Caleb made a posting about “the rules” and it spurred me to finally write about something that’s been rolling around in my head for a while.
I written before about “the rules” — both Col. Cooper’s rules and the NRA’s rules. The first rules I learned were Cooper’s, then after spending a lot of time in KR Training Basic Pistol 1 courses I came to better appreciate the NRA’s rules.
When it comes to “which ruleset to teach new shooters,” what really sold me on the NRA rules? Teaching Youngest.
I started trying to teach him Col. Cooper’s rules, mostly because that’s how I started teaching Oldest and Daughter and the consistency for when I talk to all 3 kids is welcome. However it became cumbersome to discuss this with him. Why? Because children like things to be simple, and Cooper’s rules are not simple. Yes some parts of his rules are straightforward, which is good. But let’s consider Rule 1 and all the various exceptions that can be had to that rule. Consider as well that others may or may not have the same exception set as you (does dry fire violate rule 1? does cleaning a gun violate rule 1?). There was no way I could explain these rules to Youngest without risking overload… too many new things on a young brain is a sure way for things to get forgotten, and these safety rules are not something you want people to forget!
So I opted to teach him the NRA rules. That approach worked out great. The more I think about the NRA rules, the more I find them to be a better rule set that doesn’t have to have exceptions and qualifiers. To be fair, it’s not perfect. For instance, you have to discuss what a “safe direction” is (that between the muzzle and where the bullet would come to rest, it won’t damage anything you don’t want to damage… or perhaps that it does damage what you want to damage). While you can certainly discuss this with the child, they may not have enough depth of life knowledge to know what materials can and cannot stop a bullet; you can talk about how the walls of the house won’t stop it and give some references relevant to the child’s life experience, but will a brick wall stop a bullet? Depends upon the bullet… these things a child just can’t know.
I’m not going to go with Caleb and say Cooper’s Rules are merely guidelines, but I will say they risk that, especially the much vaunted Rule 1. Once you start having a parade of exceptions, how useful of a rule is it? Once it starts being too complex to follow, is it going to serve the intended end? When there’s no established set of exceptions, how dangerous can things become? And should there be exceptions in the first place?
Any time I drive to the range with the kids we always talk about what we’re going to do, including a review of the rules. This last range trip with Daughter started off with her telling me the Cooper rules, but then I opted to reinforce with her the NRA rules. Then we had a discussion about the two rulesets, strengths and weaknesses of them, how they overlap, how they are unique, how they work to reinforce each other and ultimately in the end knowledge of and adherence to the concepts an directives of both rulesets will serve you best. I think in the end it’s best for people to know both sets of rules. There are subtle aspects the Cooper set touches on the NRA set does not, and the NRA rules touch on things the Cooper set does not. What needs to happen is teaching people the rules as statements and immediately following into discussion of the rules to ensure they are more deeply understood. And while I may prefer the NRA rule set, I will always teach Cooper’s ruleset as well because there’s good mindset in there and if nothing else… gunnies tend to prefer Cooper’s rules so it’s just good to know them.
Updated: Ah, I see. Caleb’s posting came about due to some other discussion, like from Sebastian and SayUncle and JayG who seemed to start all of this.
Actually yes, I do believe there are people out there that demand the rules be taken literally (Cooper himself, for one) — they are rules, after all. But when pressed, it’s hard to find people that don’t violate the rules in some way (e.g. dry fire, cleaning the gun, etc.). However, these people will always find ways to justify their position.
So to me, that just weakens “The Rules” as rules. To have exceptions, to have “allowable violations”, and so on… what good then are The Rules? If for no other reason it removes simplicity. You make a rule too hard to follow well… just look at the tax code from the IRS; extreme example, but thus is the slope. Even things like the “i before e except after c” rule has so many blasted exceptions, no wonder it’s difficult to learn the English language.
Interesting in all of this discussion it only beats on Cooper’s rules. I’d like to see more discussion then about a better rule set. Could the NRA’s set be better? If so, let’s make that The Holy Grail and move foward. If that isn’t good enough, then why are we as a gunnie community satisified with what we’ve got — this less than ideal rule set? Why aren’t we trying to make something better?
