Firearms Training For Beginners (Starting With The Basics)

Hello and welcome back to Student of the Gun Homeroom today we’re going to talk about the hierarchy of learning, or how human beings learn. Where you are and this is very important when it comes to learning to use firearms, and I’m going to break it down for you. This was actually broken down for me, oh more than 25 years ago by John Farnham. John Farnham is a very famous firearms instructor, if you have the opportunity to take one of John’s classes, I think you should do it immediately as soon as you can. If he’s coming to your area, take one of those classes, enough said. So the hierarchy of learning, how do human beings learn and where are you in the learning process. Okay first of all, when you first start out, you start out at the very bottom of what they call unconscious incompetence. This basically means you don’t know what you don’t know, you’re just blissfully ignorant, you’re just moving around. You don’t know what you don’t know, and unfortunately, a lot of people that we encounter in our daily lives, a lot of people that we meet in the grocery store or at the gun shop or at our place of business are blissfully ignorant. They just don’t know what they don’t know and they’re perfectly happy being like that. Now those people don’t go to gun classes or firearms training because they think that they’re good. Now, these are the people that will tell you, well now I’ve never been to a training class, but if the time ever came I would know what to do or I could do it if I ever had to. Hmm, really? No, you’re deceiving yourself but that’s okay because you are blissfully ignorant, right? Well the next step, and this is how we get people into classes or how people decide that they need to go to a training class, and it’s what they call conscious incompetence and they realize that they don’t have the information, the training education, the knowledge that they need but they want to get it. So that’s where you start out, you know when you take a firearms training class for the very first time, you go into a basic pistol class, just a 101. You’re sitting there and you’re just looking up at the instructor with big doe eyes and you’re ready to receive all that information. At that point, you have you realize you don’t have the information, but you’re smart enough to know that you need to get it and that’s good, that’s your starting level. So that’s where we start, when you go to a training class you should be in the position where you’re like, hey I realize I need to get this information, I don’t have it yet but I want to get it. Fantastic, now the next step is what we call conscious competence. That is if I think about it if I go through at my head if I say okay, he said step one, two, three, four, press the trigger, front sight, front sight, press trigger, boom, I hit the target. Okay, that’s conscious competence, that is I know what to do I’ve been told what to do and as long as I think about it. Now as long as I run through all the steps and processes in my mind I can do it, okay it’s kind of like when you’re learning to drive a car, you get in the car and you’re like okay all right, step one with the ignition, turn on. All right apply the brake, put it on the drive, slowly let the brake off, put your foot on the accelerator. When you learn to drive you did all those things you’re like, okay one, two, three, turn it slowly, the left slowly, the right, what have you. That’s conscious competence, and that’s when you’re in the orange cones, when you’re in the orange cones you’re constantly going through the okay, all right, accelerate, brake, brake, brake, brake, all right. That’s you that’s conscious competence, and that’s where a lot of people get to in the firearms world. They take a basic training class and they learn what they’re supposed to do, they learn the fundamentals of marksmanship, you know grip stance, all that jazz, and so they go out to the range they put a paper target out at five yards. Five yards, that’s what I said, five yards, and they pull out their gun, they load it up, and they slowly push it out, and they slow fire one, two, three. They shoot a whole magazine at five yards they bring the target back and they got a group that’s four or five inches across they’re like, man that’s awesome, that’s not bad. Oh, they show their buddies like, whoo high five all that. Oka, dude, you’re still in the cones you haven’t gotten off the cones yet. Okay, the next step beyond conscious competence is unconscious competence. Now, what does that mean? That means that you know what you have to do, your body has been trained, your mind, your neuromuscular impulses are all trained properly and when somebody says go, you pull your pistol out, boom, boom, boom, boom, do what you need to do. Put it away and you’re done. Okay, the only conscious thought that you’re making is when to press the trigger, everything else is there. It’s what I call the light switch response, when you walk into a room you walk into a darkened room, do you think this room is dark, in order to gain light, I need to put my hand on the wall, find a little up and down flippy thing, and push it in the up position and then I will have light. Do you do that? No, you don’t, you walk into a dark room, reach your hand up, boom you sweep the wall. How many of you out there have been in a power outage, you’ve been in a power outage right, and you know you’re in a power outage, you know the power is out but what do you walk into the bedroom or the bathroom or whatever and you instantly reach out and hit the switch and you go that’s right I have no electricity. That’s why it’s still dark in here, that is the light switch response and what you want to be able to, in firearms, is you want to be in a position where you know what to do. Your body knows what to do without you telling it to do it, because it’s like, it’s like a freshman boxer or a beginning boxer. He gets in the ring, the first fight puts his hands up and he’s thinking okay if he throws a right cross I’ll do this then, I’ll do this then, I’ll do this. Well, guess what, he’s in that thinking process and he goes kaboom, kaboom, kaboom, kaboom, and every time he’s thinking about it he gets hit, well that’s because he’s thinking. He should know what to do if you’re going to be a good boxer, a good pistol shooter, if you’re going to be a fighter you need to be able to do it without going through the tick-tick-tick-tick mental process. So the hierarchy of learning where you need to be, or where you want to be. Is your top goal is unconscious competence, that is I know what to do, without going through all the steps. Now if you’re at the point where you’re consciously incompetent, you realize you don’t have the information but you want to get it, and that’s where you want to be, and all right here comes a shameless plug. If you’re in that position right now what I want you to do is I want you to go to StudentOfTheGun.com, look at some of our training courses and we’d love to train you. We hope to see it in our next class…