I recently read online, from someone who should know better, that shooting at long distance would make close range shooting “easier” in a Real Fight™.
There are plenty of legitimate reasons to work on what many people consider long range for a pistol. Not only do we live in a world where >7yd shots are fairly common, but even >25yd shots with a pistol are necessary often enough that one probably should not leave it to chance. And of course, shooting at distance improves both marksmanship fundamentals and confidence, both of which are always a factor when pulling the trigger.
But it’s a fallacy — and a rather obvious one, at that — to believe that slow, calm, ultra-precise shooting skill is all you need when things are closer and faster. A demo I regularly do in class involves timing myself to a precise “eyeball shot” on a target at 7yd… and then seeing how many hits I can get into an 8″ circle in the same amount of time. It’s quite a few. And all else being equal, getting shot multiple times in the upper chest will probably put most people off their “eyeball shot” game a bit, don’t you think?
Long range pistol shooting is unquestionably valuable and should be part of everyone’s practice routine. But be careful not to kid yourself into thinking that 50yd head shots (with no time limit) are comparable to the reality and speed of getting good hits at maximum speed at closer distances, or that simply getting more and more accurate at longer and longer distances will somehow translate into “easier” shots under stress and time pressure up close.
Train hard & stay safe! ToddG
Slightly off topic, but you made me think of it. I’ve often thought that when we think of a gun as a defensive weapon, it can really be used two different ways.
a) As, essentially, a long melee weapon. In the standard close range surprise attack “Most shootings happen at <7 yards" type of point and shoot as fast as you can. This sort of defensive use requires almost no training to be effective, although you can drastically increase its effectiveness with practice drawing from concealment and bill drills and such.
b) As an actual ranged weapon. This is where it is hard to use a handgun without training. In a stress situation and rapid fire it's pretty easy to miss someone at 30 feet when they're charging or shooting at you.
I actually think this is where a lot of the disconnect between the "everyone should have a gun even if they don't practice" and the "it's pointless to own a gun if you don't train" people comes from. For use A, any gun is a better situation than no gun, and practically anybody can shoot well enough to do some good. In situation B, you probably are a bit more of a danger to whatever is behind the target than you actually are to the target.
What about training at long range for speed? So for example, trying to be able to draw to an 8 inch circle from concealment in less than 2 seconds at 25 yards – I have about 75% success with that drill using standard IDPA gear. I find from there that if I reel the target in to 7, all of a sudden it’s really easy to draw to that target and get a hit at 7 yards in under 1.5 seconds.
caleb — training for speed at distance is certainly good. So is training for pure marksmanship at distance. So is training for pure marksmanship at closer ranges. So is training for accuracy at speed at closer distances. Etc. It’s all got application and value. But we just have to understand that one doesn’t automatically deliver huge performance increases in another. We’d never say that blind fast-as-you-can up close splits are likely to help bullseye accuracy at 25yd, yet some people seem hellbent on convincing themselves (and others) that 25yd bullseye is the best way to improve those up close splits…
Do sprinters run marathons to improve their 100m times?
Ah, well that’s just silly. I could see an argument for saying that practicing splits on low probability targets will help you get faster at high prob targets, but just saying that 25 yard bullseye practice will make you better at anything other than 25 yard bullseye shooting seems nonsensical.
I wouldn’t go that far. Working on your slow marksmanship at 25 (or 50, or 100) certainly helps you develop better trigger control… and no one has ever complained about having too good trigger control!
But you aren’t really learning the same type of visual control that is needed to get fast hits. Trying to shoot with a perfect sight picture for every shot is, by definition, antithetical to “see what you need to see” when you can make do with worse than perfect in the visual department.
Agree with Todd 3000%
@Tom – in fact, physical training works exactly opposite of that. Running marathons will do nothing to improve your sprint speed (in fact, it will probably make your sprints slower). Running sprints, however, has potential to improve your marathon (assuming you have the ability to run a marathon in the first place).
I think the root of much of this is confusion about the nature of shooting. It’s not really an either/or proposition…the circumstances you face will dictate the shot you have to take whether that is in a match or a gunfight. A local PD ran a little FOF active shooter scenario recently and in literally a matter of a few seconds the shot needed to solve the “problem” changed from a very large human target at a few feet to someone exposing the bare minimum of himself around a corner at over 70 feet.
The skilled shooter can read from the circumstances what is required to make the hit he/she needs to make and then executes behind the sights and the trigger to deliver.
As Todd mentioned, if I gain nothing else but confidence from 25 yard bullseye then I’ve done myself a tremendous favor. I have a little theory that people are often reluctant to use lethal force even when they are perfectly justified in doing so because they don’t have confidence in the tool on their belt as a problem solver. If I develop confidence in my ability to use the pistol to solve a problem that requires a pistol, I’m setting myself up for success even if I never encounter a shooting problem that requires the precision of hitting a 2″ circle at 25 yards.
I am blessed to be able to do far more FoF than the average guy. In doing some of this, such as barricade drills, I note that what I often get to shoot during these “gunfights” is small targets, often heads/hands/feet, that are fleeting (hit it now or it’s going to gone in a second or two) at close to moderate range.
Shooting full value targets at close range is a breeze by comparison.
IMHO dot drills are a good thing to be good at.
Practicing at long range has its merits, not the least of which is actually getting dope on how your gun hits at different distances. But it’s markedly different from shooting fast up close. Anyone who says differently more than likely can’t shoot with speed at near to medium targets.
Chuck — Agreed 100%. Getting fast hits on low-probability targets is an important skill. Assuming that we’ll always have giant immobile threats to deal with is probably somewhat unrealistic, eh?
Andy — Agreed to an extent. Most folks don’t whip out their carry/duty ammo when it comes time to shoot at long range. As such, the “dope” is wrong. When I’ve been to places where we could shoot at long (>100yd) range with a pistol, I always run back to the range bag and load up a couple mags of the JHP-of-the-day.
Tom Givens made the point at a recent training class, that “more target (close target) equals less time, less target (requires) more time”.
Seems to reinforce Todd’s remarks…
@Dave Re, that was kind of my point. Not everything in the firearms world will parallel something else, but it seems like people really try to make up their own shit just to sell it.
@Tom – “it seems like people really try to make up their own shit just to sell it.” Man, isn’t that the truth?
TCinVA sums it all up here pretty well: “The skilled shooter can read from the circumstances what is required to make the hit he/she needs to make and then executes behind the sights and the trigger to deliver.” You get to that point by having practiced *everything* you might possibly be presented with, and then pushing somewhat beyond those boundaries, too.
And I agree with Chuck and Todd that practicing solely on big, easy targets is a losing proposition, long term (for competition *or* combat). The point that Todd was making to Caleb is that the opposite is *also* true. Well rounded practice means from contact to 50+ meters, on full torsos down to 1-2″ targets – and everything in between.
Note also that “full torso” doesn’t mean that you’re happy with hits anywhere on the torso – it means you have to be discerning about your sight picture, even when faced with a large target surface area, cause we’re really talking about an 8″ circle in the “chest” and a 6″ (or smaller) square in the “head” for where we want things to end up…
DaveRe – thanks for all the cool Crossfit stuff! The last vid, on the reload, was pretty cool.
The long and short of it is that there should be no stone left unturned as you develop…
My track coach (I was a sprinter in my senior year of HS) always told us that we “train fast to be fast” and that “if we trained slow, we’d be slow” (that was before he made us go run 8 400m sprints in under 60 sec each). I hated and loved that guy. The truth is, if we had just jogged around the track for a couple of hours we would have been able to run faster. However, we would not have been able to run fast enough. My soccer coach imparted that “Practice doesn’t make perfect, perfect practice makes perfect.” The idea these two men had was to tailor the practice to what we were practicing for.
With 9 years of teaching FoF training for a moderate size PD (340 officers) along with many other firearms classes we helped to develope over the years reinforces what has been discussed here. You can’t teach “one” skill or “one” way to do things. You must give your students a variety of situations to defeat, and practice from all distances and all speeds so they can develope confidence in their skills. We have gone from 3″ dots at 15 yards to the plate rack as fast as you can shoot in the same training. Using cover, moving while shooting at a variety of distances so the student can see how they perform under a variety of conditions. Those who care wanted more and more of that type of training. It has paid off in a couple of our officer involved shootings.
When we get stuck on the “one” way to do things, we hurt our students. One particular instructor in “point shooting” had some valid points, but got stuck on this was the only thing to teach. That didn’t go over very well. Getting someone to spend the time to master the skills needed to shoot is the hardest thing we had to overcome. If they didn’t want to learn, they wouldn’t despite our best efforts. Good discussions here.