Quote:
Originally Posted by Shnabdabber
Captain Crunch made a very valid point of police officers being trained to handle firearms. However, he assumes that joe taxpayer is a poor shot, trigger happy and useless in a armed confrontation. As a former member of the Canadian Forces I appreciate his opinion on these things. Surely though he must know that some of the most decorated snipers/soldiers in the field cut their teeth shooting on the farm/backwoods. Carlos Hathcock reinvented the Marine Core sniper by implementing techniques he used hunting as a boy with a .22 rifle. I'm not 100% certain but I'm sure he still holds the record for the Marines Wimbledon Cup, a 1000 yard shooting match which he set as a 18 year old. The guy was a crack shot before he ever entered the marines. A canadian soldier used to hold the longest confirmed kill at 2430m, only recently bested by a British solder by 45 meters. The canadian used to practice long range shooting as a boy and claims he used to shoot flys. Sounds ludicrous, until you see guys drive nails with a rifle over long distances. So I take offense that civillians are useless shooters, and many f class competitors, as well as Olympians and avid sportshooters would as well.
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Granted, but since I saw my name mentioned and I have a larger then life ego, I think that I need to revist.
When you talk about civillians using weapons, as far as learning to put bullets on targets that's one thing. I can successfully teach fire arms safety and I can do a relatively good job of teaching someone how to put lead to target.
However that's a long way from teaching a person how to use a fire arm in a chaotic situation and to do it without
A) Killing innocents who are not targets
B) shooting your own toe off
C) something worse.
There is a big difference between target shooting or hunting an animal and using a weapon for self defense in a chaotic situation.
I get that a lot of the really good snipers got an early shot Davy Crockett style, I get that some very good soldiers and cops graduated from hunting in the wilds.
But lets be honest, the whole call to arm teachers and to allow people to walk around with fire arms which they can use if a chaotic situation with a mad shooter erupts to me is ludicris.
I'm sure guys like Undercover and others who have served can attest to the same thing. You can't train someone to react properly with a firearm under stress in days, or weeks or months, you don't even know if someone can handle that kind of a situation until you get them into that situation, or at the very least find a way to simulate that situation realistically.
I knew a lot of guys that were very good shots when they came on board and I was working as an instructor with basic training groups. They could put bullets down range with ease. We taught gun safety out the wazoo and corrected people with a passion when they messed it up so they never did it again.
But seeing and teaching people to react when things start going crazy is another thing and it takes a looong time before you'd ever trust a person in a real situation.
In one of my first exercises in basic where we went up against a trained enemy force, it was the middle of the night, they practically sleep deprived us and ran us ragged and waited until about midnight, we were called to stand too and we jumped into our slit trenches. The enemy forces started chucking in grenade simulators and arty sims to make us extra jumpy and basically snipped at us from a distance. It felt real, and you quickly forgot that it was fake. Then I was told to move to another trench to re-enforce that position, so I left and thought I was doing the right thing. I took my time, made sure I was situational aware. But I came around a tree line and I was face to face with an enemy force guy, and he had the drop on me.
I will admit that at that moment because of my inexperience in this kind of situation, all of my training left me, and I froze for just that second.
Yes, children CaptainCrunch came pretty close to soiling himself when I saw that rifle barrel swing up, and even though he was about 30 yards away that barrel looked like it was 8 yards across. I didn't dive for the grass or behind a tree, or snap shot him. I basically died in that exercise.
But since we were so "lavishly trained over the next few years we learned how to overcome that and depend on our training.
So long story short. I believe completely that unless you take incredibly indepth in the field training and you take massive psychological testing you shouldn't be able to buy a gun that you can take into public. I don't even think you should be allowed to buy anything but a bolt action hunting rifle or a shot gun for hunting.
When the NRA talked about paying for training teachers to carry guns in school I laughed, because teaching someone to shoot at a stationary target that doesn't shoot back or scream or bleed or cry as it dies isn't going to teach someone how to react when some nut bar goes into a school with bad intentions. It won't teach a person to identify who the enemy is and isn't, and it certainly won't teach someone to be able to analyze a situation and make a semi decent decision.
Those people that joined the army that knew how to shoot a gun, they only had one percent of the training required for me to even consider them to be allowed to carry a handgun in public or use it to defend their homes or their schools or whatever, and I'm not even talking about knowing if they're psychologically stable enough to be trusted to do so.
I spent way to much time in the army with guys that thought it was easy, that a gun was the great equalizer because you simply had it and you could aim it. I spent way too much time with pocket rambo's who we had to bring back to earth with the seriousness of what they're doing.
Cops go through massive training and continue to train every day to be able to react to situations and use their weapons properly and they still get it wrong.
Soldiers train almost full time for years and there is a large percentage that still struggle when it gets real.
There's no training that a civilian will want to take in terms of time required and stress level required that would make me comfortable with them basically being a first responder.
For the most part guns are not cars. Guns are designed with the intent of causing bodily harm and death, a car is not. Guns propel bullets at high rates of speed on an uncontrollable trajectory once they leave the barrel. Cars you can constantly control.
I'm probably the most anti-gun conservative your ever going to see.
If your going to accept a right to bear arms then you have to accept that there has to be a responsibility on who has that right and what kind of guns should be allowed
The 2nd amendment needs to be revisited. When the founding fathers wrote it they had no idea that guns would become far more vicious and dangerous then they were back then. They also didn't have a civillian base lifestyle with the density and mental illness awareness that they had now. They also had an armed forces that could be generously called a civillian militia that was equal in arms technology to the average Joe, that's not the case anymore.
Anyways just blathering on now.