Confident and Wrong

Where NOT to get your training

There’s a lot of free firearms advice out there. Some of it is excellent. Most of it is wrong, dated, but wrapped in enough confidence that you can’t tell the difference until you’re trying to unlearn it ten years later.

Bad training doesn’t only hurt your scores. It programs your body with wrong muscle memory that in the best case scenario only costs you fractions of a second on the draw, and in the worst case scenario may put your life at risk, especially in a defensive situation. And it builds wrong habits that take months to fix. The cleanest path to good shooting is good instruction from the beginning, followed by continuous, certified training. The most expensive path is undoing what someone with a strong opinion and weak experience handed you for free.

Here are the four “knowledge” sources we’d steer you away from, some of what they tend to get wrong, and what to look for instead. I see them at the ranges every day. I overhear the urban myths they dispense as truths. In many cases, I’m the one doing the cleanup work with the student afterwards.

1. The Pretender

This is the guy at the range counter, the cousin at the cookout, the coworker who once shot his uncle’s Glock and has been an expert ever since. He’s never instructed anyone, never been through anything resembling a real instructor course, and has never had to perform under stress beyond a paper target. But he’ll tell you exactly what gun to buy, how to carry it, and what to do when “they” come for you. The advice tends to follow a pattern: bigger is better, simpler is better, and training is for people who don’t know what they’re doing.

A few classics:

• “Just rack the slide. The sound alone will scare them off.” This costs you a round in the chamber and announces your position. Anyone willing to fight back now knows where you are and roughly how many seconds they have.

• “Aim low — the recoil will bring it up.” It will not. The shot breaks before recoil moves the gun. You hit low, and then you keep hitting low because you’ve trained yourself to.

• “Get a .45. A 9mm won’t put ‘em down.” Modern defensive ammunition has made caliber-versus-caliber arguments largely academic. Shot placement matters. Carrying a gun you flinch with does not improve shot placement.

• “You don’t need to train. You’ll rise to the occasion.” You won’t. You’ll fall to the level of your training. If your training is one box of ammo a year without any professional feedback, that’s the level.

The pretender’s advice isn’t malicious. It’s just untested. The real cost of testing it is paid by the person who takes it.

2. The Freshly-Minted Instructor

This one’s more complicated, because the instructor’s credentials are real. They sat through an 8-hour instructor course, passed the written exam, maybe did some basic and unchallenging teach-backs with their peers - and walked out with a certificate. The problem is what came before and what came after.

If the course was run at one of the paper-mill operations that push large classes through quickly (production-line style) — the new instructor may have learned a single rigid stance, a single grip, a single way to teach the trigger press, and very little about how to diagnose a shooter who isn’t already shooting well. Without their own years of experience to test what they were handed, they teach exactly what they were told, the way they were told to teach it. People learn in different ways and at different paces. There is no “one size fits all”.

Watch for these signs:

• One stance for everyone, regardless of body type, age, or shoulder mobility. A 5’1” 65-year-old grandmother and a 6’4” 25-year-old former athlete should not be standing the same way, and an experienced instructor knows why.

• Outdated techniques delivered as gospel. Cup-and-saucer grips, leaning back to “absorb recoil,” teacup grips, locked-elbow Weaver stances taught without context — these still get passed down by instructors whose own instructors learned them in the 1970s.

• Inability to fix a problem. A new shooter pulls every shot down and to the left. A good instructor knows there are at least six possible causes and works through them in order. A new instructor tells the shooter to “stop anticipating,” which is true but useless.

• Same lesson plan for everyone. Real instruction adjusts in real time. Scripted instruction does not.

A new instructor who knows they’re new, asks questions, and trains under someone experienced is a different story — that’s how good instructors are made. The danger is the new instructor who doesn’t know what they don’t know.

3. The YouTube Performer

YouTube has produced some genuinely excellent firearms instructors. It has also produced a much larger group of people who figured out that views go up when safety rules go out the window.

The pattern is easy to spot once you know what to look for. Watch the trigger finger during reloads — if it’s inside the guard, the demonstration is teaching a negligent discharge. Watch where the muzzle points during draws, holstering, and “tactical” maneuvers — if it sweeps the shooter’s own leg, the camera operator, or anything down-range that isn’t the target, the demonstration is teaching how to shoot the wrong thing.

A few specific things we see and won’t repeat:

• Speed reloads performed by people who haven’t earned the speed yet, with fingers riding the trigger during gun movements.

• High-speed drills filmed without context — no reference to distance, lighting, legal framework, or whether the shooter has actually earned the right to attempt the drill at all.

• Trick shots — through holes, between objects, off props — that violate the four cardinal rules in service of a thumbnail.

The viewer absorbs these patterns whether they mean to or not. We learn by mimicking.

Two months later, on a real range, the trigger finger ends up inside the guard during a reload because that’s what the eyes have been watching for a hundred hours.

4. The “Been There” Friend

This one is the hardest to push back on, because it’s family. Or it’s the friend who served, or the friend who’s carried for thirty years, or the friend who’s been hunting since he was eight. The experience is real. The instruction is not.

Carrying a gun is not the same as teaching someone to carry one. Hunting is not the same as defensive shooting. Service experience varies widely and may or may not translate to civilian self-defense. None of these automatically produce someone who can break down a draw stroke, diagnose a flinch, or sequence skills in the order that builds confidence rather than confusion.

The bad advice from this category tends to be quieter and stickier:

• “You need a Glock 17/Sig P365/Walther PDP/... , it's the best gun ever.” Maybe that brand and model works amazingly well for your friend (or maybe it's the only gun they had any experience with), but that doesn't mean it fits you. Guns are very individual - from grip size to weight, size, recoil profile and many other factors. Unlike other products, you can't just "return" a gun you don't like. Selling and tradeins of firearms are regulated and generally carry additional costs such as transfer fees. To make an informed decision, don't rely on a well-meaning friend's advice. Consult with an instructor or a trusted local gun store.

• “You don’t need to clean it that often.” Maybe true for a modern striker-fired pistol shot occasionally at the range. Not true for a carry gun that lives against your body and collects lint, sweat, and skin oil every day. You shoot, you clean.

• “Just point shoot. You won’t have time to aim.” A good defensive shooting program teaches the full spectrum — from sighted fire to threat-focused shooting to true point shooting — and when each one belongs. “Just point shoot” as the only answer is wrong at every distance past arm’s length.

• “Keep one in the chamber” or “don’t keep one in the chamber,” delivered as an absolute rather than a discussion of holster, lifestyle, training level, and the specific firearm.

• Storage advice based on what they did in 1985, when nobody talked about kids accessing firearms, fast-access safes didn’t exist, and “high on a closet shelf” passed for security.

The friend means well. The friend is also not your instructor.

What Good Instruction Actually Looks Like

The common thread in all four categories is the absence of method and certified training experience. Anyone can say a true thing about shooting. A method puts those true things in order, tests them against real shooters, and adjusts when something isn’t working.

A working instructor — someone who teaches for a living, year after year — brings a few things the pretenders, performers, freshly-minted, and well-meaning friends don’t:

• A diagnostic eye. Watching one magazine fired, a good instructor can usually identify the two or three things slowing a shooter down and the order in which to fix them. That comes from thousands of hours of watching, correcting and verifying, not from a weekend course.

• Individualized teaching. A 12-year-old learning to shoot for sport, a 70-year-old with some disabilities training for home defense, a small-framed adult, a left-eye-dominant right-handed shooter, a former competitor who needs to knock off 0.2 seconds from their draw - they don’t get the same lesson. They get the same standards.

• Pace. Some shooters need three sessions on grip before they touch the trigger. Some need ten minutes. A good instructor knows which is which and doesn’t rush either one.

• Foundations that hold up. The grip, stance, sight picture, trigger press, and reset that get built in the first ten hours of instruction are the things every advanced skill rests on later. Built well, they last decades and provide solid foundations for what comes next. Built poorly, they limit everything that follows.

• Learn how to learn. A good instructor will teach you how to learn on your own. Based on your recent session, the instructor will help you create a SAFE and effective self-training routine you can engage in between sessions, both on and off the range. Elements to focus on; tendencies to watch for; even time saving tips for a good training session.

There’s nothing wrong with watching YouTube, reading forums, or talking guns with friends. None of it is a substitute for hours behind the gun with someone who knows what they’re looking at and adjusts the lesson to the shooter in front of them.

If you’re starting out, get one block of real instruction before you build any habits. If you’ve been shooting for years and something isn’t working, get a session with someone who can watch and tell you what you can’t see yourself. The cost is small. The cost of skipping it tends to come out later, in fractions of seconds you don’t have.

Got a question about a piece of advice you’ve been given, or a video you’ve watched, that didn’t sit right? Send it in. We’ll cover it in an upcoming Ask the Instructor.