It would seem to me that the definition of "those guys" would necessarily include looking at more experienced people, (including people who made a profession of arms for significant parts of their life and who now make a profession of training others to arms) that their observations after having put millions of rounds downrange and having supervised millions more are essentially no better than a guy with a couple of rifles and a lifetime experience of a couple of thousand rounds...none of them even in a demanding training environment.
...or perhaps taking a couple of training courses and then asking how exactly a Marine or SF soldier is better prepared for hazardous duty than you are, as if the training courses puts someone on the same footing as somebody who made it into a SEAL team....
Meaning that if you steer clear of such nonsense you are probably not within the category of "those guys".
That's not really elitist in my opinion. Nobody will look down their nose at someone who doesn't know and treat them as unworthy gutter trash because they don't know what color the boathouse is at Hereford, or because they haven't put 1,000 hours of training in yet. Things get tricky when someone who doesn't know behaves as though they DO know, and stridently insists that they in fact DO know and does so in a combative and disrespectful way.
Granted I don't read every thread on this site, but in every thread I have seen I have yet to see someone seeking knowledge and understanding be mistreated for doing so. Quite the opposite, in fact. Problems only happen when somebody goes beyond the limitations of their knowledge and the limitations of the environment they are in.
As an example, I was recently contacted by a former Marine who wanted to get into contracting work. He saw that I posted fairly often on another site in threads mentioning contractors and asked if I had any contacts or advice for him. I explained to him that I was an inferior source of information and pointed him to places where he could get in contact with people who actually know what they are talking about. In the threads he referenced, I seemed to be one of the smarter guys in the room because I was responding to the black helicopter and tinfoil hat crowd with some actual facts and a tiny bit of firsthand information. The reality is that I *was* one of the smarter guys in the room, but only because that was a particularly stupid room. It was sort of like being one of the smarter kids in a special ed class...not really all that challenging and certainly nothing to write home about.
The same thing is true here. There is a very deep pool of knowledge here and one would do well to recognize that and behave accordingly. I am better informed on the topic of self defense, training, and fighting than your average General Discussion poster on TOS.....but on this site I'm definitely licking the windows on the short bus. I happily embrace that reality because it means that I have the opportunity to learn here as opposed to other places where one is constantly bombarded by bad info.
Originally Posted by rhino
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