[Frank Ettin]

Originally Posted by Bartholomew Roberts

It seems to me the relevant question is do better trained people prevail more often than untrained people?

Originally Posted by BlueTrain

It begs the question: how much is enough?

The question "How much training is enough?" can never be answered.

You can never know in advance what your problem will be, so yo can never know in advance what you're going to need to be able to do to solve it. But in general, the more you can do and the better you can do it, the more likely you'll be satisfied with the outcome. The better prepared you are, the luckier you will be.

There's no reason that training (or learning in general) has to stop. If you choose to not train or to discontinue training, that only means that you've decided you have enough. That's your call, and events will decide for you whether or not that was a good call. If you run into a problem beyond your capacity, then maybe it wasn't such a good call after all (or maybe you'd still consider it a fair trade-off).

Originally Posted by HeadHunter

The rest of my article is on Tactical Wire.

But of course that sort of begs the question: What does it mean?

It makes a decent case that the RKBA is a valuable right and that access to firearms is worthwhile. But some will see the discussion as supporting the proposition that there's no good reason to seek out training, and I don't think the analysis supports that conclusion.

Let's look at some of the issues:

• You say:

  ...every year hundreds of thousands of people, who have had no training whatsoever and who seldom practice, successfully defend themselves with firearms...

  But exactly what evidence supports that assertion?
  
  We have a number of studies based on survey data (including the Kleck study) suggesting very large numbers of successful defensive gun uses (DGUs). And while the surveys, IIRC, don't capture data on the training of responders, the raw numbers are sufficiently large that at least a very healthy portion of those claiming a successful DGU probably had little training. Serious training has only been available to private citizens for a relatively short time (with Gunsite opening in the mid-1970s), and I can't imaging that the total aggregate output of Gunsite, Thunder Ranch, The Chapman Academy, LFI/MAG, Gabe Suarez, Louis Awerbuck and all the other schools and instructors would come close to the number of DGUs reported in the various studies.
  
  But in looking at some of the criticism of those studies, there does appear to be a question of whether all those incidents reported as successful DGUs were properly characterized by the persons responding to the surveys.
  
  So this must be regarded as something of a soft number. Not insignificant, to be sure, but still soft.
  
  
• There are a number of sources for compilations of media accounts of successful DGUs. The "Armed Citizen" column in the NRA magazines is one. Another good source is this website. But those accounts seldom, if ever, include much information about the defender's level of training or experience.
  
  
• There seems to be very little data on defensive failures. But the lack of data doesn't mean that there aren't any. It only means that there not getting reported or not getting reported in ways that cause them to be identified as defensive failures. As Nassim Nicholas Taleb reminds us in his books Fooled by Randomness, the Hidden Role of Chance (Random House, 2004) and The Black Swan, the Impact of the Highly Improbable (Random House, 2007), "Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence."
  
  
• In any case, a successful DGU by someone with minimal training only means that he was able solve his particular problems with the skills he had available at the time. If the problem had been different, things might not have worked out so well. In an emergency, we will respond with whatever skills and knowledge we have available. If they are up to the task, we'll prevail. If not, we probably won't.
  
  
• While we may have little data on defensive failures by private citizens, we do know that sometime LEOs fail to successfully defend themselves. And LEOs do have some training.
  
  It's true that LEOs face different sorts of tactical problems compared with private citizens, and LEO training varies. Yet here is a group of trained persons who fail at times. Would less training have produced better results?

So yes, private citizens can, and do, make effective defensive use of guns even when they lack training; and that is a good reason why it's appropriate for firearms to be available to private citizens. But training is a good idea which we should continue to encourage.