Should a $35 dollar online training course and test be all that is required to get your license to drive a car for the first time? Don’t you need to be taught in person by an experienced and knowledgeable individual who will teach you the correct and safest driving methods? How else will you correct your emerging bad habits? An online course certainly will not correct any subconscious dangerous idiosyncrasies that you may have. You may never even know that they exist. Knowing nothing about driving starting out, how will you recognize that you have any bad habits to correct at all? If an online system like this was put into place, there would be millions of people with a false sense of security thinking that they now know how to drive. The reality is that they would be a great mortal danger to themselves and others.
If you can believe it, it is a reality . . . with guns. To get your concealed carry permit for firearms in some states, there are online courses that will give you a valid certificate so that you can get your concealed carry permit. Don’t get me wrong. I’m not saying that the government should ban online courses for gun safety. I am a strict advocate for a free market, so if online firearms courses sell, so be it. Let them be sold. My concern is about government regulations that recognize certificates from online courses for an individual to obtain their concealed carry permit. Again, there are localities where concealed carry requires no certificate at all and that is fine. However, if you are going to require a certificate for concealed carry, you should NOT accept it from an online entity. This absolutely promotes a false sense of security and may cause a dangerous and even deadly situation.
For example, one of the NRA’s 3 rules for safe gun handling is “Keep your finger off the trigger until ready to shoot.” In my classes, I stress the importance of not only keeping your finger off the trigger but pasting it onto the frame so that you feel the cool steel, wood or polymer. Many students, both experienced shooters and inexperienced, subconsciously move their fingers back onto the trigger and they don’t even realize it. The reason is because in childhood we have all been conditioned to do so. Playing cops and robbers, (that’s what we used to play before the computer age) our fingers were always on the trigger ready to shoot at all times from the beginning of play to the end. In movies and TV we see characters that never take their fingers off the trigger. We have all been conditioned throughout our life by Hollywood to keep our fingers on the trigger the entire time that the gun is in our hand. That is a bad habit that will carry on to the gun owner if not corrected. In addition, it is natural for the finger to slip into the trigger guard. That is why a live instructor is needed. This needs to be recognized, corrected and driven into the student's consciousness throughout the course. No computer program can do that.
EVERY time I teach a class, students do things in class that they don’t realize they are doing. Its not their fault. Like I said above, they have been conditioned to do so. Many of these are things are potentially dangerous and even fatal. By the end of any gun class, those things should have been corrected. For this reason, before I take my students to the range, we have dry fire exercises and rehearse what we will do at the range. If any dangerous tendencies arise, they are corrected. Of course when doing this there is no ammunition in the class room and all guns are checked at every time they are picked up. I make sure that everybody is handling their firearms safely and correctly before we even talk about going to the range.
I can comfortably and openly say that an online course not only does not promote safety, in my opinion it promotes danger through a false sense of security. By a state government accepting an online certificate as valid knowledge of handling a firearm, they are promoting the danger of inexperience. A valid certificate should be from a hands on training environment supervised by a qualified instructor.
So are online gun courses good at all? I'd say yes. They can be a good source of information like an encyclopedia can. However, they should not be the basis of your primary training in firearms and certainly not an alternative to live instruction. I believe that it is prudent that all shooters get some live organized instruction, whether it is military, law enforcement or NRA or any other reputable training entity. We have a right in this country that most countries do not have. The right to bear arms. It is the responsibility of each one of us to be knowledgeable and promote the safe ownership and handling of firearms.
The good news is that more and more people are taking live gun courses to make sure they have both the experience and knowledge to operate a firearm. Because of this, accidental deaths have been declining in the past 80 years despite the rising number of firearms in this country. In 2012, according to the ATF, firearm accidental deaths were at a all time low of .2 per 100,000 population. Since 1930, accidental deaths from firearms has decreased 81%. All this despite the quintupling of the number of firearms in the US. This is not what the anti gun groups want you to know.
Happy Shooting!
