Concealed Carry Courses

The idea of attending a class taught by a Marine seemed like a great idea. I was sure he would know his stuff and have the real experience — making the class that much more informative and worthwhile. Well…
THE UP-​SIDE: He gives you eight hours on the outdoor range. That’s more than many places.
THE DOWN-​SIDE: Where to start? The owner/​instructor is not there to teach you about guns as much as he is there to tell you long and laborious stories and/​or tell you about how you can mess up in his class and how he will not give you a certificate. These ways to mess up include getting food on his carpet, asking a question while you are on break, calling him by a name other than his first name, etc. This isn’t told in some list upfront, but literally over the course of the first entire third of the class. It’s mind-​numbing. He just doesn’t stop talking you all the ways you can mess up. You don’t get to keep the books, he threatens that you’d better not mark the books or fold the pages, etc. I get that, but on top of the other hours-​long lecture on how you can mess up in attending his class, it’s a little much.
I will admit I only attended the first four-​hour session of the three night class. Do you know the one and only bit of information I gained that first night? I’m not kidding. The only thing he taught was to release your breath when you pull the trigger. That, of course, came in the middle of another story about himself and warnings of how you can make him mad at the range — not just safety stuff like you’d expect, but weird personal issues. The information he gave was almost by accident as he told a story. I had to bail on the class because of these reasons.
THE SUM-​IT-​UP: Don’t go here. There should be far fewer personal long and winding stories and far fewer weird personal warnings. It would also be swell if actual information could be taught. To be fair, I only took the first night’s course and lost money. Even so, that price was well worth not going back.