Hard-Edge Terrorists School Alert!

For the life of me I can't get the Washington Post page to come up, but you can find this story on The High Road here:

Schools Teach the Hard-Edged Lessons of Combat

By David A. Fahrenthold
Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, May 2, 2006;

MONTROSE, Colo. -- Marcus Klintmalm's two victims lay sprawled on the ground, their weapons released by hands gone limp. Spent cartridge casings, his and theirs, were everywhere -- testimony to two gunfights.

The shooting had stopped. It was time to debrief.

"Where did you hit him?" an instructor asked Klintmalm, referring to one of the assailants. The man was standing now, with a mark of orange wax from Klintmalm's "bullet" on his pants.

"In the hip," Klintmalm said.

If the fight had been real, that might not have been good enough, the instructor said. "He may not be dead."

Such are the hard-edged lessons taught here at Valhalla Shooting Club and Training Center, where students learn the basics of urban shootouts in a mock downtown. Special Forces soldiers train here for combat in Iraq, but Klintmalm is not a soldier: He is a 23-year-old aspiring business-school student from Dallas, who gave his current occupation as "ski bumming."

Valhalla is part of a lightly regulated industry thriving in a time of war overseas and terrorism fears at home. Around the country, there are at least 16 privately run schools that teach civilian students skills usually associated with SWAT teams or military combat -- close-in gunfighting, assault-rifle tactics, sniper shooting.

Well, hey! Here's my favorite quote from one of the wonks at the Brookings Institution:

Along with this growth have come concerns, voiced by academic observers and even some in the business, about the leeway afforded these schools to choose who and what they teach.

"You're talking about an entirely new industry that has a patchwork-quilt quality. . . . Some parts are regulated, and some parts are entirely unregulated," said Peter W. Singer, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution. He said that such a system would be "one thing if we're talking about clown schools," but "it's different when we're talking about private military schools."

Heaven knows anyone from Brookings knows all about "clown schools!" Anyhow, I'm off tomorrow to one of "16 privately run schools that teach civilian students skills usually associated with SWAT teams or military combat -- close-in gunfighting, assault-rifle tactics, sniper shooting.," in this case the SIGARMS Academy, for yet another three days of, as the article says, "training that would seem to have few, if any, applications in everyday life."

Well, depends on your everyday life, one supposes. I'm going to be working with Bruce Gray in a Friday Skill-Builder class wth my P226 9mm, then Saturday and Sunday we're filming his competition class for SHOOTING GALLERY.

I note that Brother Stephen Hunter, a graduate of some of those 16 schools and the Wash Post Pulitzer Prize-winning move critic is noticeably absent from this article. The writer was probably afraid to speak to him, lest Steve "go literary postal" all over him and pummel the poor man with adjectives. Or, god forbid, an adverb!