"I Ain't Need No Trainin', Boy!" or, The Face of Stupid

[NCPatrolAR]

Hey guys; lets move past the Weaver/Iso thing. Its starting to be non-productive.

[Magsz]

The only thing that i dont like about this topic is that most people seem to be relating experiences with older gentlemen.

Im 26 years old and generally one of the younger shooters at our club nights. Sure, there are older gents there that fall into the same kind of mentality being discussed in this thread but let me tell you something. Amongst my "peers" this attitude is the absolute norm, its frightening.

There is so much ego floating around amongst the youth of today its disgusting. I firmly believe that Ego should never, ever enter the picture when firearms are involved. Keep the ego on the MMA mat...

[Complication]

The only thing that i dont like about this topic is that most people seem to be relating experiences with older gentlemen.

Im 26 years old and generally one of the younger shooters at our club nights. Sure, there are older gents there that fall into the same kind of mentality being discussed in this thread but let me tell you something. Amongst my "peers" this attitude is the absolute norm, its frightening.

There is so much ego floating around amongst the youth of today its disgusting. I firmly believe that Ego should never, ever enter the picture when firearms are involved. Keep the ego on the MMA mat...

I think this is generally true of most things and doesn't always have to do with age.

Nietzsche has this terrific quote: "Half-knowledge is more victorious than whole knowledge: it understands things as being more simple than they are and this renders its opinions more easily intelligible and more convincing."

I saw it a lot in college. I studied religion at a school predominantly filled with engineers. One of the required courses for me was a survey course which covered 7 or 8 religions in a 16 week semester. It also happened to be a popular "easy humanities" course for engineers trying to satisfy their distribution requirements.

So you got a lot of angry Bill Maher, Richard Dawkins aethist types thinking that because they spent 2 weeks (6 hours of class) learning about a religion, they knew everything there was to know about it and were happy to make incredibly simplistic, retarded statements like "What has Christianity done for anyone? The Pope's a Nazi and priests **** little boys" just because they read a chapter about Catholicism in a world religions textbook (because a religion is no more complex than that... right?)

It wasn't just that they were set in their ways (which I'm sure many were), it was that they didn't accept the fact that there might be a shitload more to know about a subject than they already possessed between their ears.

I think real learning begins after recognizing your own ignorance about a subject (whether its academic, job-related, or shooting) and have an "oh shit, that wasn't even remotely close to being on my radar" or an "holy crap, I thought I was hot shit, but damn, I suck" moment.

You got the ego bit right on. Once you're prepared to accept that there's way more to learn than you're ever going to get around to learning, you can really start paying attention to what people are teaching you and focus on doing it right. Otherwise you're that guy on the range who won't shut up about his 1911 and how its such a manly gun and, as long as you're carrying one, everything you do is right, even though you're shooting 12" groups at 10 yards and the guy next to you is drilling one ragged hole with his "faggy" 9mm.

[LHS]

When I was a little boy, I thought that my dad knew all there was to know about shooting. And yet, he constantly went to classes, from just about everyone, all over the country. I asked him, if he was so good, why did he need to keep going to classes? His response was one of those little aphorisms that just rings true:

"Nobody can teach you everything, but everyone can teach you something."

[ROGOPGEAR]

if it weren't for egos and pride, this world would be a beautiful place.

I just participated in my first competition last weekend, and one of the old guys was talking about his blog so I checked it out when I got home. He reviews a lot of firearms products, gives advice on shooting gear and techniques, basically runs a professed subject matter expert firearms blog. well, long story short, I laughed to myself reading his posts because I, being a semi-noob and at my first competition, obliterated him. just makes me shake my head.

but to me the worst thing, is the pride that stands in the way of people like this and their acquiring new knowledge/skills. that same match while he was expounding upon his great knowledge, I was checking out the real shooters, and flooding them with questions. I learned so much about competition shooting in that one day it was amazing.