imported post
joshmmm,
You certainly don't need to expose the guilty if you like, but I can assure you that TRRC's courses are not like that!
Also, you make no mention of a field day at the end; we of course include that. It's a 5- to 6-hour block on Saturday that includes a walkthrough simulated game trail, with shoot/no-shoot targets based on wrong species/sex or unsafe to shoot (e.g. animal on ridgeline), a survival lecture, actual shooting of rifle, shotgun, and handgun (the handgun was required this year, previous years it was optional), and a field-dressing lecture.
I was on the firing line last weekend, and walked about 30 students through their rifle firing. Virtually all of them did the chamber-empty check on picking up their rifle off the rack without any prompting from me; that's how well we drum it in during the classroom component. Ditto for mainting muzzle safety; no reminders or prompts were needed at all.
To top it off, this weekend's course had an extra bonus feature, at no extra cost: somewhere in Pierce County someone hit a small deer, and the responding wildlife officer knew we were doing the course and brought it by. So one of the instructors did a real live (err, dead, actually, but you know what I mean) field-dressing demo!
Finally, though there will be some variation from class to class, and instructor to instructor, the overall success of the program is revealed in the long, slow, steady decline in hunting-related accidents.