Firearm User Network

Matt at The Everyday Marksman posits that firearm use is a martial art and there is nothing wrong with that. His take on this is spot on. Tip-toeing around the fact that firearms are weapons (insisting on euphemisms such as “Modern Sporting Rifle” as an example) does no good as it implies there is something wrong with skillful weaponcraft and citizens owning personal weapons. The vast majority of humans can learn to use them without harm.

I take the stance that most games and sports involving a ball/disk/puck/dart/etc. are a form of marksmanship as they involve launching an object into a designated scoring area for points. An ability to do that with greater precision, from further distance, and/or faster than others is always an advantage.

As mentioned in the article, a number of these games have direct martial roots. Even Track and Field was created as a military exercise. Consider the Hoplitodromos.

The Martial Art of Marksmanship: It’s Not Bullshido
https://www.everydaymarksman.co/mindset/marksmanship-martial-art/

I would never have been introduced to [defensive shooting instruction] if I hadn’t gone to a match and met some guys who told me about it. Shooters usually flock to where other shooters are, and USPSA and IDPA competitions are a big deal these days. Matches have largely replaced gun-shop counters as the place where serious shooters hang out. I expect to continue to use matches as an opportunity to meet new people and even grow my training business organically through conversations between stages.

– Aaron Israel

The Army adopted the Trainfire model around 1955. The most recent version revamped the program in the late 1970s and served as the primary approach until the new Training Circulars re-wrote doctrine starting in 2016.

Until the new TCs and qualifications for them, all changes to Army small arms standards have reduced the challenge and needed skill. Consider this video where Soldiers conducting routine qualification during Basic are advancing downrange with loaded rifles and expected to take up positions on timed pop-up targets. FM 23-8, which was doctrine when this film was made, included a four table qualification that included shooting while advancing, offhand, and other unsupported shooting. Also note the regular use of peer coaching.

“Bullshit has tremendous advantages over knowledge. Bullshit can be created as needed, on demand, without limit. Anything that happens, you can make up an explanation for why it happened.

There was a Kansas football game a year ago; some Texas-based football team, much better than Kansas, came to Lawrence and struggled through the first quarter — KU with, like, a 7-3 lead at the end of the first quarter. The rest of the game, KU lost, like, 37-0, or something. The announcer had an immediate explanation for it: The Texas team flew in the day before, they spent the night sleeping in a strange hotel; it takes them a while to get their feet on the ground.

It’s pure bullshit, of course, but he was paid to say that … if it had happened the other way, and KU had lost the first quarter, 24-0, and then ‘won’ the rest of the game 17-14 (thus losing 38-17) … if that had happened, we both know that the announcer would have had an immediate explanation for why THAT had happened. … Bullshit is without limit.

As I saw it, baseball had two distinct mountains of material. One the one hand, there was a mountain of traditional wisdom, things that people said over and over again. On the other hand, there was a mountain of statistics. My work was to build a bridge between those two mountains. A statistician is concerned what baseball statistics ARE. I had no concern with what they are. I didn’t care, and I don’t care, whether Mike Schmidt hit .306 or .296 against left-handed pitching. I was concerned with what the statistics MEAN.

“Sportswriters, in my opinion, almost never use baseball statistics to try to understand baseball. They use statistics to decorate their articles. They use statistics as a club in the battle for what they believe intuitively to be correct.

– Bill James

When James began writing his annual Baseball Abstracts, people all across the game crowed that pitching was 75 percent of baseball. They usually said this after a dominant pitching performance, like the one Madison Bumgarner had against Kansas City in Game 5 of the World Series. In those days, saying “pitching is 75 percent of baseball” served as philosophy, and as good old-fashioned common sense.

To Bill James, it sounded like garbage trucks colliding. Seventy-five percent? What? Who did that math? He wrote a 2,000-word essay tearing apart the nonsense, not because he wanted to but because he HAD to, because that was such unadulterated bullshit that it had to be stamped out for the good of mankind.

“It’s just a number,” he wrote, “picked out of mid-air and plunked down in the middle of a bunch of words in a way that seemed to make sense, provided you don’t think too hard about it – quite a bit like saying that ‘Philosophy is 75% God,” or ‘Movies are 75% acting’ or ‘Sex is 75% mental, 25% physical.’”

There are many parallels here and in the shooting world. Consider the many “truths” espoused by gun owners and how many of them are based on nothing more than people continuing to repeat the same nonsense endlessly.

https://firearmusernetwork.com/tag/qualified-to-teach/
https://firearmusernetwork.com/tag/training-scar/

Baseball and other popular ball sports are carefully controlled and overflowing with carefully-gathered statistics and people still succumb to tribal “wisdom” and superstition.

Vanguard after the Revolution

View story at Medium.com