You are the operations manager of a firearms training facility that caters to the concealed carry market. Business is slow. Your marketing director says that to improve business, they are going to offer the following program:
- Sign up for a 5-day concealed carry class.
- Each week, do 30 minutes of practice in their indoor range.
- After the first year, you must refresh your training with a 2-day refresher course.
If you do your training, practice, and refresher, the training facility will pay all your legal bills if you are ever charged with a gun crime. It won’t matter if you are in the wrong or not. Furthermore, if you are injured or killed by a violent criminal, the company will pay for your medical bills or funeral services.
You reply that this program will bankrupt the company. The marketing director says it is your job to determine how this program won’t bankrupt the company because it will be implemented to improve business. How would you proceed?
We’ll first you would vet any potential clientele. It would be best if you did extensive background checks. Various conditions would count towards a risk management index. For instance, raised by a single parent or multiple foster homes, didn’t graduate high school, parents incarcerated, siblings incarcerated, criminal records, multiple divorces, etc. If you added them all up and the risk management index was above “low,” you wouldn’t accept them in the program.
Next, you should have them take an emotional assessment test or anger management test. This test would again have an indexed risk. We would only want to accept low risk into this program.
Using the National Crime Victimization Survey (NCVS), we know that youth and a never-married marital status are common among victims and offenders of violent crime. We should evaluate those as well. According to the Uniform Crime Reports (UCR), law enforcement officers arrest more people for drug and alcohol violations than any other crime (by a wide margin). We should evaluate a candidate on their drug and alcohol consumption.
At this point, we have a properly vetted clientele. What should we teach them? First, we want to look at our statistics and have them drive our training. The statistics we will look at are the UCR, NCVS, and the National Firearms Survey (NFS) regarding Defensive Gun Use (DGU).
The UCR and NCVS show that aggravated assault is the most common violent crime. The NCVS also indicates that 67 percent of the time, aggravated assault does not result in victim injury. These two facts suggest that civilian confrontations that escalated and resulted in a weapon threat constitute these cases. These statistics drive the need for de-escalation training.
If we look at the NCVS carefully, we should conclude that injurious aggravated assault resembles domestic violence. In addition, rape is underreported. Both of these crimes are primarily violence against women. From the UCR, we saw that rape reported dramatically increased when the definition of rape changed from forced to consensual to account for things like date rape drugs. Should a woman be drugged, standard self-defense techniques may not be available. Therefore, a class for women to avoid these circumstances becomes critical.
Strangers, public places, and no weapons are common circumstances for robbery. Robbery appears to be a violent crime where an ordinary civilian will likely run into a violent criminal. The typical circumstances suggested are when a civilian travels to and from their vehicle attending an event. The same can be said for trips to and from the hotel room when it is selected due to its convenient location where destinations are within walking distance. A class is needed to instruct civilians on how to avoid robbery circumstances.
DGU statistics show that 79 percent happen at home or on the home’s property. Also, 82 percent of the time, the firearm is not discharged. These facts suggest a class on properly preparing your home’s security is critical. Also, other statistics show that the average number of rounds fired by civilians is about two, the distance is about arm’s length, and the potential victim had time to get their firearm. Choosing simple weapons over complex weapons is a must for home security, greatly simplifying training and avoiding negligent discharges.
Because most DGUs happen around the home and not in typical concealed carry situations, we need to work on carrying our weapon by the law, improving law enforcement interactions, and yet still having the ability to access a weapon. Since this would result in many changes for most concealed carriers, it has a class all to its own.
Looking at all these proposed classes, we see that these training needs are much different than what is offered today. The training is dramatically different when you get training from someone on the hook for being right AND wrong.
Many of these topics are extensively covered in my book.