Firearms Owners Against Crime
Institute for Legal, Legislative and Educational Action
Institute for Legal, Legislative and Educational Action
by: Klint Macro
Many are surprised at my stance on mandatory training when they learn what I do for a living. I have been getting paid to train students and instructors alike for over a decade and I consult “for profit” training businesses to help them grow their companies by offering more “for profit” training opportunities.
Amendment II: A well-regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.
The government has no right to dictate to you what tool you “keep and bear”. The government also has no right to dictate to you how you go about being “well regulated”.
“Well regulated” means trained.
I certainly endorse folks getting trained. However, when training is mandated, there is a catch. The government is purposefully putting a hurdle in the way of your exercise of a self-evident, natural born, and/or God given right to defend yourself and those that you love. This hurdle costs time, it costs money, and in some cases, it costs lives.
In states like Maryland, New York, and Illinois you ARE REQUIRED to take a class to purchase a handgun. Then you ARE REQUIRED to take more training to get a carry permit. These classes are expensive, time consuming and frankly laughable from a “curriculum” standpoint. The mandatory Maryland wear and carry course (for instance) is 16 hours of instruction that mainly consists of an instructor reading statutes and laws off of a power point. These slides illustrate how restricted the students are as gun owners. Law abiding gun owners are held to an unreasonably high standard while criminals are afforded copious latitude in the criminal justice system. The state approved curriculum dedicates VERY little time to firearm safety and operation and offers hardly anything about how to carry a firearm for defense. Rather than dedicate time to developing a defensive mindset, sharpen awareness skills, understand the concept of reasonableness, learn about safety, and carrying a firearm for defense, they spend hour upon hour going over what guns are banned, and what you will be charged with if you carry a gun in a prohibited place. I personally believe the class helps citizens to prepare for the government to someday confiscate their property.
Faulty confidence is sometimes gained by the student. If the government requires and approves “this training” then many will believe that “this training” is all they will ever need. No amount of training should be the end all be all. Well regulated-ness is a lifestyle choice.
Our defensive training should be an ongoing thing… not a one and done.
When Americans are told that they must do something, such as a required class, the students often have a closed mind and come into the class with a chip on their shoulder. In states where training is NOT mandated, the students want to be there. It is their choice. They typically get more value out of the class and knowledge retention is higher.
Mandatory training promotes an industry of the lowest common denominator. Some businesses focus only on the state mandated purchase or “plastic card” (permit/license) course and dismiss other types of contextually appropriate training that many of our fellow Americans are seeking. How many Americans want to use a firearm to defend their family in the home, but they don’t quite have the confidence to carry one in public? The answer is lots! By only offering the carry permit class, training businesses are missing out on a large group of potential customers who want training but not the training the state requires.
Mandatory training also waters down the instructor pool in those jurisdictions. Instructors are only required to teach the state minimum therefore many instructors are only trained to teach the minimum and noting more. It is not too different than industries in communist countries. The state sets the standard and apathy sets in. Some will not strive beyond the minimum standard as they see no reason to. There will always be people seeking the minimum because the minimum is all that is required, mediocrity at its finest.
What about the hurdles? What if someone you love was being threatened by someone who claimed that they were going to come to their house and hurt them. Shouldn’t they be able to arm themselves NOW? What is the human cost of mandatory training?
I did an episode of Meet The Pressers with special guest Mary Schuster-Callison. She is one of the co-founders of Million Moms Against Gun Control. She told the story of her sister who was violently attacked while her purchase permit was being processed. I believe that the politicians who passed the Illinois law that forced her to jump through those hoops to bear arms should be held accountable for her inability to defend herself. Had she been able to purchase a firearm without government interference, she likely would have been armed and able to fend off the attacker that beat and raped her multiple times. Mandatory training has a human cost.
Does mandatory training make people “safer”?
There is NO data to show that people in mandatory training states are less “dangerous” than people where there is no training requirement to purchase or carry a firearm. Actually, you may find the opposite. If mandatory training made people safer, then we would have no car accidents or traffic violations. Training is mandated in EVERY state for people to get a driver’s license, yet there are thousands upon thousands of traffic accidents and violations each year.
While we are talking about automobiles, Americans are much more likely to be hurt or killed in a vehicle than with a firearm, yet there is no “White House Office of Automobile Violence Prevention”.
I recently made this meme. It is a sarcastic take on deaths due to vehicles and other causes if the government also addressed them as “epidemics” with common sense “controls”.
Gun control is not about saving lives…. It is about CONTROL.
Mandatory firearms training is a gun control measure designed to make it harder for Americans to freely exercise their natural born, God given, self-evident right to protect themselves and those that they love.
I encourage ALL AMERICANS to seek out training. Make training a lifestyle choice. Train EVERYDAY. Take classes, practice, watch instructional videos, read books and articles, take classes, find a shooting coach, learn first aid, learn about laws, pay attention to everyone and everything in your protective bubble. Make smart choices about where you go, when you go, and who you go with.
Take on the responsibility to be better well-regulated as well as armed Americans. It is your choice… not the governments!
You want to know WHAT kind of manditory training I would potentially support? How about firearm training at the grade school level? I could get behind this. Training for EVERYONE, not just gun owners. What better way to encourage our future citizens to responsibly exercise a right than by offering them training as a kid? More on this in a future post!
Stay Armed and BE Well Regulated!
Klint Macro
FOAC-Institute VP