and packaging.  I will reserve any further judgement until I’ve had a chance to attend one of these events.  Fair enough?

These aren’t from our weekend, but Peter has dug up some good ones.

I have never been a huge fan of laser sights.  Mostly because I’m a bit of a traditionalist, and believe that getting a clear sight picture on your target needs to be something instinctive, and it’s how folks should train.  When I found out our Para 1911s were going to be equipped with Crimson Trace Laser Grips, my reaction was mostly “Well, that’s cool Crimson Trace did that for us, but I don’t really use laser sights.”  But once I learned how to use them as a training tool, I was pretty enthusiastic about them.

The training use of laser sights is one thing that Todd Jarrett impressed on us at Blackwater.. This is not an angle I had ever considered before, and after seeing his technique demoed, I’m sold.  What the laser helps to do is to amplify movement, so you can immediately get useful feedback on grip, stance, trigger control, and follow through.  The fact that the lasers were activated by the grip safety made problems with grip pretty apparent when you would see the laser disappear, and you could easily see which shooters were thinking too much about their trigger pull.  Todd was pretty tuned in on what the various whisps and movements of the laser meant, and saw something in mine that indicated I was locking my knees.  But most problems were pretty obvious, and next time I take a novice shooter out on the range, I’m going to have to try using a laser sight and see what problems I can correct.  Should be interesting.

UPDATE: I should clarify that for beginners, I will still absolutely eschew the use of a laser to teach sight picture.  I still believe beginners need to know how to use open sights.  But for people who get that part, the laser is a great tool for helping make someone a better shooter.

Kevin Baker and I were on the show last night.  If you missed it, you can listen here.

There seems to be the general consensus that I absolutely need to try an Appleseed before I knock it, and until then, I am simply unqualified to question or comment.  Let me call bullshit on that.  Many thousands of years ago, human beings developed this thing called language, where we learned to relay and communicate experiences to others, so that they may benefit from knowledge without the need to have to experience things first hand.

PDB has made some solid, and I think well founded criticisms of the program.  I questioned whether the packaging was really conducive to keeping shooters interested and getting them to want to come back to shooting.  People have provided antecdotal evidence that it’s a wonderful program, and everyone has a great time and folks come back again and again to get themselves out of the kitchen, so to speak.  I have no doubt that many people enjoy it, because shooting is pretty fun, after all.  But does everyone?  What about the people that walk away thinking this isn’t for them?  Would they have enjoyed themselves in a better, more carefully crafted training program?  I also question where all the money is going.  Pulling their form 990s, they are spending almost a quarter of their 80k a year budget on travel.  That’s not necessarily wrong, but it does raise some questions in my mind about what a 23k a year travel budget is accomplishing for the organization.  Most of their budget, about half, is going into the bank.  That’s not unusual for a non-proifit just starting out, but what projects or purpose are they saving nearly half the yearly budget for?

Egregious Charles says in the comments:

I know they’re doing it wrong and I haven’t been there.  How do I know?  Because I’m interested in bettering my rifle skills, have spent thousands on rifle training (much of that was actually for the travel and ammo), and looked at Appleseed material online and thought I’d rather not go there.

It’s an unconcious phenomenon you see all the time in martial arts schools.  They pick a fairly unusual and specific technique: in this case, the sling, now abandoned by the world’s best military.  Then they say that anyone who does not know this technique is not a real maritial artist: in this case, is a ‘cook’ not a ‘rifleman’.  This enables them to feel exclusive and vastly superior to everyone else, and requires of them only a relatively small investment in practice.  It’s a psychological trap.  I predict getting others involved will become more and more a cover for an unconcious goal of demonstrating their superiority to the cooks.

Note that this criticism is totally unconnected to whether the sling is a good and valuable technique.  I bet it is.  I’d certainly like to learn it.  It is connected to whether the sling is an essential requirement.  Modern militaries clearly demonstrate that it is not.  Appleseed says what do they know?  They’re all cooks!

Also a fair criticism.

UPDATE: I should probably point out that I’m not at all criticizing the idea that it’s a great good to bring new shooters into the sport.  Or that it’s a great idea to teach people rifle marksmanship.  I’m not even going to heavily criticize teaching use of a sling.  But I will take issue with selling it as the one true path to being a rifleman in the tradition of the revolutionary war soldier, whatever that means.