A buddy of mine came to me a few days ago asking for help getting started with firearms. He’s shot a little bit, his wife hasn’t shot anything. Apparently wife’s friend took some sort of introduction to firearms course and had a great experience, relayed that to wife, now wife is interested, so husband/buddy came to me for some guidance on how to get started.
Since we don’t live in the same state I did the best I could to offer some generic guidance towards finding a worthwhile instructor: questions to ask, the sorts of things to look for, etc.. And I hate to say it, but since his wife was involved my gut feeling was for them to seek out a female instructor. Why? I didn’t want them to risk getting the “Here lil’ lady, let me help you with that” sort of mentality. Or saying that “Oh for you, Hon, you want a little snub-nosed J-frame .38… but Hubby he can have a big-ass 1911 .45” sort of bullshit.
Here’s a fantastic write up on this very problem. Caleb offers his comments on the write-up, as does Tam. TXGunGeek posted on this same topic just a little while ago.
Stuff From Hsoi 
Found a great blog post today about gender in the firearm world. If you haven’t read it already, I’m sure you’d find it fascinating considering the topic of your blog: http://munchkinwrangler.wordpress.com/2009/03/26/genders-got-nothing-to-do-with-it/
That’s the one I linked to in my posting. 🙂
http://gungeekrants.blogspot.com/2009/03/better-faster-syndrome.html
Wrote this one up a couple weeks ago about firearms instructors teaching women. More pointed to the issue at hand and lesson learned form having done this for a while.
I was looking for that one when I was authoring this post! Thank you for putting it in the comments. I’ll also update the main posting with the link.
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