My permit to carry a pistol is up for renewal soon. I took Joel's class and feel obligated to give my business to one of the top supporters of second ammendment rights in Minnesota.

But...Is a "Refresher-Readers Digest-Express Checkout" version available that means sitting on a folding steel chair for 2 hours instead of 5 ???

Must I requalify at the range????

Is there a cresting of renewals now...could a renewal only class be organized where the instructor .....speed talks???

Just thinking out loud

This question comes up with some frequency...and there is no simple answer. The law as written essentially requires the same process to renew as was done when you took your original class.

Because each instructor is the same in one sense (must teach to the same standards) but also perhaps quite different in their interpretation and emphasis, most (some? many? all?) are reluctant to offer a MCPPA Lite Class to someone that took their initial class elsewhere as the instructor would not know what was taught before (and we all have egos that at times rears its head where we think that our curriulum is better than that SOB someone took your first class from! )

So, in such cases there is no real Lite version. But....in the same vein, if I were called by someone that I had initially trained, and it was just that person in class (or everyone else is also a former participant in my class), I would not feel the need to reinvent the wheel. I know that I could go faster with that person or group than I could with a class of totally new applicants as we have "been there...done that" before. Or said differently, reviewing a topic in most cases is faster than teaching a topic.

I personally think that I would be in violation of the statute (and not very ethical to my students) if I intentionally short-changed people on a renewal given that I essentially promised the State that I would teach a certain curriculum etc.

I also think there is some merit in taking a renewal class from someone other than your original instructor....getting different viewpoints and different nuances seems useful to me.

Bottom line ....if you were my prior class participant and the class was solely attended by similar people, yes...I can be faster. If there are other folks in the class, (at least for me) there is no fast track shortcut that I feel I can take and still be in compliance with the statute and my self-imposed ethical standard.

Actually, I have had folks call and say in essence ..."I have a permit already and just need you to sign off and give me a new certificate".... and I have to respond that it just does not work that way. Maybe it should, but that is not our current law.

The short form is: no.

A bit longer: the shooting qual is not optional; it's specifically required by the law. It would certainly be possible to cover the minimum other stuff required by the law in two hours, or less, in a classroom, and I wouldn't have any theoretical objection to doing that in a situation where I was confident that everybody in the class already really knew not just the minimum that the law required, but the other stuff that I think is important, and just needed a review that was more or less just going through the motions.

But . . . how would I know that in advance?

Add to that the following:

* The chairs at Joel's classes are not folding steel, but very nice hotel conference room upholstered chairs. There's coffee, too, and donuts. You will suffer in comfort.

* Even if everything Joel said above were true, what you actually retained from five years ago is a small fraction of what was taught. You will learn something in your renewal class that you had forgotten or never knew.

* It's once every five years. Deal with the fact that you will be investing one day for that five year permit. Amortized out, that's ten seconds a day.

Ok I took Joel's class in a VFW in Farmington i think....steel chairs.

Quick question Joel...exactly how long is the class? 4, 5 or 5 plus hours...including or not including qualification

It's never taken less than four hours -- with the exception of Express classes, which are mainly a review to make sure that the folks have learned from the book. (I'm very curious to see if -- or, perhaps, how much longer it would take -- it would work if the folks had read Michael Martin's book instead.)

Generally, not including the qualification, it takes about five hours, although there are days when it goes longer.

That's not ego -- that's fact.

Seriously, there's "different," and there's "shockingly shortchanged," which many students were for their initial training. We know 12smile wasn't, but many of my renewal students have shared by surprise and dismay about what they didn't learn in their previous permit class.

Yup. And, back when the renewal flurry first started, I was dismayed not just by what hadn't been covered, but what stuff preposterous amounts of time had been spent on, and by what had been taught that's just plain wrong.

There are about four instructors whose former students would, were I able to figure out how to do it, incur an "unlearning fee." And not just the guy who sells the carry permit badges.

And then there's the difference between taught, retained, and remembered 5 years later. It's generally a good idea to tickle the grey matter from time to time and going back to basics can often help.

You don't know what you don't know after all.

I certainly do -- I think my class is structured in a way that's better than anybody else's for me to teach; that's why I do it just that way, of course.

But different folks often have legitimately different styles. I know a couple of instructors who get the safety issues across by spending far more time than I'd care to on mechanical issues around gun handling. I'm not saying that they're wrong not because I'm unwilling to criticize, say, Cobb and Tom T -- who are two who do that -- because I don't think that they are. I think that's an utterly legitimate way to teach safety; I just think that I'm more effective by doing it the way I do than I would be by doing it that way.

(Just to be clear: I'd have no concern at all about sending somebody I cared about to either of their classes.)

And weasels and incompetents can also have differing styles from others, too. I know a perfectly nice guy who spends a preposterous amount of time in his class (two seconds would be excessive; he goes on and on) about the FBI NIBIN program; there's the bowling ball / floor polish guy; the one who teaches about the virtues of carry permit badges, and let's not get into all the shady practices, shall we?

Now, if somebody has managed to get their permit after taking a carry class where, say, they learned all about the NIBIN program, arranged to get a bowling ball refinished, played with a popup book, bought themselves a new carry permit badge, and then fired ten shots from a borrowed .22 at a target at 15 feet and passed because they managed to actually hit the target six times and didn't shoot anybody . . .

. . . the notion that it's going to take me less time than usual to put them through a carry class to my standards is one that I'd be more than a little skeptical about, particularly since the ones I've had take TCCarry as a renewal have, the more that they paid attention in their subpar original class, required more time to get through to.

The recovering tacticool bunch aren't bad, though; far as I can tell, at least many of the tacticool classes, not much was said and nothing was heard about such minor matters as the legal or practical issues around civilian carry, as they were all focused on the the real issues: the chance to go out and practice such everyday necessities as the speed rock, dynamic entry using the SUL grip, and learning to spout such phrases as "life is three-sixty!" "You'll default to your level of training!" and, of course, "Sully's looking awful good today...."

Strong language to follow.

The fact that this question is coming up is enough of a reason to require a full class for renawal. It shows that knowledge is perishable, and if you don't actively work to retain the knowledge and skills needed to carry a gun you will forget the nuances. I think we can all agree that the law here (being as good as it is) still has tricky areas.

*That being said, I do not endorse ANY training/age requirement for any free man to carry a firearm for self-defense.

I understand, but then there's this.

http://www.twincitiescarry.com/forum/vi ... highlight=

Yup, then there IS that. As I read it a off-duty cop put a gun on a table and his buddy picked it up and shot someone "accidentally."

A person trained to very high standards does something stupid, followed by someone (very) old doing something just as stupid.

So, tell me again where training and age helped prevent that <s>tragic accident</s> situation.

I'd argue that that only shows that you can't make anything foolproof, because the fools are far too ingenious, alas.

Undigressing, every time I hear about the bowling ball salesman, the various shady practices, and all, I do reassure myself that in states like SD and PA, where there's no training at all required, permit holders tend to stay out of trouble. My unwillingness to do a subpar short class may have more to do with my own pride than anything beyond that.

I do not think we should need permits to carry. Individuals that know I believe this had expected me to just sign off on them. When I would not they said I was being a hypocrite. I told that I will not do what I feel is a sub-par class. I believe if something is worth doing you must do it to best of your ability. I provide one of the best values in MN carry permit classes in the state. Just ask me.