Education

NRA’s Personal Protection In The Home

/ hsoi

I spent today at KR Training, taking the course to become an NRA Instructor certified to teach their Personal Protection in the Home course. From the NRA Blog:

Americans own firearms for a variety of reasons, but home defense is among the most common reasons for owning a handgun. To help handgun owners learn more about firearms and home defense, the NRA developed the Basics of Personal Protection In The Home Course. This course focuses on the safe and efficient use of a handgun for protection of self and family. Students can also learn about their right to self-defense as a law-abiding citizen.

[…]

During the eight-hour course, an NRA Certified Instructor will teach students basic defensive shooting skills, how to respond to a violent confrontation, and strategies for home safety. Specific state firearms and home defense laws are taught by an individual certified in the state that the course is taught (such as an attorney or police officer). Not sure which gun is right for you and your home? You can learn how to choose a handgun for self-defense, along with continued opportunities to expand your skills.

Although Personal Protection In the Home is considered an NRA Basic course, it’s not for beginners. In order to take this course, students must be law-abiding adults (at least 21 years) and have experience with a firearm. To learn more about the course requirements or to find an NRA Basic Personal Protection In The Home Course near you, visit NRA Education & Training or call 703-267-1481 for more information.

It’s a pretty cool course. I think there’s a lot of good material in here that goes beyond your basic “how to shoot a firearm”, which NRA First Steps and Basic courses are about. My understanding is this course was developed to help with concealed handgun license requirements in some states. What’s good about the class isn’t just that it teaches how to shoot, but it works to address realities about self-defense shooting such as the legal matters and what your personal response may be (e.g. emotional and psychological impacts). A combination of Jeff Cooper and Massad Ayoob.

Much of this material I already know from taking other training courses. But to obtain the certification is certainly a good thing.

We also had a little extra fun in the class. One of the parts of the course is educating students about shooting opportunities, such as IPSC and IDPA action pistol shooting. So to expose folks to that, one IDPA course and one IPSC course were set up. Much fun to shoot that.

A good day, especially since much of it was spent on the range. Weather was perfect. Life is good. I just need to complete the exam and submit the paperwork to make my certification final.

Mandating Education

/ hsoi / 4 Comments

Bob S. has started a small series on mandated education for firearms. Post 1, Post 2, Post 3.

Then as I’m catching up on my blog reading this morning, I see this posting from Roberta X.

Given what we see in Roberta’s posting, it just feeds into what Bob was saying about government mandated firearms education: what’s the damn point?

Of course, I take a step back beyond just gun/firearms/concealed-carry education and look at government mandated education in general. Hey… I homeschool my kids. Tells you what I think about government schooling.

For those unsure of my stance, I think education is one of the keys to success in life. The more you know, the better you’ll do. Rarely is ignorance the better route. But mandating education? That opens up a whole ugly can of worms, mostly because no one is going to agree where to draw the line. Look at the mess of our public government school system and failures like No Child Left Behind.

In the end, those that understand the value of education will seek knowledge. Those who are satisfied to remain ignorant will do so. Best we can do is ensure folks don’t infringe upon another’s ability to live their lives.

Writing PackageMaker (Installer) Plugins

/ hsoi

I’ve never written an installer with Apple’s PackageMaker. Never had a need to.

However, the day job has recently required me to write a few custom plugins to customize how some installers work.

I was amazed at how easy it was. The InstallerPlugins.framework is very simple and well-constructed. Sure you can’t do everything you need with it, but you can do most and then write scripts and other things to customize it to your heart’s content.

The thing that gets me? There’s almost no documentation on it. Apple provides the InstallerPluginSample code, and really in a lot of ways between that and reading the InstallerPlugins.framework headers, that’s about all you need. It’s that simple and well-written of an SDK.

Still, some things came up while I was working that I couldn’t find an answer to. For instance, I was instructed to create a “display license” panel that replicated the stock panel the installer provided but had a few customizations. The trouble with this? Anything outside of the content panel I couldn’t replicate, such as the “Print” and “Save” buttons. I was pointed to this resource and specifically this FAQ:

[Q] Can I add Print… and Save… buttons similar to the ones used in the default License pane?

  • You can do it through an undocumented and private method:
    1 Open the nib of your plugin project in Interface Builder.
    2 Add a custom view to the nib file.
    3 Add Print… and Save… buttons to this custom view.
    4 Create outlets in your controller class for this custom view and buttons and make the appropriate connections in Interface Builder.
    5 Add 2 methods in your controller class to be called from the 2 buttons and connect the buttons to these methods in Interface Builder.
    6 Add the - (id) bottomContentView; method to your controller class and make it return the reference to your custom view.

IMHO, using an undocumented and private method is bad and just asking for breakage and trouble down the line. But, some people are willing to live with that so tread accordingly.

Stéphane Sudre also provides this HOWTO on using PackageMaker. By the screenshots and some text I can see it’s old, so I don’t know how relevant it is to day’s PackageMaker. But there you go.

Teaching “the rules”

/ hsoi / 6 Comments

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?

Background check to be a parent

/ hsoi

Continuing this morning’s theme of “Asinine in England”, apparently now there’s a proposal for homeschooling parents to have to undergo a criminal background check in order for the government to deem them fit and qualified to teach their children.

Unbelievable.

So you don’t need a background check to send your children to government school, but if you want to teach them then you do. Of course we can enter into the slippery slope here because if you’re unfit to teach your children, wouldn’t you be unfit to be a parent? How soon until your children would be taken away from you (given how the UK governments behave these days)? Who deems what a fit or unfit parent is? Why just stop at a parent that wishes to teach, how about any and every parent because if you’re not fit to be with the child during the day, why should you be fit to be with them during the nights and weekends?

As well, one side-effect would be killing off homeschooling, which is well-likely a hidden goal. Lord knows we can’t have free-thinkers in our midst, nor encourage thought other than government-sponsored. Too dangerous for a well-controlled society.

This is government gone amuck. This is intrusion. This is daft.

Learning to Program

/ hsoi / 3 Comments

I learned to program on my Apple //e a long long ago.

But I did take a class in undergrad that was a sort of introduction to programming for non-programmers (now that I think about it, I don’t know why I took the class as it was well below my knowledge level). It used a neat book called Karel The Robot. You can Google on “Karel the Robot” and all sorts of stuff comes up, including a lot of love and praise for it. It’s really a good way to learn how to program because it’s simple and friendly. It doesn’t focus upon a particular language, which is part of the simplicity and appeal. It allows people to learn about general programming concepts and constructs, and how to use them as building blocks to solve problems. After you grok the concepts, then you can get yourself caught up in the semantics of a particular language… trying to do both at once is just too much to focus on.

So I’m writing this blog entry as a bookmark to myself. I’ve been wanting to teach my kids how to program and wanting to use Karel to do it. So I found Karel on SourceForge. I also found RUR-PLE (history of it here) which is a Karel-like approach that uses Python. There’s also Guido van Robot. I really like Python as a language (tho I don’t get to use it often enough), and feel it’d be a great first language for my kids.

Anyway there you go. Karel.

Working homeschooled kids

/ hsoi / 2 Comments

Oldest expressed interest in getting a job.

Hallelujah! 🙂

Since he is a minor, all sorts of child labor laws come into play. I found this summary of Texas and Federal law at the Texas Workforce Commission’s website.

Here’s one part that I’m not sure about:

Under the Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA) a child 14 or 15 years of age may not work during school hours…

We homeschool. In Texas, the legal status of homeschool is a private school. So, what does “school hours” mean? My guess is the normal hours of operation for the public school system in the district in which we reside (I sent an email to HSLDA). But why must it be this way? One of the benefits of homeschooling is flexible scheduling. It allows us to better organize our family life. It can give an employer a work resource at a time when they might need the help (e.g. lunch rush), instead of only getting a glut of teenager help from 3-7 PM every day. Furthermore, that glut limits the number of teenage employees that can be had as there’s only so much work and wages to go around at that time of day.

I understand the intent of child labor laws, including the history of how they came about. The intentions are good. It is evident the laws are constructed around traditional notions of institutionalized schooling. Given the dramatic rise of homeschooling in the past some years, it makes sense to revise and modernize our laws to improve how homeschooling is legally regarded (e.g. HoNDA).

Updated: Well, maybe this will work out, at least here in Texas.

HSLDA sent me a summary of Texas child labor laws.

Q: Can a child work during public school hours?

A: Texas has no prohibition against a child working during public school hours.

I requested clarification regarding how Federal law would work in here. Since the Federal law does not specify what “during school hours” means, Texas law trumps in this case.

So it seems if Oldest was to be hired, he could work the lunch rush. So long as of course things didn’t conflict with his schooling, which we wouldn’t allow anyway.

Nevertheless, I could see employers not wanting to hire in such a situation. First, they may be unaware of the laws. In that case, best I can say is for Oldest to walk into the job application process prepared with paperwork showing the laws and legal take on things, because I’m sure an employer would contact the TWC but they may also be unaware. Second, an employer may just want to avoid the potential appearance of the situation. To see a child working mid-day will be strange to a lot of people, which could prompt phone calls to CPS or TWC, and an employer may just not want to deal with the hassle…. or it could count against Oldest in some way.

We’ll see how it all plays out.

Obviously another terrorist

/ hsoi / 2 Comments

So we had a 6-year-old Cub Scout suspended from school because he brought camping gear on school grounds. Zero tolerance.

Now we have a 17-year-old Eagle Scout suspended for 20 days because he had a 2 inch knife in his car. Why did he have a knife in his car?

Matthew Whalen, a senior at Lansingburgh Senior High School, says he follows the Boy Scout motto and is always prepared, stocking his car with a sleeping bag, water, a ready-to-eat meal — and the knife, which was given to him by his grandfather, a police chief in a nearby town.

He lives in upstate New York, so getting caught out in the snow is a real possibility. So he keeps things in his car, ready in case of emergency. Good for him.

And so why is this all being done? Because they have to apply policy. Because they have to make an example out of him.

Whalen said he does not know why the 15 days were added, but he said a school district employee told him it was because the school wanted to apply its policies consistently.

“I’ve been told by someone who works for the district that they had to do it, because if someone else had a knife and they saw that I didn’t get a suspension, that it would look bad for the school.”

What looks bad isn’t Matthew Whalen. What looks bad are stupid school administrators making asinine rules. I thought schools taught critical thinking… but I guess they don’t need to apply it.

Obviously a terrorist

/ hsoi / 1 Comment

Zachary Christie. He’s obviously a terrorist.

How do I know this?

Why, he ran afoul of the Newark, Delaware school district’s zero tolerance policy.

What did he do?

He brought a utensil to school.

You see, 6 year old Zachary just joined the Cub Scouts. He received a folding utensil that can be used as a knife, fork, and spoon. He was so excited at receiving it, he wanted to use it to eat his school lunch.

Obviously a terrorist. Spoons… soon we won’t be able to take those on airplanes either.

As the result of this, the boy faces 45 days in the district’s reform school.

Obviously a troublemaker. Thank God those school officials acted now. Who knows what could have happened if this sort of behavior went unchecked. I mean, the boy takes karate… obviously demonstration of violent tendencies. Then he joins the Cub Scouts, with all their uniforms and handshakes and oaths, learning about camping and the outdoors, maybe even how to shoot a BB gun… what sort of paramilitary training is this?!?! I’ll say it again, thank God for those school officials.

So, what is the mother doing? Homeschooling him, at least while this whole ridiculousness is going on.

Frankly, I hope Mom makes it a permanent setup. Zero-tolerance for public school lunacy, I say.

But you know, easier to hide behind stupid policies that don’t work (in fact, they tend to make things worse) than use your brain. Wither education.

Subtle bias

/ hsoi

I am at the teacher supply store (yea iPhone!) waiting on Wife to finish shopping for some teaching supplies. While waiting I wander around looking at the teaching aids and workbooks. I happen upon the book section on social studies and government. Oh cool! A workbook on the US Constitution. I flip through it. There is a section on the second amendment. It has a brief discussion of the “controversy” of 2A. Then the question section:

On the lines below, describe one argument for and one argument against gun control.

Why not for or against the right to bear arms? for or against the right to defense? for or against the abridgement of a fundamental right?

Subtle bias?