He grew up on “a steady diet of The A Team and Rambo cartoons” and with a dad who preferred to collect, not shoot, guns.
“I basically had to teach myself,” professional outdoor writer and tactical firearms expert Jorge Amselle told me. “I started with air rifles at summer camp when I was 12 or 13, and I read every issue of the NRA InSights magazine when I was old enough to get a job and pay for my own NRA membership. As soon as I could drive, I enlisted in a Civilian Marksmanship Program youth league and started with smallbore. When I was old enough to buy my own gun, I bought a Mossberg shotgun and joined the Izaak Walton League sportsmen’s club and basically just asked one of the old guys there to show me how to shoot. Every adult I asked for help or lessons was more than willing to help.”
Amselle served in the National Guard in Maryland, telling me, “Despite the military and taking the occasional lesson, I never realized how little I knew about firearms until I started working at NRA and became a certified instructor for shotgun and pistol. That was a real eye opener, and when I started teaching classes I was learning as much from the students as they were from me. Teaching beginners can be a real challenge in a good way, because they come up with questions you never would have thought of and that forces you to become a better instructor and really adjust your way of thinking.”
Amselle soon tailored his instruction to beginners, which included women and children.
“At first I was a bit surprised at how apprehensive and fearful some people were about shooting for the first time (and that includes men and women). It helped me to think about when I started learning to drive and how nervous I was then. I found that they key was to establish a very welcoming and low-stress environment with an emphasis on safety and fun,” he recalled.
He recommends smallbore pistols for most novice shooters, because of the low recoil and noise factor.
Occasionally, people ask him if he’ll instruct in Spanish, which he has.
“Obviously, most Hispanics in the U.S. speak English, but some may lack full comprehension and can benefit from having an instructor who can speak their language, and that’s a benefit both from a safety and a comfort aspect. I can only assume this would be the case for speakers of other languages wanting to learn about guns, shooting and firearms safety, as well. I think that gun shops and instructors that operate in communities with a large immigrant population would do themselves and their communities a great service by looking for at least one or two bilingual staffers and instructors,” Amselle said.
As a full time gun writer for Harris and NRA publications, Amselle attends training programs and tests guns on a regular basis.
“Shooting for me now is work—but it’s the best job in the world,” he said. “The thing I have always liked most about shooting is the feeling of accomplishment I get from hitting the target, which still happens infrequently enough even now to keep things interesting.”
Check out Amselle’s blog, Guns N’ Tacos, at gunsntacos.com.