At what point do my experiences of over more than a decade as an instructor stop being anectodes and morph into data? Over the last six years Ive trained (and continue to do so) with some of the best instructors in the industry, three separate SWAT teams and a very motivated and skilled group of locals. Do I have to put it on a chart or have it published?
I have had personal conversations with Henk Iverson about this very topic. If you need credentials he has them. He has combat experience as a former member of the South African Military. Experience as a Police officer in South Africa and experience as a member of the South African Special Police Task Force (look it up, there is a great documentary on you-tube about these guys). He is currently under Govt contract instructing Special Forces and when we last spoke in the fall he was in the running to obtain the contract for Delta also.
He advises against mixing self defense and sport shooting. He feels the same way about sport fighting. Once a certain level of skill is reached there is no longer a benefit. So you are right, opinions vary, even among the "experts".
I could quote others that feel the same way but I dont have the keyboard stamina that you posess JT
So I`ll just copy and paste some links.
- Shawn
http://www.striketactical.com/newsletter/?id=20&archive=1WHAT DO YOU THINK ABOUT SPORT SHOOTING IN GENERAL?
Henk Iverson: Sport shooting is just that, SPORT. Sport shooting has its place in our industry. I come from a sport shooting background, having been an IPSC shooter most of my police officer days. I represented the South African Police Service National IPSC Team and have SA Police National Colors for both open class as well as limited class.
We all love to shoot and IPSC taught me to shoot under pressure, in front of crowds of onlookers, in front of tough competitors. IPSC taught me to control adrenalin and use it to my advantage, even to this day.
As long as a sport shooter does not CONFUSE sport and proper training. Sport shooters need to know how the body reacts to a "survival adrenal dump" in a real life gunfight. When survival mode kicks in, your sub-concious mind takes over the fight, meaning your body will react EXACTLY as it has been trained. If you use a red dot scoped, compensated 38 Super competition pistol and practice contantly with that equipment, neglecting your duty gun and holster, you might be in for a deadly surprize!
I do not teach sport shooting or sport shooting techniques. As my friend John Farnam often says, there is a huge difference between gamesmen and gunmen!
The "Range Effect" A Deadly Syndrome
By Ralph Mroz
The range is flat, open, unobstructed, well lit, safe, unidirectional, stress-free, and clear of distractions. The street, or wherever else you'll have to fight for your life, is not. Range targets are flat, static, facing head-on, quiet, non-personal, and non-threatening. The person trying to kill you isn't. So obviously, range training, no matter how "practical' or "tactical" is not real-world training. This is not a hypothesis, nor an opinion. It is a plain fact. You can shoot high-speed, low-drag drills all day against paper (or steel) targets and not touch the reality of a genuine encounter.
Three Stages:
We are stuck in the second of three stages of gun skills development. These three stages are:
Grounding in the basics:
Beginning fundamentals need to be developed at this first stage. Safety, basic gun handling, marksmanship, trigger control, sight alignment, etc. (No matter haw advanced we are, we can all use occasional brushing-up on these most basic of skills.)
Range drills - simple to complex:
Progressing from beginner-level bull-eye shooting in stage 1, it's common and prudent to move on to progressively more difficult range drills. Drills such as shooting from cover, while kneeling, while prone, weak-handed, while moving, one-handed, etc. It's here that shooting for speed as well as accuracy is introduced, as is shooting at multiple targets, decision targets, and so on.
Most of the training today-either police academy training and even at national-level schools, stop at this level. But while static shooting at targets can get ingeniously complex and difficult (look at any IPSC match), it's still just shooting at paper.
Force-on-force scenarios:
This next level of training, the place that we logically ought to be aiming for, is to replicate as closely as possible the fights we'll be in. This kind of training requires the use of real guns (or something very similar) modified to fire non-lethal projectiles. Here, we're talking about targets that think, move, and shoot back! (Admittedly, even in a simulated force-on-force exercise, we don't duplicate the level of stress you get in a real fight - afterall, we know we're not going to get killed. But it's the closest thing we have available now) Stage 1 is where we all start. Stage 2 is where we develop useful skills and instinctive motor movements under stress. Stage 3 is where we learn to actually fight.
Each stage has a point of diminishing returns. No one would argue that refining marksmanship, or breath control, or trigger control in stage 1 past a certain point is meaningless in terms of practical survival skills. What we seem to have forgotten is that there's a point of diminishing returns in stage 2, too. Shortening a little time between A-zone doubles, or shaving small fractions of a second off a reload, or working on minute decreases in draw time, is increasingly irrelevant past a certain point.
Once we've reached that point, it's time to move on to stage 3 training. But today, few trainers and students move beyond this static-target, intermediate stage of training. Indeed, many trainers today seem to actively promote their student's retardation by indefinitely perpetuating the stay at stage 2.
Feeding the Marks:
Why? There are cynical and not-cynical reasons. Certainly few students are really ready for force-on-force encounters. Their skills just aren't there yet, or they don't posses the other attributes necessary in a fight: fitness, strength, speed (of body movement), empty-hand skills (most real encounters occur within touching distance), and just plain fighting spirit. Also, this is the stage where the gamesmen live (some, such as IPSC master-class competitors, at awesomely high levels), and many shooters are primarily interested-whether they admit it or not-in playing games. For most people, games are much more comfortable and much more fun than replicating a real-life encounter. That's fine, but we shouldn't confuse skill at games with fighting skill.
From a cynical point-of-view, trainers have a vested interest in keeping their paying customers at stage 2. By making the drills here ever more complex, and by making arbitrary standards increasingly difficult - way past the point of any likely practical necessity - they insure a continued supply of students striving to meet these goals. If they then add the lure of their own self-anointed badge of mastership - usually some title including the words "Combat" and "Master" - then the student is even more driven to accomplish these artificial and arbitrary objectives - and to keep on paying to learn at the master's feet.
This is an old con - I've seen it for the last 25 years in the martial arts. Most martial arts schools keep their students busy by endlessly practicing street-useless “katas” and ineffective "advanced techniques". They grant their badge of mastership - the black belt - to people who've never punched much more than empty air. Very few do full contact/full speed sparring. This is, afterall, just good business; realistic training doesn't make the instructor look as perfect as empty-air drills, and scares the marks - I mean the students - away.
Do I wish I could break multiple bricks with my bare hands, or score a 10-yard A-zone double tap in one second from the holster? Sure. But I'd much rather have spent the training time necessary to accomplish those goals in the ring getting hit and developing a reliable left hook, or in a "fun"-house learning how to shoot thinking opponents before they "kill" me.
Are all trainers really this deceitful? No, but it is in their best interest to perpetuate - perhaps indefinitely - their students stay at stage 2. Not the least of the reasons is that so long as they can reliably out-perform their students on stage 2 artificial drills, they continue to look good and attract more students. By contrast, anyone who's ever participated in a force-on-force exercise knows that sometimes, no matter how good you are, you lose. Real life is harsh, and is mostly a matter of probabilities. I know that I can shave two-tenths of a second off my draw and fire time if I practice hard enough, but the only result I can be sure of if I pursue force-on-force training is that I'll lose somewhat less often.
The Range Effect:
All of this results in what I call the "range effect." That is, the creeping prevalence of artificial behaviors and skills into stage 2 training. This is exactly what happened in Japan to the old Budo martial arts. These were genuine inter-personal combat disciplines, with their training dictated by the realities of constant war. When peace came to Japan, these practical disciplines devolved into the "arts" we see today on every street corner, each as different as one sort of art can be from another, but all alike in their lack of realism.
We see the range effect in operation whenever a teacher insists that the "proper' way to execute a 180 degree turn is to pirouette on a toe, or when he (or she) explains in excruciating detail the exact way to perform a simple side-step. We see it when we are told that the "right" way to shoot is to isolate our upper bodies so as to eliminate any extraneous movement, and thus get the sights on target faster. (While that's true, and while I do get accurate shots off faster that way, if someone is trying to kill me, you can bet that my behind will be in motion!)
We see the range effect in an emphasis on stepping-back techniques as a response to close-in threats (see the chapter on Extremely Close Quarter Shooting video for the numerous fatal flaws in this technique.) We see it brought to ridiculous heights by subjecting stage 2 students to hostage targets in front of "shoot" targets. And so on, and so on. (If you think that you can really shoot a moving bad guy taking cover behind a moving hostage while you're moving, then try out for your local SWAT team as a designated entry marksman. It's irresponsible to even suggest this to anyone else! Hostage/bad-guy targets, which are perversely so much a main-stay of stage 2 training, have no place in the responsible training of most people.)
The range effect, the game mentality of too many shooters, the self-interest of trainers, and the humbling difficulty of truly realistic training, all combine to make stage 2 training self-perpetuating. But there's a faint trend developing in the right direction. We are starting to see some trainers move to force-on-force training. This will truly be the area to watch, explore, and research in the next few years. Lets just hope they don't invent some sort of competitive league - complete with a rule book and a board of directors - for it.
