Poseurs who teach

Within just the last 24 hours I have been contacted by 3 different reliable sources about poseurs – in fairness, alleged poseurs – involved in the firearms training industry and the manufacture of firearms. Such fraud isn't confined to any one region (and probably not to any one industry). These allegations have been made against companies located from Indiana to Florida. Certainly this sort of CV-padding is nothing new, but it does prompt us to remind you – trainees beware. Before you spend your hard earned money and potentially put yourself at risk with an instructor, perform some due diligence. Remember claims can range from grandiose to mean and still be an embellishment or a falsehood. Awesome web pages, slick YouTube channels and great war stories make for excellent marketing, but they certainly don't guarantee quality of instruction. Remember the well being of you and your family may be dependent on the instruction you receive (this is why we encourage training with multiple teachers). This isn't just physical well being. It could be financial or even criminal. Don't take that sort of thing lightly.

For the instructors part, if you are someone claiming to be something you're not (or just a more tacticool version of what you really were), wind your neck in. Be proud of what you actually did or righteously achieved. There are some very fine instructors out there who've had little or no experience on the mean streets or outside the wire. Think of the second and third order effects of your misinformation and misdirection – someone may actually use the skills you're teaching to put someone down. When that shooting goes to court, they're going to call that person's trainers to the stand. In today's litigious society, do you really want to be the one outed as a fraud even if the shoot was righteous? You can be teaching good tactics and proper skills and still wind up on the wrong side of a lawsuit or even criminal action, and that's not beginning to touch on the implications of a bad shoot.

This doesn't even touch on the issue of honor or your ethics of course. Be careful. You may never be up on the stand in something as contentious as the Zimmerman trial, but someone is eventually going to open the lid on your bucket of crap and you're going to wind up wearing it. When you draw the ire of a retired CSM from a JSOC-affiliated unit or have lots of legitimate knuckle-draggers taking legal action to obtain your real records, your days are numbered. Do the right thing and mitigate the damage now. If you're providing quality instruction and you're sufficiently contrite you might even stay in business.

Note – the following video is satire. It's here to make a not-so-subtle reference to the instruction you could be getting if you're not careful. The feature image is from Sgt. Bilko (Imagine Entertainment and Universal Pictures). It is not meant to imply any misrepresentation on the part of those actors and is intended to be symbolic.

Dynamic Pie Concepts is awesome. Sgt. Bilko was a funny movie. Poseurs are neither.

Poseur. poh-zur; a person who attempts to impress others by assuming or affecting amanner, degree of elegance,
sentiment, etc., other than his or hertrue one

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