Is there anybody on the internet who hasn’t seen the nude photos of Jennifer Lawrence, Kate Upton, and that little gymnast girl who wasn’t impressed by her podium finish? If you haven’t heard of “The Fappening”, and you’re male, go check it out. I’ll wait.
Back? Doesn’t JLaw look even better than you’d hoped she would? I know! Alright, let’s get serious. My print piece on instructor deaths is online. Check it out. It was a privilege and then some to have four of the best people in the business agree to lend me their voices on the subject, including recent Blancpain Lamborghini Trofeo race winner Aaron Povoledo.
I feel lucky for everything I have, including those photos of JLaw.
The same sorts of things exist with firearms “instructors”. Teaching is a skill. Teaching a kinesthetic skillset requires more than just basic understanding of pedagogy. Teaching a kinesthetic skillset with a lethal instrument (a car or a firearm) requires an even deeper level of skill and sufficient experience to understand the conditions that make bad events possible well enough to prevent them from occurring in the first place. Experienced, skilled firearms instructors often have rules the inexperienced chafe at and offer corrections that some egomaniacs resent…but ***there is blood behind those practices. ***
The skilled instructor sees more, processes information faster, and has narrowly avoided disaster. The more time they’ve spent doing the thing that’s being taught, the more close calls they’ve likely had. They start to become keenly aware of their exposure to risk and become less and less charitable about being exposed to any unnecessary risk. In other words, the first time someone negligently points a firearm at you on the range you might not even notice it. The tenth time you notice it and you try to correct it in a friendly manner. The hundredth time you’re absolutely certain a bullet is coming out of there and the prospect of being killed or maimed because somebody else can’t manage to observe a simple rule (don’t point guns at people you don’t want to kill) fills you with all sorts of dark thoughts.
There’s no room for ego when handling a lethal instrument, be it a car or a firearm. That goes for students and double for those who would position themselves as instructors. There is a reason why I don’t put new shooters behind a fully automatic weapon with a full magazine…which might explain why I am still here and the guy who put a fully loaded Uzi in the hands of a 9 year old *isn’t*. There’s a right way and a wrong way to do things. Those who aren’t patient or humble enough to do it the right way have no business doing it.
Period.
Totally agree — I studied with Chuck Taylor, Dale Fricke, and Ignatius Piazza in the Nineties.
I wish I would have had the means, way back when, to attend the original Gunsite when Col Jeff Cooper still strode the ranges. I’ve had to be content with reading everything he ever wrote, just about everything written about him, and receive sporadic training from far less famous (though competent) instructors.
My step-daughter, now attending a police academy in Florida, has been shooting top scores, up against classmates which include two former marines and a former Army Ranger. All those trips to the range with the old man paid off. How’s it feel, boys, to have the girl you call “Barbie Cop” kick your asses?
God bless the instructors of the deadly arts. Though she did bitch at them about the DA-only 8-lb trigger-pull Sigs used for training. She knew why they were required, but requested she be allowed to use my Springfield 1911 with its crisply tuned 3-lb break. Of course, no freaking way, but the instructors did do a double take.
Sometime let’s get together and I can tell you a few fascinating things about Col. Cooper. Like you, I’ve read the books and the Gunsite Gossip and the Cooper’s Commentaries.
My step-daughter watched the video of the girl and her instructor in class. Police academy instructor showed them how not to do it. So I looked for it to see if I could figure out just what the heck the instructor was thinking.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/post-nation/wp/2014/09/02/girl-who-accidentally-shot-her-instructor-with-an-uzi-said-the-gun-was-too-much-for-her/
The instructor, after having the girl take a single shot to orient herself with the gun, flips the Uzi to full auto, then stands above and to the side of the child. Of course, muzzle climb ensues. The end of the video is edited to go black-screen right before the fatal round.
What’s most disturbing to me is this little girl will carry the memory of having killed her instructor — the bloody, violent mess and horror of it — all because this instructor did everything, and I mean everything, wrong. It’s not her fault. It is her burden, however.
I think the girl would have had a great day shooting spinning targets using a bolt-action single-shot .22 rimfire. And actually learned the basics about safety, sight picture, proper range procedures. And the instructor would be less dead. Whatever happened to common sense?
There are significant issues pushed forward with this article. It has precipitated discussion and argument in several places where I am involved. Facilities are a bigger issue than I realized, with a shocking number of incidents on formal racetracks related to obstacles like “Trees!”
I intrigued by the complete lack of comment in Road&Track or here on the illustration chosen to accompany the article. Surely there was pre-publication discussion about the detail there? Driver position, instructor reaction, dress, windows, in-cockpit communication (closed-face helmets, no apparent wire to the driver), eye focus,…
We’ll see what develops this time.
Art and writing tend to be pretty separated at major magazines. The first time I saw the art for this piece was when it arrived in my mailbox. 🙂
Do you have a conversation underway with the four featured experts in The Hard Question box? There are some very good guys there.
How about this database by The Charlotte Observer for some objective data:
Try this way:
http://www.charlotteobserver.com/2014/08/15/5108503/searchable-database-of-deaths.html
I think your piece is great for starting the conversation. From the article, I don’t think there is a system at all. And that is where the problem resides. That is from a (very) uninformed perspective.
Unrelated to driving instruction, but to your original hook, this showed up in my YouTube feed and I though of your first paragraph.
http://youtu.be/V4-a958_qrg
But so my comment is not without contribution.
My previous work kept me moving or traveling to often to be a regular and anything other than the autoX level.
So at every track day or HPDE, I was always in the novice class to start. Lucky this started in my 30s and my experience overwhelmed my need to be “flat out.”
But an interesting occurance involved my move to instructorless intermediate. If I had something happen in front of me, or (especially in the 911) overstepped my bounds a tick, my reactions would always get me moved up faster than three good sessions where nothing went wrong.
One instance I had overcooked my tires and the 911 stepped out on me. I added a little throttle, caught it and resumed the line.
My instructor told me I had handled it “exactly right” because if I had lifted, the car would have done what 911s (even 996s) do when you lift in an oversteer.
The rest of the weekend I spent in the intermediate group.
I see it on te track and in aviation; to often a new instructor can misinterpret confidence when everything is going right and miss the key skills needed when it goes sideways.
Holy shit I’d like to see that broad naked. I had the volume off on my laptop and I enjoyed it just as much!