About Prerequisites

Firearms Instruction Research and Education

About Prerequisites

As any visitor to this site can see, we have prerequisites for a number of our courses. Consequently, I am often contacted by people who wish to take a course that requires a prerequisite, to see if some other training they have taken will satisfy the prerequisite. This is perfectly fine and completely appropriate. Nevertheless, I have to decline to admit the majority of those who wish to substitute a prerequisite. Most people are gracious and understanding; some are not. I thought a word of explanation might help.

In summary form, there are two reasons we require prerequisites for our courses: safety, and to assure some degree of uniformity in the skill and style of the participants in our courses.

The safety issues pertain to us being assured that an individual has been properly instructed with respect to range procedures, the range commands we use, and firearm safety generally, and has some experience with these things. We need to know those issues are taken care of before we will proceed with courses such as, for example, Tactics I (where students shoot from other than a square-range firing line) or Low-Light courses (where instructors cannot always see all the participants at the same time).

The purpose of the prerequisite is not to guarantee that all participants have appropriate previous instruction and are "up to speed"; each instructor always independently verifies, on a square range and in daylight, that his students are sufficiently prepared to move on with the course before proceeding. Rather, the purpose of the prerequisites is to minimize the number of participants we find during the review process who are not adequately prepared. We would rather disappoint someone on the telephone, long before they have enrolled and made room in their schedule for a course, than to disappoint them on the range once the course has begun.

The uniformity requirement is to give us a "base line" from which we can proceed to instruct on new material. We assume, for example, that students in Carbine II know how to safely and efficiently load, do a systems readiness check and clear malfunctions without looking at their rifles, so we can move on to other matters such as how to turn or use a flashlight to search. If we have people who are not sufficiently prepared, we have to take the time to bring them up to speed before moving on. That extra step not only slows down the class for those who came prepared, it distracts the individual participant from what we intended to teach. It is not good for the individual, and it is not good for the class, and it is not good for the instructor.

It is nothing personal. We are not making a judgment that an individual who does not meet the course prerequisite is a poor gun handler or has learned anything incorrectly or is a bad person. We are saying that we have no way of knowing that an individual is sufficiently safe and well versed in the systems we teach to fit easily into a particular course. It would be nice if we could go out and shoot with each applicant for awhile to verify what they know, but that is simply not practical.

Issues we most frequently run into are those who have taken courses which do not translate well (e.g., someone with general rifle training who wants Carbine II), people with military experience who wish to have us accept military training (military small-arms training almost never prepares one for our courses), people with training under Pennsylvania "Act 235" (which is worthless for any purpose I can discern), and people who have accumulated many hours of instruction from people we do not know, in half-day increments.

With respect to this latter group, I must apologize that we cannot know the level of competence of every instructor out there, or the methods they employ. If we know a school or instructor, then we know what has been previously taught, and we can even call the previous instructor if there are any questions and ask. For example, if someone says they attended a "Gunsite 250" or Randy Cain's "Hand-Gun 101" last year, I have a pretty fair idea of that to which they have been exposed. However, if we do not know an instructor or what he teaches, we have nothing upon which to base a judgment regarding what our prospective course participant should know.

Bear in mind that the written "credentials" of instructors we do not know are of little or no use to us. If their credentials are that they taught at Gunsite for 12 years, we have something, since we know what they taught and will doubtless know people who know them. That is rare. Usually the instructor we do not know was himself instructed by people we do not know, and their primary experience is as an "ex-something-or-other." This tells me nothing about his competence or style or, more to the point, the competence of the individual he instructed two or five years ago. (In fact, "ex-something-or-other" qualifications will most likely invoke my personal prejudices about ex-something-or-other's, so it is best to leave all that out of the equation).

We also believe that training taken in small blocks of time over the course of years will be ineffective. Short courses are fine to "refresh" previously learned skills, but they are not well suited to the initial learning of firearms skills. Debate that all you like; it is where we stand.

The main thing to remember is that course prerequisites are for the benefit of everybody. We firmly believe that we are not doing a fellow any favors by passing him into a course for which he is not properly prepared. A lot of schools buckle to personal or economic pressure to enroll someone who is not prepared, and the result is almost never good for the school or any of the individual course participants.

The smart thing to do is put ego aside and take the proper prerequisite course, rather than the "advanced" course. I have never heard of anyone regretting that move. On the other hand, I have heard of nothing but problems from forcing people past a prerequisite.

Peter Georgiades,
Executive Director.

"The more you know of the basics, the more advanced you are."

For Details, Information and Directions:

Join our E-mail list for future announcements

"Having a gun and thinking you are armed is like having a piano and thinking you are a musician"
------ Col. Jeff Cooper (U.S.M.C. Ret.)

This course is sponsored by the Firearms Instruction Research & Education (FIRE) Institute,
a Penna. nonprofit corporation.
Training is provided as a public service.
All students must be 18 years or older. Proof of no criminal history is required.