This past weekend I took the Basic Pistol 2 course at the Austin area-based KR Training school. It was a 4-hour course with roughly one hours of class room material and three hours of live fire on the outdoor range.
I new more basic theory about gun shooting and I had some practice from the Texas CHL course and a dry-fire class but what I learned in these four hours was beyond what I thought and expected was going to learn.
The main thing I learned was the difference between casual target shooting and defense shooting – and let me tell you there isn’t anything in common between these two types of shooting.. even the targets look different.
I won’t get into detail about everything that we went through – I strongly suggest to anyone who is interested in their self-defense to take such a course (and take even more course as this only lays a good, solid foundation), but I will share two things that were indirectly linked to defense shooting.
These facts I didn’t know about.
Lead poisoning. Here is what Wikipedia has to say about lead poisoning:
[blockquote quote=”Lead interferes with a variety of body processes and is toxic to many organs and tissues including the heart, bones, intestines, kidneys, and reproductive and nervous systems. It interferes with the development of the nervous system and is therefore particularly toxic to children, causing potentially permanent learning and behavior disorders.” source_link=”httpss://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lead_poisoning”]
And the following is from the CDC (Center for Disease Control and Prevention):
[blockquote quote=”Lead-containing dust is produced by 1) the combustion of lead-containing primers, 2) the friction of bullets against the gun barrel, and 3) fragmentation as bullets strike the backstop (5). Lead dust inhaled into the lungs is highly bioavailable, with an absorption rate near 100%.” source_link=”httpss://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/preview/mmwrhtml/mm5423a1.htm”]
As you can see – not a pretty picture. Do your own research to learn more about lead exposure especially in poorly ventilated indoor shooting ranges.
How fast we lose learned skills. At the end of the class the instructor said, “Shooting skills are like music instrument skills – you lose 50 percent after three days without practice and 50 percent more of the remaining 50 percent after three more days, and so on”.
Just thing about this for a second. If you don’t practice for about a week after you’ve developed a skill 75 percent of what you’ve learned is already gone! This applies to self-defense shooting skills, music instrument skills, and I am sure to any other learned skills, like martial arts, sports, other mechanical skills.
My take away from this second point: If you paid to learn a new skill don’t throw your money in the toilet by not practicing. Otherwise, what’s the point of paying and going to a training course if most of it will be gone in a number of days that can be easily counted?!
Here is my experience from the course following this one – Defensive pistol skills 1