Old Fuff ~
First, I agree with you that there are a lot of things that people who carry weaponry ought to know. I agree with you so strongly on that point that I spend a lot of my time volunteering to teach these things to people who need to know them. A person who carries a pistol but has never armed himself with the legal, tactical, and practical knowledge of how and when to use it, is worse than ignorant in my book.
But I utterly, categorically reject the notion that a person ought to be prohibited from exercising a fundamental human right until such time as some government bureaucrat has rubber-stamped their ability to do so.
Furthermore, it is my contention that when the laws are set so that people have to shoot to a minimum standard, the cost of available training goes up while the quality of such training goes down.
The costs go up because trainers have to be certified, approved, and rubber-stamped by the state. They have to pay whatever guild fees the bureaucrats demand.
The quality goes down because each instructor is no longer responsible to his own personal conscience as to what his students learn and how well the students learn it. He doesn't develop his own curriculum and thus he no longer has much personally invested in what his students learn. Instead he is given a list of very minimal standard requirements. The students aren't expected to master the requirements, either, but only to meet some (usually low) standard score to which the instructor will be able to point if the student ever gets in trouble.
The requirements might vary from one state to another but they all have one thing in common: they encourage people who have met the minimum score to think of themselves as "trained." Individuals begin to believe that if they can pass a very (very very) simple test of marksmanship, they are equipped to enter into deadly combat and not just survive, but prevail. Generally speaking, this isn't really true; people who have met the minimum requirement and have learned nothing else are really not yet equipped to win a deadly encounter -- although even in such a poorly trained status, they may be lightyears ahead of an ordinary unarmed person. The problem is that people stop there, and because the government says it's good enough, they believe it really is.
In addition to all that, every required hurdle is just that -- a hurdle -- which will eliminate a certain small but predictable number of people from obtaining a CCW. Higher costs mean fewer poor people. More hassle means fewer busy people. More intrusive screening means fewer cynical people. Written testing means fewer dyslexic people and no illiterate people.
Meanwhile, my next-door neighbor still has the basic human right to protect herself.
Doesn't she?
pax
That a free citizen should have to go before a committee, hat in hand, and pray for permission to bear arms - fantastic! Arm your daughter, sir, and pay no attention to petty bureaucrats. -- Robert Heinlein
