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Comment from Caleb Giddings...
JTH:
Caleb made an interesting comment on Facebook today:
"Real talk: if you say you're serious about shooting and you don't own a timer, you're not."
Now, he's not talking about anything other than shooting skills with a handgun in this context (from the discussion he was in). So no, not about hunting, highpower, trap, skeet, or any long guns.
In addition, it wasn't about self-defense practice (which includes a lot of things in addition to handgun skills). He was talking straight-up about people who claim to be serious shooters, with serious handgun shooting skills.
Thoughts? Can you actually get to the point where you have serious handgun shooting skills without practicing (at least sometimes) with a timer? Do you know anyone who has?
If so, what do you consider "serious about shooting" and what level of skills do you consider serious?
newfalguy101:
Pretty difficult to improve without some means of measuring/quantify progress.
Les:
Isn't "Serious" a relative term?
bkent:
It depends on the context. A person could be serious about accuracy or having serious fun with a handgun, neither of which requires a timer.
When moving to the context of defensive shooting, time becomes a crucial element. The idea is to become faster at the draw, target acquisition, rounds on target, reloads and malfunction recovery. Off the top of my head the only part of defensive shooting that I can think of that isn't time dependent is holstering. The number one priority of holstering in my mind is safety.
Can a person be serious and improve without a timer, yes. For example, take the 3x5 drill.
http://pistol-training.com/drills/3x5-card-drill
It's not time dependent but we could introduce time to the drill by modifying the drill goals to include, 'as fast as possible.' Once at the point of being able to reliably slow fire 6 rounds into a hole at 3 yards, I could pick up the pace. I may not know the exact splits I'm getting but If I regularly practice and continue to push the speed of the drill from success to failure, eventually improvement will occur. One more thing on this, I'm pretty positive the world contained serious shooters that were seriously good at shooting before timers existed. :)
Having said that, I think timers are great. A timer is a tool that allows us to analyze and dissect our performance, making training more efficient. Maybe the goal is to put 5 rounds on a pie plate at 10 yards as fast as possible. In order to do that the timer can tell us if it's the draw to first shot, or our splits that need to be worked on first. The timer also gives us the ability to easily compare our performance with others and to set objective goals.
Phantom:
--- Quote from: Les on January 15, 2017, 02:23:16 PM ---Isn't "Serious" a relative term?
--- End quote ---
:o
It begs the bigger question ;) , Serious to him or Serious to Me ? :P
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