Honing skills, to minimize the chance of that stray bullet hitting YOU when a bad guy causes a problem. I know that you must have not been around much violence in your life, and honestly I haven't either. The difference is that I KNOW that evil lurks about out in the real world in which I live my day to day life. With the economy being bad, unemployment being high, drug abuse being so high, the chances are greater by the minute that each of us will encounter someone wanting to rob us, or a business that we may be patronizing. Whether you want to believe it or not, there are people out there (that almost certainly acquired a firearm illegally) that will kill you just for a few dollars to get their next fix of meth, or whatever their drug of choice is. My wife works in a pharmacy and hears about all the pharmacies around our area getting robbed for what they sell by prescription. It scares me to death thinking about how likely it is that it could happen where she works. It's also no secret that drug abuse is pretty high in our area. She is now considering taking the class and learning more about firearms so that she can also protect herself in such an event. I'd like to see some stats on the number of guns out there vs. the number used in crimes, and how many of them are acquired illegally, vs those acquired legally. Common sense tells me that I know what the stats are like...