NevadaDep said:
Am I a great instructor? No. Do I know it all? No. But I can do a hell of allot better then Clark county did and at half the cost.
You just eloquently and beautifully illustrated the argument against mandatory training that I made in post #14 of this thread. Mandated training
always sinks to some level of overpriced inefficiency, sometimes worse than others but nearly always far below the level a free market would create. The Clark County training you took is about like most mandatory classes end up being: a whole lot of talking, a tiny bit of shooting, a huge bore for the folks who know the basics but nowhere near enough for the folks who don't.
Absolutely agree with you that poor folks should have access to quality training. The question becomes, how can they get it?
Best-kept secret in the training industry: People
can obtain quality training for nearly free, if they're willing to do a little work in exchange for the privilege. Most of the big-name, traveling instructors really need people to organize classes in each local area. If you contact one of these guys and ask about organizing such a class in
your area, and you're willing to do the legwork, guess what? You will get to train "for free," as the incentive to be the class organizer. Of course that does not cover the cost of ammunition or motel bills or food, but, well, you have to eat anyway and if you're organizing it you'll organize it close to home so no hotel bill or other travel expenses. Ammunition remains a problem, sometimes a substantial one (believe me I know this), but if you know six months in advance that you will need 300 rounds on a given weekend, even the slimmest budget would usually allow you to squirrel away that much ammunition over the intervening months.
So it's already possible to obtain high quality training at a low cost,
if you're willing to put some effort into it.
But here's the irony: most of those high-quality, traveling instructors don't actually provide the proper rubber-stamp for state-required training! They give more complete classes, for the most part, but rarely meet the specific, state-mandated requirements written by bureaucrats. The
really sad part is, state-required classes often cost a set amount of money, and all of the paperwork that goes with them costs another set amount of money. Even if you find a willing instructor who will waive his own fees, there are going to be some set paperwork fees which cannot and will not be waived.
What all that amounts to is that someone who is resourceful and energetic but broke can still get good training tailored to their specific needs for "free" (plus effort), making it possible for even the poor to afford good training. But mandatory training will almost always cost what it costs, and will rarely if ever provide what the student actually needs at the level the student needs it, making it impossible for the poor to obtain training.
pax