Contextual Defensive Firearms Training Explained

All right, I'm here with the English pit range today, in Washington state with Grant Cunningham. Of course he's well known to anybody who's followed Personal Defense Network and really, anyone in the firearms community. Grant, you're an author, revolver smith, great opinion leader in the community and obviously an instructor as well. Wanna talk to you today about contextually based training and how you deal with, you know, you have diverse student body, you've traveled the country and you also reach an audience that's incredibly diverse with your writing and with all of your podcasts and anything else that you put out, these interviews. How do you deal with helping students figure out what we mean when we say, training has to fit their context. You know, a lot of students, in this industry there's lot of advertising and a lot of promotion that goes on that students are affected by. And certainly, they come into class sometimes with some preconceptions about what they need without understanding their needs. So, we start with talking about what they're actually gonna be doing in their life. For instance, we talk about, you might be defending your home, you might be defending yourself in a movie theater. Those kinds of things that they get into on a day to day bases, that maybe they hadn't thought about before. They go into it thinking that, well, what I need is some sort of combat training or I need some sort of special forces training, because they haven't really identified their needs yet. So, we start with an assessment of what the student really needs. And we start talking about what their life is like. You know, do they spend most of their time at home, do they go to the movie theater a lot, all that sort of thing, because they're bombarded with these ideas about what they need. They read the magazines certainly, there's a lot of stuff that goes on there, as you know and sometimes they don't have a really good idea of what they're really looking for. So, we start with assessment process. What are you actually gonna face? Do you have kids? Do you work at home? Do you work in a big office? Do you go to the hospital a lot? All of these thing that dictate the context of training that they're gonna need. That's gonna vary from person to person. I live in a relatively rural area. My context is very very different than somebody who lives in a loft in downtown Portland, for instance. I'm from Oregon and Portland is a relatively large city. I live in the woods. My needs are gonna be different than somebody else's. And so, we start with that assessment now, in a lot of cases, because we do pretty much, we live kind of the same lives generally. I go to the city occasionally, people from the city go to the country, vacation. So, certainly there's a lot of overlap, but there's also those things that are unique to each individual and we have to talk about those and it starts with that assessment. That makes a lot of sense. Do you find that most students come in with a misunderstanding or most students that you're seeing today come in pretty well educated and really looking for the right thing, when they come to you as students. I think that it depends upon, actually depends upon the student. I find for instance, women tend to come in with a much better understanding of what they need. They understand the risks in their lives certainly. They understand, I think the things that can happen, because they read the news a little more. I think men typically come in with a little less idea of what they need in context, because they tend to read the gun magazines and they tend to watch the high speed videos on YouTube and things like that. And so, they often come in without a good idea of what their actual context is. And sometimes when you talk to them and make them consider all of those things. Like for instance, what do you do if somebody break into your house in the middle of the night? And they haven't really thought about this before. So, it depends upon the student. Interesting enough, I find that a lot of the younger students are coming in with a lot more flexible ideas, about what they need and although they may come in with with some preconceptions or some misconceptions, they're a lot more flexible in terms of education to get passed those. Okay, so, not surprisingly, some cliches are true. It's the guy who kinda thinks he knows it all, that's the harder student to deal with and maybe someone whose more open to training, someone who's more in tune with themselves and then coming to you to find out what they need, that's gonna be the better student to understand their context in training and it's incredibly important, fundamental concept. It's gonna help you get the most out of any time, effort, budget that you spend out on the range.