Chapter 9 — Grandad, Uncle, and Your Buddy at Work

Ben

Some of the best men in my life taught me some of the worst habits I had to unlearn.

That is the truth I want to open this chapter with, because almost every new student in this country has at least one well-meaning person in their life who is positioning themselves as the obvious choice to teach them to shoot. A grandfather. An uncle. A father-in-law. A high school friend. A coworker who carries.

I am not going to tell you those people don’t matter. They matter. They are often the reason you are reading this guide in the first place. What I am going to tell you is that experience and instruction are not the same thing — and that the people who introduced you to firearms are very rarely the right people to teach you to be a defender of yourself or your family.

— Ben

Experience is not instruction

A person who has been around firearms their whole life has experience. They are not, by default, an instructor.

An instructor — a real one — has explicitly studied how to teach. They have a curriculum. They have a way of correcting students that does not produce shame. They have a way of communicating safety that produces understanding rather than fear. They have a set of standards by which they measure their students’ progress. They have, in most cases, paid for and completed formal training to teach.

A friend or family member who shoots well may have none of those things. They may have years of experience and no framework for transmitting it. They may have absorbed bad habits from their own informal teachers, and now be in a position to pass those bad habits to you — without ever knowing they are doing it.

This is not a judgment of those people. It is a judgment of the situation.

Why well-meant family teaching plants expensive habits

Most informal teaching has the same pattern. The teacher demonstrates. The student copies. The teacher corrects if something looks dangerous. The session ends. There is no measurement, no homework, no plan, no follow-up.

The student leaves having learned something. What they have learned is rarely what they think they have learned. They have absorbed:

• A grip that was probably fine for the teacher’s hand and may not be right for theirs.

• A stance that may or may not match modern best practice.

• A safety habit that may be sound — or may be the same one that almost got the teacher hurt twenty years ago.

• A confidence level that is not calibrated to their actual capability.

Most of those habits are correctable later. Some of them are not — they live in muscle memory and they have to be rebuilt the hard way.

Marcus is the clearest example in this guide of someone who learned that the hard way. He shot well, by the standard of his teachers. He shot well enough to enjoy it. He did not shoot well by the standard of someone whose daughter just bought a house in a tough neighborhood and asked him to teach her. The gap between good enough for hunting season and good enough to teach my child to defend her life is the gap that real instruction closes.

How to honor the people who taught you, while still getting professional instruction

This part is delicate. The relationships matter. The introduction your uncle or your grandfather or your friend gave you to firearms is something to be grateful for. You do not owe them less affection because you also owe yourself professional training.

Here is a simple script, if you need one:

“I love that you taught me. I want to build on what you started by training with someone who teaches for a living.”

That is the whole conversation. Most reasonable people in your life will hear it, accept it, and move on. Some will be hurt at first. A small number — usually the people whose ego was already tangled in their role as your teacher — will resist. That resistance is information.

You can honor the people who introduced you. You do not have to delegate to them the part of your education that requires professional work.

Sidebar — Marcus calls his daughter back

The conversation that started Marcus’s entire journey lasted under sixty seconds.

His daughter had asked him to teach her. He had said yes. He had hung up the phone, opened the safe, looked at the pistol he had owned for twenty-five years, and realized — clearly, for the first time — that he did not actually know how to teach her. He knew how to shoot. He did not know how to teach.

He called her back two days later.

“I’m going to take a class first. I want to teach you the right things, and I need someone to show me what those are. Then I want to find you an instructor too — separate from me. We’ll start there.”

She agreed.

They did. She trained with a different instructor than her father did, deliberately. Marcus continued his own training. Within a year, they were training together — not as teacher and student, but as two students who had each been taught well by professionals, who could now sharpen each other’s practice.

That second arrangement was always the right one. It just took Marcus a moment to see it.

Where this leads

Once you are training with the right instructor, with the right framework, on the right schedule, the next question is how you measure progress.

Most students don’t. That is one of the reasons most students plateau.

Let’s talk about standards.