Credentials Without Curiosity

Seen in the wild. This individual has some interesting takes on training. Of note, the lists himself as a former firearms instructor for what appears to be a law enforcement organization. Note the word former. That matters.

PICTURE 1

In the first image, he rails against training facilities that use words like “tactical,” “defensive,” “special,” or “advanced.” He declares that you cannot teach anything of value in a few hours or in a single eight hour day. He also insists that anything “tactical” or “realistic” cannot be trained in an air conditioned environment.

That is a remarkable stack of absolutes.

He goes on to say it took him four hours to properly teach nomenclature, and another four to teach grip and stance. If that is his baseline, that tells us more about his methodology than about anyone else’s.

Yes, the photo he criticizes shows an imperfect grip. That happens. It happens with brand new civilian shooters. It happens with military personnel. It happens with law enforcement officers. Teaching is not magic. It is repetition, correction, refinement. A still photo freezes a moment, not a curriculum.

If someone believes no value can be delivered in an eight hour class, one must wonder what they are doing with their eight hours.

PICTURE 2
In the second image, he expresses outrage over what he believes is a Weaver stance being taught.

It is not.

What he is looking at is a classic trigger isolation drill. The entire purpose of the exercise is to remove variables and force the shooter to focus exclusively on proper trigger manipulation. Grip and stance are not the point of the drill. The trigger press is the point.

This is not an exotic or secret technique. It is fairly common among instructors who understand how to isolate and train individual components of performance.

If you have never seen the drill, that is fine. We all have gaps. But confidently misidentifying a basic exercise while critiquing it is revealing.

Hmmmm...

PICTURE 3

In the third image, he reacts strongly to what he believes is an instructor teaching a student to crowd cover and extend the firearm past it.

Except the video does not show an instructor teaching.

It shows a competitor shooting a timed stage. A match. A contest where speed and accuracy are measured under rules that are not combat doctrine.

Anyone who has spent time around practical shooting understands that competition technique and defensive technique overlap in some areas and diverge in others. In a match, efficiency within the ruleset governs behavior. The presence of a shot timer and a range officer makes that obvious.

Context matters. Without context, criticism becomes noise.

SO WHY THE ANGER?
This is where it gets interesting.

Based on publicly available information, this gentleman likely graduated high school in the early 1970s. That places him in his seventies today. Age itself is not the issue. Some of the sharpest instructors on earth have decades behind them and remain lethal thinkers.

The issue is stagnation.

If your entire professional identity is built on a narrow band of institutional training, and you never step outside that ecosystem, the world eventually moves without you. Techniques evolve. Data accumulates. Civilian competitive shooters push performance envelopes. Cross pollination happens.

If you refuse to look beyond your original lane, you wake up one day and discover that what you thought was the whole map was only a corner.

When ego is fused to past credentials, new information feels like a threat instead of an opportunity. Different methods feel like heresy. Better results from unexpected sources feel intolerable.

That is not an age problem. That is a growth problem.

SUMMARY

• If you are not growing, you are dying.
• A snapshot is not a syllabus. A drill is not a doctrine. A match is not a gunfight.
• And the moment you decide you already know enough is the moment your instruction starts turning into sediment.
• Fossils can teach us something, this one surely has. 
• There is more than one way to produce results. The wise instructor studies them.
• You can have patches. You can have certificates. You can have titles. But if curiosity dies, competence eventually follows it into the grave.
• This all applies to much more than just Firearms Training.