"Not Where I Want to Be Yet"

I get a lot of emails from people who want to come to an Appleseed Event, but they say they are “not where they want to be yet” with their marksmanship. This is what is preventing them from coming to an event, until they are ready, in their minds, to ace the course.

Of all the reasons not to come to an event, this has to rank as one of the worst ones, and it epitomizes the dissociative behaviors of the American People. Since they are not where they want to be, as far as rifle skills, they do not want to come and learn. It is also the way most folks deal with the current problems America faces. Since I can not fix a certain thing with ten minutes of effort or a $20 bill, I can not spend any time thinking about this. I do not want to think about the fact that we are facing some troubling times, because if I do, I will have to do something about it. We will get back to this in a minute.

As far as being ready for attending an Appleseed Project two day rifle marksmanship weekend, there is nothing you need to do to prepare yourself for attending a course. The Appleseed course is designed to take anyone who attends, from never having fired a rifle, to being able to fire at four minutes of angle, which is the Appleseed standard and is above what 99.99% of American firearms owners can achieve. How do I know? I have been teaching events now for several years and have seen many hundreds of shooters attempt to shoot to this standard and fail on their first attempts on day one, but have seen quite a few folks achieve this standard by the end of day two.

But if this was all Appleseed did, teach you to shoot to a four minute of arc standard, I could see, maybe, why people do not wish to show up “unprepared”. Even though an Appleseed event is not a contest, it is a fundementals of rifle marksmanship course, no one wants to make a bad showing when they are meeting new people and trying something new, right?

Banish these thoughts, because Appleseed is much, much more than a rifle marksmanship program. Appleseed is a beginning. A place to start, a launch site.

Americans are adrift in a sea of uncertainty, floating nervously along in a nebula of media pablum without a compass and not comprehending the fact that they need to find true north. Were they to find the source of their anxiety, they would then be faced with doing something about it. Much like the sick and dying Grandfather or Mother that is ignored until the funeral makes things right . Faced with the mess of a dying relative better to ignore it and try to make the best of your day rather than having it make a mess of your life right? Soon enough they will die and all will be well again, right?

Wrong. When America dies, we all die. Like all the fruit on a vine, when the vine is cut or the roots pulled from the ground, the fruit of the vine does not survive. We have a direct and unbroken link to our past in all the men and women who have embodied all that being an American is.

In Naomi Wolf’s latest book “Give Me Liberty, A Handbook for American Reviolutionaries”, she talks about what being an American really means. About who Americans are. By what right they deserve the title “American”. This is what we do at an Appleseed. We help people to understand what it is that defines them as Americans.

That is what Appleseed is. It is a starting place, it is a way to reconnect with the Founding Fathers. We teach people who attend that they did not just today, pop into existence with no history and no direct line to the Founding Fathers. We tell them that they owe all that they have to men and women who came before them and sacrificed all in some cases so that they would have the freedom and liberty that they now enjoy. And that without remembering and honoring those people, and without continuing to safeguard those very same principles and ideas, they will lose them. With only two days we can not give them everything they need to know to do all that is needed to save our country, but we can start them on the path, and we do.

We try to teach people that being an “American” is not granted to you by virtue of being born on a certain piece of ground, but earned by you every day you live. The path to becoming a Rifleman in the RWVA Appleseed Program is not an easy one. It is not a program where you learn to shoot at a target and hit it and then go home and put your rifle away in the closet with your training and get back on the couch and become one with the remote again.

A chimp could, theoretically, be taught to hit a target with a rifle. I imagine somewhere the military has some data on experiments they have done with this. One of the things we teach you, besides the greatest fundamentals of rifle marksmanship courses in the nation, is that once you have been to an Appleseed and we tell you what is occuring in our country and how you have a blood debt to honor the Founding Fathers and do your part to protect and defend our liberty and freedom, that you are a changed person and you can never go back to who you were. Not with a clear conscience. You now have a duty, a place to start.

So when I get that email saying “I am not where I want to be yet”. I have a ready answer. As a Rifleman with the Appleseed Program, get used to saying that. That should be the phrase that follows you into the grave. You should always be on a quest to learn something, find answers, become more skilled. If you ever think you have learned all there is or that you have nothing left to learn or teach, think about how sad that would be? But, you should not let it stop you from attending an Appleseed two day rifle marksmanship weekend.

A Rifleman never stops learning, a Rifleman never stops teaching. A Rifleman continues to seek ways to to protect the freedom the Founding Fathers left us, to improve himself, his home and family, his community, his state and his country, everyday of his life. A Rifleman adapts, a Rifleman overcomes and a Rifleman persists.

This is not just some fancy gilded rhetoric we throw around like popcorn and pennies. This is the code we live by here. There is nothing wrong, no matter how often the mass of talking heads tells you it is wrong, or outdated, or corny, stupid and cavemanish, with having a code to live by in your life. Modern Americans have forgotten their code. They have forgotten how to be Americans. We are here to help them remember.