Firearm owners as a group tend to shoot themselves in the foot (mostly metaphorically) now and then. TTAG’s IGOTD winners are a testament to that. We’d offer the gun control crowd considerably less fodder for their reasonable bullshit proposals if some of our poster children used a bit more common sense. To wit: had Adam Lanza’s mother acknowledged that her son was a whack job and properly secured her guns, she might still be breathing as likely would 26 kids and teachers. And as a community, we would be under considerably less fire as well . . .
The question at hand is whether mandated safety training before receiving a carry permit would be an undue burden. Please don’t flame me. I’m trying to ask a serious question here. I understand that there would need to be serious safeguards in place as it would be all too easy for anti-gun administrations to set the safety class requirement bar so high that no one could pass it. They could do things like only offer the class annually on Christmas or on February 29.
But what if the safety class simply leveraged what was already out there? Maybe the class requirement could be the NRA Home Safety Firearms course curriculum. That’s a four hour class.
There are a boat load of NRA instructors out there and for those folks who can’t afford it, I’d offer it for free. The NRA certainly has the cash to pay for course materials and people like me would be more than happy to donate a half day of our time once a month or so to help educate our fellow prospective gun owners.
The initial reaction of many will be that such a requirement would constitute regulating a right guaranteed by the Constitution, but I don’t know if that’s the right point of view. If the course were offered frequently and at little or no cost, the upside would be better informed gun owners and hopefully fewer gun accidents. I’m not seeing the downside here. Please let me know what I’m missing.
I would maybe go even further. I personally would like to see people demonstrate some minimum level of shooting proficiency before they take a gun out in public. After all, I have no problem with people carrying outside the home (and wish more people would do it), but don’t you want to know that they have a chance of hitting what they aim at? I know I do. Yes, this is an even higher hurdle than attending a safety course. But if it were run entirely by the NRA, would it still be a bad thing? After all, such gun-friendly states as Texas require a shooting proficiency test for a concealed carry permit. If we set aside knee jerk reactions for the moment, does this make sense?