suck at firearms

It’s OK to Suck at Firearms

ByLandon

Most new gun owners don’t expect to suck at firearms. You go out and purchase your first firearm for personal defense, whether concealed carry or home defense. You want to be proficient in protecting yourself, so you dry fire, watch videos online demonstrating technique, and read articles about shooting theory. When you are finally ready to test out your skills, you pack up and go to the range.

You are excited to see how good a shot you are, and as you make your way through your first magazine, you are disappointed. Your shots seem all over the paper, and you don’t have a good sense of where you are shooting. You notice on your next magazine you start trending low and left. You try different distances, maybe you switch to a different gun, or try adjusting your stance and your grip. As the session goes on, you get worse not better, and feel frustrated. You’ve heard Lucas say, “if you suck, you suck,” and it’s not OK to suck at firearms, right?

The Mental Results of a Poor Range Trip

You finish your session, pack up your stuff and head home, and on your way back, you start to cement the trip in your mind, and it is most likely to go in one of two directions: you tell yourself you did fine despite your actual performance or you criticize yourself lose confidence.

In one direction, you tell yourself that it’s good enough for what you need, and if the time came that you actually needed to use your gun, you could handle it. Maybe you take some well framed pictures to show your friends how “well” you did. No matter how much you tell yourself you did well, you know in the pit of your stomach you didn’t, and you don’t know what to do to get better. Because you’ve told yourself you are good enough, you train less and don’t bother to identify the areas you can improve.

The other direction is to get demoralized. You are frustrated by your performance, realize you did poorly, but don’t know what to do to get better. It doesn’t seem like your friends or the people you watch on YouTube have the same issues. You lose confidence in your ability to effectively use your firearm for self defense. Maybe you stop carrying or lock your home defense gun in the “big safe.” You wonder if shooting just isn’t for you, and train less as a result of your negative experiences, because who likes sucking?

Do I Suck at Firearms?

Neither mental direction is helpful for getting better at shooting: either pretending you are better than you are, or losing confidence and beating yourself up to the point that you stop training. Instead, you have to come to terms with your current abilities and be honest about where you are actually at. In short, it’s OK to suck at firearms, it’s just not OK to stay there. Like Socrates recognizing the first step towards wisdom is admitting what you don’t know, to get better at shooting, you have to be honest about your abilities. This doesn’t mean being overly critical, beating yourself up, or carrying your failures with you, nor does it mean pretending that sucking is good. You aren’t celebrating you are bad, you are admitting that it’s OK to suck right now, because you are working to get better.

Shooting is an acquired skill. It is not something that anyone has a natural affinity for. While there are certainly skills that help support, no one is born good at shooting. In order to get good at shooting, you need to train. Just like any other acquired skill, regular repetition of good actions, building shooting virtue, is necessary if you want to get better.

As kids, we are exposed to all manner of opportunities to truly fail, whether it’s a sports or school or your first job. As we get older, when we try new things, we are usually building on previous expertise and experiences, so we don’t start out completely failing, but being mediocre and working our way up. When we come to something like shooting, we expect that same sort of progression, but if you are coming to shooting cold, r even if you have been shooting for a while and never learned the fundamentals, you are more likely to suck at firearms than you are to come in with some innate skill.

How I Learned to Suck at Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu

I learned how to suck first hand when I started training Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu as an adult. I started training in my 30s, with zero background in martial arts or any physical defense. I’d never been particularly adept at sports, so I was really starting as a blank slate. I started learning techniques, and after only a handful of classes, I started sparring with other students. I sucked. Badly. I sucked so badly, in fact, that despite being 100 lbs heavier and 6 inches taller, I was regularly getting beaten by teenagers. There is a special type of humility built when you come home covered in bruises because a 16 year old girl beat you up.

Because I had no background in martial arts, and had been warned I was going to be very bad to start, I embraced sucking. Instead of getting frustrated that I was getting choked out by a kid who had to be dropped off for class by his mom, I had fun with it. I tried to have a sense of humor about the whole thing, relying on self deprecation and brutal honesty about my own skills. I wasn’t shy about telling people how bad I was. I sucked. I knew it. And it was OK. The professors (coaches) also did a great job sharing stories, about themselves and others, reflecting on how bad they were when they started. No one needed to pretend they were better than they were, because we all sparred against each other and knew what we could handle; anything other than brutal honesty ended in getting crushed on the mat.

Even Though You Suck at Firearms, Keep Training

I was completely OK with sucking, and didn’t let it get to me, relying on humor to get through it. I was OK because I was doing my best to get better. When the consequences of sucking are physical discomfort, you try really hard to get better. I didn’t want to keep getting destroyed, so I kept training to get better. I was OK with sucking because I wasn’t OK staying bad.

Firearms are no different. It’s OK, and expected, that you suck as you are training to get better. The key is to continue training. Go get help from someone who knows what to look for and how to help you get better. Keep dry firing, and be reflective of your shortcomings so you can self-diagnose and get better. You will not get good all at once, but with good training, you will get noticeably better. Understanding the principles of good shooting will make an immediate positive effect on your skills, but getting good will take time and practice. It’s not easy, but it is worth it.

Any gear mentioned in this post was purchased for my personal use. I have not been compensated or incentivized by any company for any product reviews, highlights, or opinions.

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