So in yet another fit of eclectic autodidactism, I’m taking the Canadian Firearms Safety Course. It’s basically twelve hours of class followed by an exam (and then another four hours for the “restricted,” i.e. handgun, course). I wondered what exactly they could cram into those twelve hours — I mean, how long does it take to teach “don’t point at anything you don’t want to shoot,” and “make sure it’s unloaded”?
I guess the instructor didn’t know either. He claims to have been teaching firearm safety for over thirty years, from which statement I can only deduce that he lives in an entirely different dimension of existence wherein the word or even the concept of “pedagogy” doesn’t exist.
He doomed the the entire class right away by announcing that though the actual handling and firing of the firearms is a, pardon me, deadly serious business, he would actually be quite jocular in the lecture parts of the class. This means, of course, that he’s the most humourless individual I’ve ever seen. He’s extremely unprepared — he’ll throw up an overhead projector slide (which is out of sequence from and numbered differently than the pages in the textbook), say a few desultory words about it, then launch into a long rambling story whose point rarely, if ever, even approaches anything to do with the use, care and regulation of firearms.
If he thinks something would be useful to illustrate, he’ll stop in mid-sentence, disappear into a back room whence rummaging sounds will emanate for a while, and then come back with one of eventually dozens of old disabled firearms and cartridges, which he’ll pass around for our edification.
Plus he’s stone deaf.
But have we actually seen, let alone touched, let alone loaded and fired any actual firearms? After two mind-numbing sessions I’m increasingly thinking that we won’t, until the final exam, whereupon we’ll be required to know lots of the useful stuff from the textbook, and handle actual weapons, all without any explanation or practice.
Oh, Canada!
Thus taking this course would seem pointless from a useful life skills point of view, unless one combines it with some actual shooting. So I guess I should mosey on out to the only rifle range in the Lower Mainland — an hour’s drive away from Vancouver. And maybe spend some of my hard-earned tax refund on a .22 target rifle or something, if I decide to apply for the licence.