Competency course. Negativity????

Tikka391

Now maybe I am taking things up completely wrong, but I think I have noticed a negativity towards the competency course, from what I can see and I may be totally wrong whenever anybody post a question regarding license application for training certificates for their children possibly there has been A negative attitude towards them. There was a post just above mine with a similar question regarding the training certificate and a response was given from a legal point of view to regard the legal requirement that it was not required.
Well maybe the answer was quite correct regarding the legal requirement or whether it's needed or not but surely any and every chance should be taken for especially a young person to hear as much safety type of conversations as possible from as many people as possible, therefore the Competency course in what ever form a comes from or whatever body issues the course should be used to great affect to instil all of the safety measures and routines used in shooting regardless of discipline.
I myself with my young 14-year-old lad participated in the NARGC course two years ago and found it to be very good, a lot of the stuff I knew but it's great to hear it again from somebody else just to jog your memory if nothing else, and the young fella learnt a hell of a lot to.
Only a couple weeks ago my club ran the NARGC course again and we did it again and found it just as good, I think it only costs 15 Euro and my son was free so really I think it should be instilled in all young shooting members of clubs to attend the safety courses even though they might not be legally required if only to sow a seed of safety I know we all teach our own kids and junior members safety rules and regulations but it's always good to hear from somebody else as well.

There can never be too much safety drilled into young peoples minds and should always be promoted at every chance legally required or not.

As I said I may be totally wrong and have picked you up wrong on your answers, but maybe when telling a poster – the course is not legally required, it is advised that they attend. Why not what harm can it do.
We can never be too safe in shooting sports.

Sparks

There's no harm in good training Tikka, and we've always been very clear on that - if you're taking the training just to train, there isn't any downside.

The problem arises when you look at the training as a mandatory legal requirement to getting a firearms certificate. From that point of view, it's an absolute disaster. We've talked about why rather explicitly several times before but to summarise some of the important points:

• The law does not call for it, but so many people have forgotten that that the Gardai are now treating it as though it was the law, and that's a bad state of affairs to be in, let alone to bring about;
• There is virtually no regulation or consumer protection for these courses;
• There is no way on this earth that one course can fit all needs, but that's exactly what they're being pushed into doing or claiming to do;
• These courses are utterly orthogonal to several of the other legal means of satisfying the competency requirement, but they're being pushed as a prerequisite to those means.

As a side point, you're talking about the NARGC course above, but these points don't apply to just it, but to all courses.

And to repeat myself from an earlier thread, this is what I personally think is the biggest problem with the whole situation (the industry I'm talking about is the industry of running these competency courses):

Sparks wrote: »

●●●

I do however, think something stinks about this particular industry in general and here's as good a place to talk about that as any.

First off, the industry is perfectly legal, and was deliberately created by a Minister for Justice. There's no question of illegality or perfidity here. There are those who think it's even beneficial, and in the ideal they have a good point, but in the real world there's this big stinking problem that they're ignoring and it's this:

There is no regulation of firearms training in Ireland.

There's absolutely none. Not one single law, not one single official who oversees it, not one national standard, nothing. Almost everyone and his dog can happily rock up and start a course to train people in how to use firearms (and if you want to see how badly that can go, just google the phrase "Baron Shorttarse"). We all know of RFDs - and we're not going to name them specifically here because the Defamation Act is tiresome at best - who run courses over the course of an hour or less that people then use as proof of competency in licence applications, and we also know of competency courses run by national bodies and by ranges. And, be fair now, some of these are good basic safety courses run by well-meaning competent people. A few of those people even have the kind of training you need to teach something (which is an incredibly different set of training and skills to those you need to do that thing well). And a very very few people in Ireland are actually really good coaches, but they're really in a different industry so I'm not counting them here. I'm thinking of the basic safety/basic instruction field here.

The problem is, while we have a lot of good people trying their best, we have nobody vetting these courses to weed out the chancers setting up courses to make money who aren't actually teaching basic safety well. There's no standards for the courses to meet, no curriculum, no training of the trainers, nothing. There aren't even any consumer rights really, because you can go to person X, pay them for a course, do the course and "pass" it (sorry, but if there's no standard for the course, saying you pass or fail is a meaningless statement, it's like saying you won the race on the M50 on the way to work) -- and then the local Garda Superintendent can say "No, I won't accept this as proof of competence" and you can't get your money back, you can't sue person X for failing to provide the proof of competence you were seeking, you have no recourse at all. This is why we've been saying for years to ask the Super for the course first, which is a bad state of affairs to start with because it results in an effective state-sponsored monopoly in each garda district, but the alternative seemed worse.

Incidentally, yes, there are non-national bodies who will certify courses (you're all thinking of the NRA, but many others do it too, like the NSRA, the UK NRA, the ISSF, and many others, and people have been doing those courses in Ireland for a while now). But those non-national certifications mean absolutely zip in a licence application. The NRA says you're safe? Well that's nice, but unless your local Garda accepts that, it means nothing. And if he or she declines to accept it, then you have no recourse - the lack of standards means the Gardai have no requirement to accept non-national accreditations here.

And this is before you get to the thorny problem of what happens if someone is trained in one of these courses, doesn't learn basic safety but "passes" anyway and then goes on to hurt themselves, or someone else, or worse. Who's legally liable then? And what will the fallout be for the community as a whole?

We got dumped in this appalling situation by a Minister for Justice who, frankly, made a huge mess out of the Ministry he was given and who then just flounced off out of public life completely afterwards, but nobody's ever cleaned up the mess he made. Instead, some (not all) people have been opportunistically profiting off it and exacerbating the situation.

For example, we've been talking here about safety courses and proof of competence as though the former was the sole method to gain the latter; and not only is that not the case, it is deliberately not the case. Courses were never seen as being the norm, they were seen as being one way to provide competence, a new way, brought in alongside the established ways of direct instruction that we'd had since before the founding of the state. There's nothing wrong with having courses, if they're done right, but they were never supposed to take over from everything else, and especially not when they were this unregulated.

And this current push to try to get us to introduce graduated licencing is just going to make things even worse by increasing the demands for proof of competence and creating even more opportunities for commercial exploitation.

So like I said, the industry is perfectly legal. But it stinks. It's not safe, it's not good for the sport, it's not good for those in the sport, and it's only good for a few who are profiting off it. It badly needs regulation and standardisation and groups like FETAC to get involved for that to happen. And absolutely nobody is pushing for that to happen anymore.

Cass

Tikka391 wrote: »

As I said I may be totally wrong and have picked you up wrong on your answers, but maybe when telling a poster – the course is not legally required, it is advised that they attend. Why not what harm can it do.
We can never be too safe in shooting sports.

Sparks has covered most it quite nicely, but as it was my post i thought i'd answer.

I've no problem with a well run, and thorough course. None whatsoever. My answer in the other thread did not explain the whole situation as i was trying to answer the OP without giving him a two hour life story. However to give a quick reason behind my post i'll explain.

The application for my young lad was sitting for over three months without the Gardaí in the local station even opening the envelope. It's only after weeks of calls and then waiting outside the station for three hours did i meet the Garda. When he opened it he told me it's"no good" without a competency certificate. I explained that a competency course is (as Sparks pointed out) only one of several ways to prove competence. I wanted training cert to let the young lad come with me and legally carry the rifle. To learn the basics under my supervision.

The Garda once again insisted the application was as good as dead without the cert. IOW he ignored another way to gain competence, and blaming the Super for it. The Super denied this, and said the training license is exactly for this purpose.

Now the young lad will do a competence course at the MNSCI. Until then he comes out with me in the field, goes to the range, and learns as he goes. When he turns 16 and can get a full license he'll have the cert, my letter of support, and two years of a training license under his belt.

So i'm not opposed to the competency course from a learning/safety point of view, but in this case from the attitude shown to me by the Garda, and his ignorance as to the other ways to gain it.

ezra_

I did a competency course for shotgun the other day as you get it free when you join the club.

I had a chat with the guy doing it, he pointed out some safety things that I didn't know and some that are specific to semi auto shotguns.
Then I got a lesson about trap shooting and the many, many ways to break etiquette with a semi.

Well worth the time and I wouldn't hold track with 'I know how to shoot' so there attitude that sometimes surfaces here.

If I was giving a such a course in rifle and someone came in with the 'I know how to shoot so FO' attitude, it raises red flags and if they don't have the respect to listen to you, they probably don't have the respect for either the rifle or the range.

Sparks

None of which has anything to do with the problem Ezra. Those are well-acknowledged principles already (I remember those points being part of the normal RO training for DURC 20 years ago).

ezra_

Sparks wrote: »

None of which has anything to do with the problem Ezra. Those are well-acknowledged principles already (I remember those points being part of the normal RO training for DURC 20 years ago).

It was more, skipping the legal aspects of it, that there is little to no excuse to having an attitude against them. And in my experience (which I'm pretty sure tallies with yours) people who take such an attitude are the people who raise red flags on ranges. I'm not not saying they are dangerous, just that don't seem to respect how guns are fired in the place that they want to go and fire some guns in.

Sparks

ezra_ wrote: »

skipping the legal aspects of it

Thing is, it's only the legal/regulatory aspects of it that have (very well earned and deserved) negativity directed at them.
The other aspects - when they're not tangled in the legal side - are fine.

But to give you an example of why those legal aspects are critical - you went on a course and it was good. But you know enough to know that. What if you were a newbie, and went on a bad course? One given with technically incorrect details by someone who hadn't learnt how to teach something?
(a) You'd have no grounds to look for your money back;
(b) You'd have no guarantee it'd get you the licence; and worst of all,
(c) You'd have been trained in unsafe practices and might injure yourself before someone noticed you doing unsafe things unknowingly.

If this problem doesn't get fixed, sooner or later, we will have occasion to lament (c).