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What is up with folks paying a gunsmith to clean their guns?!
- Thread starter cmshoot
- Start date
Schools don't run 'practical' courses any longer (back in the UK, when I was in 'the machine' - shop included setting up lathes, milling machines and for punishment, being given a piece of scrap steel and being told to turn it into a 1/2in cube) - so you ended up exposed to complicated manual processes that stretched the creative mind a bit.
Education nowadays doesn't go there, so it's a little unfair to simply blame individuals for being either incapable or unwilling (because risk-aversion is now taught not only in school, but society) to the point where when I have spoken to new gun owners about cleaning their guns, the most common concern is that they might break it.
We're training ourselves as a culture to be risk averse and "leave things to experts". Increasingly, we're seeing that experts themselves are separating into people with genuine competency, and people who are highly credentialed, but actually just as ill-informed as the people who seek their help.
Being incapable of cleaning your own gun is an admission of failure as a firearm owner, because it signals that you probably don't understand - even on a basic level - how your gun works - but whether you decide to have someone else actually clean your gun is between you, your pocketbook and your conscience.
Education nowadays doesn't go there, so it's a little unfair to simply blame individuals for being either incapable or unwilling (because risk-aversion is now taught not only in school, but society) to the point where when I have spoken to new gun owners about cleaning their guns, the most common concern is that they might break it.
We're training ourselves as a culture to be risk averse and "leave things to experts". Increasingly, we're seeing that experts themselves are separating into people with genuine competency, and people who are highly credentialed, but actually just as ill-informed as the people who seek their help.
Being incapable of cleaning your own gun is an admission of failure as a firearm owner, because it signals that you probably don't understand - even on a basic level - how your gun works - but whether you decide to have someone else actually clean your gun is between you, your pocketbook and your conscience.
