Teach a person to shoot.

[snyper]

Teach a person to shoot: Part 1.
by B.B. Pelletier

An article from Pyramyd Air Blog Archives

I promised several readers I'd address the subject of teaching people to shoot. We talked about teaching kids, but why limit it?

Determine the level of the budding shooter's maturity
Maturity is more important than age when it comes to shooting. Since the shooter will ultimately have total control of a device that can kill, he or she must be worthy of that level of trust. Don't make the mistake that because we are talking airguns that it makes a difference. It doesn't. A person who can load and fire a pellet pistol can also load and fire a powerful firearm.

Observe the potential shooter's actions
Whether the person is five or fifty makes no difference. If they cannot concentrate on what they are doing, or if they are prone to horseplay, don't teach them to shoot. I have seen plenty of adults horse around with airguns, claiming that they are just BB guns, after all. Some of the guns they horsed around with were as powerful as .22 rimfires and, in a few cases, they were big bore air rifles capable of killing larger game. Do not waste time trying to teach these people anything.

Weed them out!
When I coached youth shooting teams, during the first through third meetings a small number of kids were eliminated from further participation. We always insisted that a parent or guardian be present during these early sessions. (I would NOT recommend an older sibling, because you don't know whether THAT person is trustworthy, either.) If little Bobby couldn't stop talking, running around or touching the guns when he wasn't supposed to, we sent him home. The parents had already read and signed a contract that gave the coaches the power to do that, and we never had a single instance of a parent objecting to our decision. We didn't do it very often, and we suffered a lot of misbehavior from Bobby before making the call, so the parent was prepared for what we had to do.

If you're training a single person or your own children, you need to be just as attentive to their misbehavior. Don't try to train a child to shoot in the false belief that it will somehow mature him/her. While learning a discipline, such as shooting, can increase maturity, there are some people who should not be permitted to participate - and finding them is the first prime duty of the instructor.

You must be able to trust the shooter
Before very long, a coach has to be able to trust the student with a loaded gun. Yes, it's easier to control them when it's one-on-one, but at some point every new shooter will be in complete control of the gun. You must be able to trust them entirely when that time comes.

First, train them on safety
While all this observation is taking place, you are training the new shooter(s) on safety. Start with gun safety and don't advance until they know everything as well as you. The National Rifle Association (NRA) has developed numerous safety training programs that can help a shooting instructor. They even offer instructor training courses, which I highly recommend to anyone who is about to do a lot of firearms training. Their Airgun Shooting Sports Safety Guide, the first 10 pages of which are available on the internet, is an important resource for instructors.

In the next installment, I'll discuss how to make the shooter as aware of safety as the instructor. I'll also share tips on how to test a student without sounding like it's a test

[snyper]

Teach a person to shoot: Part 2
by B.B. Pelletier

An article from Pyramyd Air Blog Archives

Making students aware of safety
How do you make a student as aware of gun safety as the instructor? You make a game of it. First, you teach the students the most basic safety rules, with the first one being Never point a gun at anything you do not intend shooting. That's sometimes watered down to Always point a gun in a safe direction, but I have seen too many people (myself included) who cannot initially appreciate how far a bullet or pellet can reach out. That's why I like the first way best. If you think it's necessary, you might want to set up a few demonstrations of what it looks like when a pellet hits something. Rotten fruit is good for this, as are plastic milk jugs filled with water dyed red.

Make the students repeat the safety rules, and let THEM discuss what each rule means. To make sure every student participates in the discussion, to hold it in a setting that is as informal as possible, while still maintaining control over the class. Then, demonstrate what an infraction of the rule looks like. In the beginning, some students will get the idea right off, but some will require more processing time before they start responding to the infraction. The goal is for every shooter to respond to an unsafe act without thinking about it. For example, I have found myself shouting, "Cease fire" at airgun shows when someone dry-fires a gun indoors. I was as surprised as those around me, but the shooter got the message.

Testing without the formal structure
You can test the students on all the safety rules by committing infractions during the rest of the training. This is an old training tip, and it's a far better method than a formal paper or memory regurgitation test. However, once again, your students will not all respond at the same speed. You'll have a bright young girl who is as quick on the draw as Wyatt Earp, and there will be a quiet thoughtful boy who seems to be a half-second behind everyone else. You must find a way to test every student without embarrassing any of them.

Never stop testing the safety rules!
Continue to throw in a careless act from time to time during the rest of the training. The students will become so immersed in the shooting safety rules that they will surprise you someday. I have seen children shooters catching coaches and officials in unsafe acts at public events. I've been caught, myself. When the shooter knows the rules to that level, you have succeeded as an instructor.

Teaching shooters to use sights
This is the first lesson in training someone how to shoot. Guns are not required for this lesson, so you can even work it into a demonstration class held in a place that's inappropriate for actual shooting! I learned this in the NRA introductory class I took almost 50 years ago, and we practiced it for three successive weeks before ever shooting a gun. As a result, all the bullets from the first-time shooters landed somewhere inside the black bullseye!

The triangulation method
This method uses a flat stick (such as a yardstick), a chair for the instructor to sit on, two cardboard boxes, a target, a piece of paper and a lead pencil. An instructor is needed for each student. First, a sturdy set of paper sights is attached to the flat stick. You can also use real sights taped to the stick, but the front sight may have to be raised up on a block to align properly.


The sight trainer is simple and inexpensive to make.


Notice that we made an aperture rear sight. The shooters in formal training programs will be shooting with aperture sights, so it's important to not confuse them during training. Also, an aperture is MUCH more precise than any other open sight.

In the next lesson, I'll tell you how this training method works.