Performance Shooting?

I have been focused on performance shooting for almost 30 years now, and the training industry seems to be warming to the idea. Is that a good thing?

For over 40 years almost all high-level shooting technique and training has resulted from competition. IPSC kicked it off and then Steel Challenge, Bianchi Cup, Sportsmans Team Challenge and others contributed. Today, most of the highest-speed shooting comes from USPSA, but is it still relevant?

If you are an enthusiast who is going to put in a lot of time and effort to being the best shooter you can be, then I say have at it. If you have a job that requires you to carry a gun, more training and ability is better. If you are responsible for training other professionals, who are not going to put in the time and effort you do, maybe the latest and greatest techniques are not the way to go.

That may sound contradictory, or even deceptive, but I don’t think it is. I have absolute control over how much time and effort I spend on my shooting. I have almost no control over how much time and effort other people will spend. If my job is to train other professionals to win fights, and I know I only have a day or two a month to train them, I’m simply not going to have them work on the same things I work on. To be clear, I’m mostly talking about subtle differences, not major ones like weaver vs. isoceles, or something like that.

How much ammo and range time does a professional actually have each year? Looking at pistols, a basic LE position, in an agency that tries to do a decent job, usually looks like 12 actual shooting hours a year and maybe 800-1000 rounds. That’s actual time spent shooting, not how many days or hours are allotted for training. That 12-hour figure is based on 4 range days a year.

A good SWAT team is going to be closer to 72 hours a year of actual shooting (not counting CQB time and whatnot). That is going to look like somewhere around 5000 rounds a year. A top-level full-time unit may look more like four to six times that much. There are certainly exceptions that train more but they are EXCEPTIONS. Many actually train less than the numbers I have presented.

What does a high-level competition shooter look like in comparison? Anywhere from 8 hours a week to 30 hours or more. That’s 382 hours up to a whopping 1440 hours a year. Not including dry fire time. Ammo consumption from a low of about 50,000 rounds a year to four times that much. If you think these disparate groups of people are all best served with the same type of training…

An example or two may help here. My grip is a fluid thing. I know how much pressure to apply to get the results I want for a given shot. If I want to play with a relaxed shooting hand and a firm support hand, I can do so. The guy shooting 72 hours a year cannot do that. Instead, I would teach them to grip the gun about as firmly as they can, while still being able to articulate their trigger finger independently.

This may not get them to win a sporting championship, but that’s not what they are trying to do. It will get them solid hits at real-world times while minimizing gun issues. What do I mean by gun issues? Fights seem to feature way more malfunctions than range training does. Part of this is the training itself (subpar in many cases), and part of this is the fog of war. Friction and stress combine with lack of ability to cause normally reliable weapons to malfunction. That is a simplification, but it should do for our purposes. If they decide one day that they want to be better, then they can play around with other stuff on their own time.

If we have those same 72 hours to train, I’m not going to spend much time at all working on things like shooting in and out of a position. Can that be helpful in CQB or some other situation? Sure, but the return is not worth the time in this instance. Again, if they decide they want to get better at that sort of stuff, I’m happy to work on it with them offline.

When you have a limited amount of time and attention from your professional group, you focus on the basics. Things that have been proven to win fights from the beginning. Combat marksmanship featuring a solid grip, a decent stance, and the ability to make acceptable decisions under stress. How you get there is much less important than simply getting there. Getting there is hard enough but completely doable. Let’s not complicate it by trying to get them to shoot faster than they can get solid hits on real-world targets. That is best left to the individual who understands their limitations and wants to push them out. I assume that includes most of the readership here, but probably not the people we are responsible for training.

As TLG would say, “train hard and stay safe.”