Input on Current Project

[John Hearne]

Several months ago, I was taking Ken Hackathorn's Intermediate and Advanced Handgun class. Something that Ken said has stuck with me and I was trying to pin down some specifics. Ken said that there are four kinds of people when it comes to guns - the incompetent, the competent, the good, and the great. Ken said that in order to win armed encounters, you don't need to be great but you do need to be good. His point seemed to be that the vast majority of armed combatants were incompetent some were competent but that these probably consisted of 95% of the gun carrying population (my numbers not his IIRC). His point seemed to be that if one was "good" you were better than 95% of the threats you'd likely face. I've been wondering for some time where the line between competent (is mostly safe, know the fundamentals of marksmanship but has to work hard to apply them, etc) and good lies. In other words, at what point are your skills good enough to carry you through most situations.

At this point I'm soliciting what benchmarks or standards you use to distinguish the various levels of competence. I'm a fairly visual person and came up with the chart below to throw out some of my ideas on the subject. I'd like to see as many benchmarks as possible and would be fascinated/amazed if there was some consensus.

This is what I came up with, what do you think:
http://i1202.photobucket.com/albums/bb374/ajp3jeh/Gun%20Stuff/chartv1_zps817694f7.jpg (http://s1202.photobucket.com/user/ajp3jeh/media/Gun%20Stuff/chartv1_zps817694f7.jpg.html)

I'd like to focus on reality over theory so for instance, in my mind, the person who just barely passes your typical POST qualification may not even be competent but they may be on the high side of incompetent. A shooter capable of cleaning (shooting 100%) a typical POST is probably "good" but not necessarily "great."

[TheTrevor]

I'd put 7-sec FAST times into "good" territory, and 5-sec times halfway into "great".

I think passing the POST qual should at least get you to the low side of "competent".

I'm not Hack but I think there's a distinction to be made between incompetent (i.e. dangerous to self, others) vs not competent (needs improvement but is aware of such). Too nuanced a distinction when speaking to a class, but I certainly consider those to be separate categories, i.e. dangerous idiot vs beginner.

[JodyH]

USPSA-A should be borderline great.
Definitely higher than IDPA expert.

[orionz06]

I am not so sure I would rank IDPA Master as high as a 5.0 FAST, perhaps around the 6.0 FAST.

[YVK]

John, the problem I have with this is using a short format static tests like FAST and more comprehensive assessments like classifications in the same scale.

And there is absolutely no way USPSA A class is lower than sub-6.0 FAST.
A general consensus is that USPSA A is higher than IDPA Master, a comparison being limited by lack of realistic rating above the IDPA M class.

[TheTrevor]

John, the problem I have with this is using a short format static tests like FAST and more comprehensive assessments like classifications in the same scale.

100% agree on that point. The ability to shoot a 4.99-second FAST has only the sketchiest relationship to the skills required to make USPSA A or Master.

[gringop]

I'm gonna add all 3 Defore pistol tests in the low Great category.
http://www.kyledefoor.com/2012/02/defoor-shooting-tests.html

The FBI PQC 80% in the Good, 100% in the Great.

The 10-8 test, not sure how to rank it, I suck even in the 8 second range.

I am seeing multiple POST tests online depending on the state. Is there a definitive one that is used?

I agree that the quick and dirty FAST is not as comprehensive as the others. Probably some correlation but not sure how much.

And just to stir things up, where is the Combat Master?:p

Gringop

[NETim]

Well, this is certainly sobering.

Oh well. I'll continue to carry. :)

[Casual Friday]

Well, this is certainly sobering.

Oh well. I'll continue to carry. :)

I hear ya brother. Time to hit the range...

[NETim]

I hear ya brother. Time to hit the range...

'Course terms like "competent" are a matter of perspective. At my little local club, I'm a near great 'cause very few take handgunning as seriously as I do but if I get to a club near large cities (or even mid-sized ones), I'm very much middle of the pack. :(

I can consistently break 10 seconds on the FAST drill (with occasional gusts to 8 something), so yeah, I'm not very good in the overall scheme of things.

But still, it's fun trying, competing and gratifying to see even small improvements here 'n there.

[Redhat]

Not to state what may be the obvious, but have you considered asking Ken Hackathorn what he thinks qualifies someone as "Good"? Is this only grading shooting (weapons handling, accuracy and speed..etc) or are other skills beyond shooting like movement, decision making and general tactics to be included?

[GJM]

Threshold of IDPA master = B class USPSA

Consider Rogers Basic, Int and Advanced

First two shots of the FAST is very relevant and predictive. The rest is mostly a reloading exercise. If you need a slide lock reload for real, in a hi cap world, you have likely made a big mistake or are in a world of hurt. Also best FAST or average FAST time?

Should long gun competency factor in?

I think USPSA Classifier performance is more relevant, as most fights aren't 42 rounds with footwork as important as shooting.

[John Hearne]

First, thanks for all of the input, this is exactly what I was looking for.

I fully recognize that there is more to winning a gunfight/armed confrontation than simple pistol skills. I would offer that a certain level of pistol skill is a necessary per-requisite for winning (as opposed to surviving) such a contact. What I am trying to do at this time is look just at the skill side of the equation. At what point are your skills good enough that they won't be the principle weakness in your performance? At what point might you be "good enough" and start to spend limited training resources on other important aspects?

When I did the first version of the chart I was worried that people would become fixated on arguing the relative values of certain data points. I am some what familiar with the IDPA world but not so much with the USPSA world and their rankings. I have notes on what Ken considered good enough but I wanted to look at alternate standards. I am less concerned about where USPSA-A is in relation to IDPA-Master than whether they are good or great. With that said, I think that most of us recognize gradations of performance once you're "good."

The other issue that rears its head is that some of these metrics are based on speed over accuracy. I've heard of lots of higher level USPSA shooters that couldn't reliably make the head shots on the FAST or shoot bullseye tests well.

I get the concerns about using a variety of metrics, some short and some long, to measure but I think there is still some relevance if the shorter metric is "legit." By that I mean shooting a sub 6 second FAST once doesn't matter. If you show up at the range and shoot the FAST three times cold and consistently average less than 6 seconds then that matters. Similarly with "paper Masters" or "paper GM's." We're talking about people whose level of skill consistently meets that standard. I would argue that some of the shorter courses might be best evaluated in combination with another. For instance, if you can pass the FAM qual (speed) and shoot a passing score on the FBI Bullseye, you'll definitely be "good."

Regarding which "POST" course, I don't think it matters much. State POST courses are written so that passing can be accomplished by the most mediocre of institutional shooters. I've seen plenty of "qualified" officers who I don't think of as passing the threshold for competent.

I've got Ken's ideas on what "good" is as he does provide that input during class and I am a compulsive note taker. For instance, I think he expects you to pass his head standards 7/9 to be good enough. Ken has other standards that he offers but they are different. For instance, his El Pres has a random reload in it which really increases the typical time. With that said, I'm not just worried about what Ken says is good enough but what the group thinks is good enough.

GJM - I thought hard about including Rogers but those measures can't be replicated by the average person without their own Rogers Range. With that said where do the Rogers rankings rate. My thoughts are passing=competent, Intermediate=Good, and Advanced=Great but I'm open to discussion.

[JHC]

I have notes on what Ken considered good enough but I wanted to look at alternate standards.

Based on my Advanced Tac Pistol course with him and our conversations; now a couple years old; I sense you are tracking to a tougher standard than his. ;)

[GJM]

GJM - I thought hard about including Rogers but those measures can't be replicated by the average person without their own Rogers Range. With that said where do the Rogers rankings rate. My thoughts are passing=competent, Intermediate=Good, and Advanced=Great but I'm open to discussion.

Perhaps Rogers time standards, as they distribute on their handout, can be incorporated.

Depending on whether you subscribe to the Rogers philosophy, that one hand skills can be quite necessary in many fights, you would either believe Rogers level one hand skills are very necessary or a diversion of training that could be better spent elsewhere.

Someone that can consistently shoot 70-89, or basic on the Rogers school test, is a very solid shooter with two hands, left and right hand only. My understanding is that Robbie Leatham is the only person, in the entire history of Rogers, to shoot at least 120/125 first time through the school test.

[jlw]

Interesting topic!!

My opinion on POST courses is that at best they can rate "competent". The generous par times allow for someone with a decent skill set to take their time and get solid hits versus some of the other standards where you have to push a balance between speed and accuracy.

I have no experience with USPSA standards as I have never played that game, but based on some people I know who cross over,
A-class seems to be somewhat higher skilled than IDPA/EX.

---

The chart puts me in the "good" category:

- On the IDPA classifier, my scores are in the 102-104 range with an M&P45 thus EX in all three pistol divisions.

- I typically turn in a mix of 100s/99.3s (one 8 point hit) on the GA POST course; I shot a 100 on the old FBI this past year, and dropped two support hand shots from 25 on the AL POST course.

- From my duty gear, I have run the FAST by another name on an IALEFI-Q (https://letargets.com/estylez_item.aspx?item=IALEFI-Q) clean in 4.85 seconds, but the head scoring range is more generous than a 3x5 card.. That was cold. I later ran it in 3.89 with one dropped head shot. I was pushing too hard on the second run trying to compete directly with Lund. I'm guess around 6.0-6.5 on the actual FAST from concealment when accounting for the smaller head shot target and less practice from concealment versus duty gear.

I have twice gotten an "Advanced" rating on a system similar to a Rogers range, but people I know who have attended both tell me the Rogers course runs a little faster.

I have yet to run the FAM, but hope to do so soon.

At best I figure I am on the lower side of "good".

[Mr_White]

Really cool thread, John. I have often thought along these same lines.

I'm all for comparing different standards and declarations of skill level from different venues and I find it very interesting to do so, but I personally am a little hesitant to say that Incompetents will die, and the Competent, the Good, or the Great will live/survive/prevail, etc. I think there is something to the argument that people who we in the dedicated training communities might find quite incompetent, frequently prevail. No data to back that up, but HH's arguments have influenced me on that point. Not that it's going to stop me from training and carrying the way I do.

There are definitely confounding factors in some of the skill comparisons on your chart. FAST in class is stiff because of pressure conditions and few chances. FAST in practice is inherently easier. IDPA and USPSA rankings are only achieved under match conditions under the attendant stress and pressure.

USPSA rankings are one that I think bears some additional consideration. I don't believe it is necessarily correct to say that having a given USPSA ranking means the competitor consistently shoots at that level. Because of the way the classification system works (in this case, throwing out classifier scores more than 5% below a person's current classification), a USPSA shooter might slowly claw their way up the classification ranks, but along the way can post many bad scores. USPSA classification tests heights reached much more than consistency, IMHO.

And it is true that a given classification in USPSA can reflect that a person is particularly fast, or particularly accurate, but not the other - at least for a ways up the rankings. As the rankings get higher, there is no way out of being very fast and very accurate. Shooting fast without accuracy only gets you so far. Shooting at a pace where you are guaranteeing the hits only gets you so far (it got me to B class initially.) Even though I am ambivalent about the practice of throwing out bad classification scores, I personally find USPSA ranking one of the more significant metrics that you are considering, based on my experience of how difficult it is to post a very high score on USPSA Classifiers.

Some specifics with me as an example:

When I could shoot Master on the IDPA Classifier on demand in practice (8x.xx), I barely squeaked into B class in USPSA. As I was attaining B class in USPSA, I won the FAST coin in class with TLG, with times of 4.67 and 4.58, IIRC. The week before that I shot a 3.62 cold FAST in practice. Around that time, I had been posting consistent 290 + scores on the Hackathorn Standards, and around 250 on the Manly Man Hackathorn Standards. I could shoot a sub-5 Triple Nickel, a pretty consistent sub-2 Bill Drill and ~1.5 Mozambique. El Prez, as shot on the IPDA Classifier was about 7 seconds I think.

Some specific suggestions with regard to the skill comparisons on the chart:

I'd put USPSA C class about even with maxing POST Quals (of course I am thinking of the one used here in Oregon, the PQC-1, since that's the one I'm most familiar with.)

I would say that IDPA Master is approximately low B class in USPSA, and I am guessing might correspond to being able to shoot a 5-ish second FAST. I tend to think passing the old FAM qual is somewhere near here.

I'd put USPSA class A at the upper end of Good or lowest end of Great, I'd put USPSA class M a bit into Great, and USPSA GM class halfway up Great, to leave room for National Champion and contender level shooters at the upper end of Great.

I'd put USPSA C class near the bottom end of Good.

Based on the comparative FASTs of Sevigny's official record, Vogel's performance in winning his FAST coin, and Vogel and Stoeger's back-and-forth warring runs on video, I'd put a sub-4 FAST a small distance into the Great category, and a FAST run in the low 3s much further into the Great category. Sub-3 FAST would be like a limit of human performance run that only the very best shooters in the world might reach.

I would call USPSA D-class roughly equivalent to passing POST/state LE Quals.

I think I'd say that passing the Defoor Pistol Test #1 is about B class in USPSA and I'd call passing the Defoor Pistol Test #1 with halved PAR times to be GM level shooting.

Based on what I've seen shooting USPSA and GSSF, I'd call a sub-60 score from GSSF the level of pure shooting of a USPSA B or A class shooter, a sub-50 score from GSSF the level of pure shooting of an accurate M or GM in USPSA, and I'd call a low 40s score in GSSF approximately the pure shooting of a national-level big dog GM in USPSA.

This is all very rough since the parameters and conditions can be so different for these different metrics, and different shooters attain different rankings using different personal strengths and weaknesses, which can lead to odd combinations, like a GM who can't shoot a sub-5 clean FAST, or an IDPA Master who is C-class in USPSA, or a USPSA B who is really fast but doesn't do well in IDPA due to accuracy issues or maybe shoots a 10 second FAST because of the wicked accuracy penalties.

[taadski]

I'll add a couple of perspective points:

(1) I know a ton of folks that shoot our (Colorado) POST tests clean over and over but can't come close to shooting a 7 second clean FAST test on demand.

(2) Most solid B class USPSA shooters, IME, can shoot IDPA Master level, even with the newly implemented time standards.

(3) While USPSA classifiers vary with regard to their accuracy requirements, the standard for an A class run generally FAR exceeds what's required of the IDPA Master class standard.

(4) As already noted, I think one needs to look at consistent capability (3 clean in a row, cold type "consistent capability") as opposed to any "one time" hail mary type performance. USPSA classifiers cater to the "hero or zero" type mentality which doesn't necessarily jive with that. The IDPA classifier less so because of its length, but you still only need to shoot it once at a given level to gain that classification.

The whole "paper GM" or "paper Master" distinction generally refers more to folks who practice the classifiers and "stand and shoot" skills to a level higher than their respective ability in field courses and actual matches.


t

[Mr_White]

Here's another chart (not mine) that's been floating around for a while that attempts to make a similar comparison:

http://farm8.staticflickr.com/7397/12090279186_0468a4949d_b.jpg (http://www.flickr.com/photos/52790396@N08/12090279186/) Skills_zps102fc8f7 (http://www.flickr.com/photos/52790396@N08/12090279186/) by OrigamiAK (http://www.flickr.com/people/52790396@N08/), on Flickr

[jlw]

Based on what I've seen shooting USPSA and GSSF, I'd call a sub-60 score from GSSF the level of pure shooting of a USPSA B or A class shooter, a sub-50 score from GSSF the level of pure shooting of an accurate M or GM in USPSA, and I'd call a low 40s score in GSSF approximately the pure shooting of a national-level big dog GM in USPSA.



David Knight is usually in the low 40s in GSSF and a multiple times over Matchmeister. He has a Rogers Advanced pin, and he was the top shooter in his Rogers class. He has also won some steel championships.

I had the honor of running him though the IDPA classifier. He shot an an 88.xx. This was his first go at classifying in IDPA.

[Surf]

Interesting thread. I know that the thread is talking about the component of perhaps shooting skills sets, but I will also note that the mindset, training of tactics and practice / experience in those areas are the other key and often times more important skills. I am sure most here are aware of that but I am only trying to make sure that there is no room for interpretation on the point that I believe that solid fundamentals and skill sets while extremely important are but only 1 component and may or may not be the most important deciding factor in any one situation. That would be another discussion however and keeping the focus within what appears to be the scope of the thread, for discussion sake I do find this component to be very interesting in how not only I but how others might look at it.

I fall into that camp where I am very critical of my own performance, which like many pushes us to put in a lot of hard work and effort to strive to become more competent and proficient at whatever we choose to do. This of course applies to my own performance with shooting skill sets. A measuring stick is a viable way to track performance and to find out what works and what does not, so in that sense I am also interested. In the past I have had a habit of running many drills as a way as to measure or track performance. I was also known to run drills or courses of fire for others as a validation or to get my feedback. The thing that I am lacking on would be the alphabet soup stuff discussed in this thread as I do not shoot organized competition and have no experience with the IDPA or USPSA classifiers as an example. The things I can relate to on the example given in the original chart would be the FAST, FAM qual and the Hack Head drill if that is the 10 rounds, 10 yards, 10 sec drill. Other than that I have no other measuring stick to gauge feedback.

So if I go off of my own limited experience with items on the list, or from my own personal feelings, I come to this.....

I can pretty consistently average sub 5's on the FAST following the original rules. The FAM and the Hack Head Drill is easy enough. Having said that I don't think my sub 5's on the FAST would put me in the excellent range and I think the FAM and the Hack head shot should be lower on the scale. The POST quals can be a joke. The all in type of POST quals have huge hit zones or the entire silhouette. The points scoring types still have large full scoring hit zones and all seem to have forgiving times. With that in mind say a 25 round all in the silhouette POST qual IMO would indeed be bordering on incompetent / competent depending on speed and shot placement, but that is not credited in that qual. So a shooter could shoot all head shots in a faster time and pass the same as someone shooting buckshot on the silhouette just making the time limit, so that is a difficult meter to gauge competency. Now for a clean score on a down scored POST qual is still not overly complicated and I might want to bump that down a bit further or closer to the Good / Competent borderline. Of course even with shrunken hit zones you might have an excellent shooter absolutely smoke the qual with speed, small precision and accuracy.

As for the USPSA / IDPA classifications, I am not doubting their validity as a measuring stick, I just don't have the experience there. I will however note that I did some poking around online for the courses of fire and it is no big surprise to find as an example that the Hackathorn Standards, 10-8, Redback One type of standard drills mirror many of those stages found in the IDPA classifier. The USPSA is complicated for my mind to relate to in the brief couple of minutes I scanned over it. I might set up the IDPA classifier as it is simple enough to set up and perform. Maybe I will have more insight on the scale proposed if I can add more components or data points to make the comparison more fair. Or maybe I am just overly critical or demanding of my own performance and that unfairly skews my points of view? Regardless interesting topic and one I look forward to others input.

[Mr_White]

Interesting thread. I know that the thread is talking about the component of perhaps shooting skills sets, but I will also note that the mindset, training of tactics and practice / experience in those areas are the other key and often times more important skills. I am sure most here are aware of that but I am only trying to make sure that there is no room for interpretation on the point that I believe that solid fundamentals and skill sets while extremely important are but only 1 component and may or may not be the most important deciding factor in any one situation. That would be another discussion however and keeping the focus within what appears to be the scope of the thread, for discussion sake I do find this component to be very interesting in how not only I but how others might look at it.

That's very true, and is the reason I am reluctant to assign the Incompetent, Competent, Good, and Great labels as declarations of likelihood of gunfight domination by a given practitioner. I think it's a lot less of a stretch to compare different drills, tests, standards, and classifications as they relate to skills only. And I still find that highly interesting.


I might set up the IDPA classifier as it is simple enough to set up and perform.

I'd really encourage you to do that. The IDPA Classifier is a long, relatively broad (not comprehensive) test of skill. It's great to use as an ongoing benchmark over a long period of time. And it's a more precise measuring tool than anything with PAR times, since it's open-ended.

[KevinB]

I'd argue most of the gun game classifiers are utterly not relevant as most folks run them in game gear - not gunfighting gear.

As well as SURF mentioned how can you classify experience?

I'm sorry but I see this as an exercise in futility that will end up in a Johnson measuring contest between followers of different dogma.

I'm not trying to justify my own mediocrity in this, I'm generally not a fast guy with a pistol, but I also have never shot anyone I did not want to ;)

[Mr_White]

I'd argue most of the gun game classifiers are utterly not relevant as most folks run them in game gear - not gunfighting gear.

That is a fair point at least some of the time. I've seen a range of approaches and results among some different shooters. Two GMs I know in my area are working cops. They do really well in USPSA with game gear, and also really well in GSSF with stock Glocks. They are clearly going to be very skilled with their duty guns. One of them occasionally shoots his duty gear in USPSA. I don't know what or if they carry off-duty. I've seen another high level Open shooter tank it big time in GSSF. I feel your point but confine my hangup about it to myself. Your point is why I pretty obstinately stick with my carry gear and concealment in USPSA, even though it's a real boneheaded way to play the game. Bottom line is that I enjoy it that way and I think I am subjecting myself to a beneficial level of pressure and testing, and that's why I won't give it up.


I'm sorry but I see this as an exercise in futility that will end up in a Johnson measuring contest between followers of different dogma.

Could be, with the wrong people discussing it. But I always find it interesting to compare the different metrics used to gauge a shooter's skill, since none of them are a complete measure unto themselves. I think I'd have a much more accurate picture of a shooter's skills if I knew his USPSA and IDPA classifications, GSSF scores, and FAST scores, for example, than if I only know one of those.

[GJM]

I think there are three important factors:

1) Skill at arms. Defined by USPSA, FAST or whatever. On the issue of gear, I think a really good shooter will be a good shooter, regardless of what holster he has on.

2) Mindset/tactical preparation. Much of what Kevin/Surf are referring to by "experience."

3) Preparation, as in do they have any gun, and ideally a suitable one.

I think it is human nature to highly value what we are good at, and try to minimize or discount where we are deficient. This might lead the USPSA GM to think their skill at arms trumps points two and three above, and the stone cold killer to accept being less proficient at skill at arms. At the end of the day, I think all will agree the stone cold killer, with GM skills, carrying the right hardware is most theoretically prepared.

[orionz06]

I think there are three important factors:

1) Skill at arms. Defined by USPSA, FAST or whatever. On the issue of gear, I think a really good shooter will be a good shooter, regardless of what holster he has on.

2) Mindset/tactical preparation. Much of what Kevin/Surf are referring to by "experience."

3) Preparation, as in do they have any gun, and ideally a suitable one.

I think it is human nature to highly value what we are good at, and try to minimize or discount where we are deficient. This might lead the USPSA GM to think their skill at arms trumps points two and three above, and the stone cold killer to accept being less proficient at skill at arms. At the end of the day, I think all will agree the stone cold killer, with GM skills, carrying the right hardware is most theoretically prepared.

And really only one can be quantified and evaluated objectively.

[JSGlock34]

Very interesting project. Just a thought, but instead of an individual FAST (which opens the question of 'best' vs. 'average') why not try to align the KSTG classifier (which is based on the FAST) with the chart?


SLG and I spent a while today discussing the Classification system.

Originally, we vacillated between five or six seconds as the standard for Master, which would translate into either fifteen or eighteen seconds as the bar to reach for Master class in the Classifier (which is the F.A.S.T. three times in a row). We finally settled on five seconds back then because we assumed as the sport grew more people would "perfect" the F.A.S.T. and getting sub-5 clean runs would become commonplace among better shooters.

Over the past few years of teaching, I've seen plenty of dedicated shooters who were highly motivated to win a coin (which requires just two out of three runs to be sub-5 and clean)... very, very few of them have succeeded. As such, the idea of having the bar at 15 seconds seemed perhaps a bit too high.

So we're considering bringing it back to 18 seconds. All of the other times flow from there. Revolver Master is just one extra second per run for the reload, so it would go from 18 seconds to 21 seconds. "A" is 125% of "Master," "B" is 130% of "A," and "C" is 140% of "B." So the new scheme would look like this:




Semiauto
Revolver


Master
18.00 seconds or less
21.00 seconds or less


A class
18.01 - 22.50 seconds
21.01 - 26.25 seconds


B class
22.51 - 29.25 seconds
26.26 - 34.13 seconds


C class
29.26 - 40.95 seconds
34.14 - 47.78 seconds


D class
40.96 seconds or more
47.79 seconds or more



Alternatively, in the spirit of the head-to-head nature of the rules, with the additional second we're giving semiautos at the Master level, we could just eliminate the distinction between semi and revo in the classification system. Everyone, regardless of gun, would classify using the semiauto numbers above.

If the game were ever to grow enough that there was a glut of Master class shooters of widely varying skill level at the top, we can easily create a GM-type classification and use 15.00 seconds as that limit.

Taking pistol-training.com scoring in mind, that is fairly consistent with Master being the equivalent to Expert, A is Advanced, and B is intermediate. It's not perfect, but the PTC version is based on a best-of while the KSTG is cumulative.

[167]

Could add one more metric.

S-P Defensive Handgun Skills Test (http://shooting-performance.com/Shooting-Performance/Training_Resources/Entries/2012/11/7_Skills_test_files/S-P%20Handgun%20Skills%20Test.pdf)

[BN]

I think anyone who shoots at least twice a month, whether it is practice, drills or competition will be better than 95% of shooters. :)

Should it be based on what someone can do on demand? I've been seriously shooting pistols for over 30 years. I'm a 5 gun IDPA Master, A-Class in USPSA Open, Limited and Production and I might be able to shoot a 6 second FAST. Some of my USPSA scores are 20 years old. Should they count? I recently shot the FAM and failed the first 2 times I shot it because I went over time on one string. I gamed it the next time and shot faster and sloppier on that string and passed. ;)

It all depends on what you practice. I do all right at IDPA, but when I first started to shoot the FAST, I missed the 3x5 card a lot. :)

Take someone to the range and have them shoot the test of your choice. I like the IDPA Classifier because you have to keep it together for 90 rounds. If a shooter could shoot a special USPSA classifier and shoot 4 or more different stages, that would also be a good test. Then there is the thought that most shootings take only a few rounds by comparison and a short test like the FAST repeated a few times would be a good test.

Your chart is pretty good. Some might move things around a little but it is pretty close.

[jlw]

Could add one more metric.

S-P Defensive Handgun Skills Test (http://shooting-performance.com/Shooting-Performance/Training_Resources/Entries/2012/11/7_Skills_test_files/S-P%20Handgun%20Skills%20Test.pdf)

I like these. I have modified them somewhat for a class I am running for our folks this year. For my top guys it the competitive nature will get them going. For my "needier" folks, early improvements will be easier to quantify and internalize than another 82 on the POST course. Going from one hit in the time allowed to two hits is a huge improvement on a percentage basis.

[KevinB]

Hey I'm just the guy tossing the turd in the punchbowl.;)

In Duty gear I am about 2 sec faster on the FAST -- I have two modes of shooting, duty gear or concealment gear - and I (currently) am willing to lose a bit in concealment carrying IWB where it is roughly on my Duty/Battle Belt. I'm going to play around with AIWB for concealment carry as all the cool guys are doing it...

Without having one shooter running thru all the potential myriad of shooting courses its hard to make an apples to oranges comparison.

Also while you note it is not your chart, having taken a number of Mil/LE courses involving CQB and HR stuff, I would not rate SWAT/ and Vanilla SOF in the Master category in and of them being somewhere.

I think the FAST is a really good course of fire for a test. However shoot/no shoot (with 3D or Photorealistic targets) and some stressors would be good additions to something like that -- I've seem some GM's thru a house - and hose a few badge holders and no shoots based on it was out of their lane/element.

[jthhapkido]

Ken said that there are four kinds of people when it comes to guns - the incompetent, the competent, the good, and the great. Ken said that in order to win armed encounters, you don't need to be great but you do need to be good. His point seemed to be that the vast majority of armed combatants were incompetent some were competent but that these probably consisted of 95% of the gun carrying population (my numbers not his IIRC). His point seemed to be that if one was "good" you were better than 95% of the threats you'd likely face. I've been wondering for some time where the line between competent (is mostly safe, know the fundamentals of marksmanship but has to work hard to apply them, etc) and good lies. In other words, at what point are your skills good enough to carry you through most situations.

Reading the discussion thus far, here's my question:

(well, at least my first one)

...when you say "competent," "good," and "great," my response is, "at what?" Gun skills? Self-defense? Armed encounters?

People are listing all sort of skill drills and qualifications---and yet, I keep remembering what Tom Givens has said regarding the stats he keeps on his armed student's defensive encounters, in terms of what seems to be necessary to succeed:

1) Have a gun
2) Be willing to use it
3) Get it out fast
4) Put shots on target rapidly.

And yet, all of these qualifications and drills that people are listing to decide skill levels include MANY other things past those four points. Givens even made a point of saying once that the amount of training didn't really seem to be a deciding factor. (I'm sure he didn't mean that people don't need to train, merely that for what seemed to be the vast majority of situations, lots of training in a wide range of defensive skills and topics simply wasn't required and thus comparatively, shouldn't be a priority. I may be putting words in his mouth, though, so take that with a grain of salt as that was my interpretation only.)

So are we talking about "armed confrontations" from the point of view of an armed citizen for self-defense? Or LEO? Or military? Because it seems to me that there are significant differences in terms of priorities in training for those types.

Here's an example: I have great respect for SouthNarc, and am looking forward to taking his class later this year in Council Bluffs. I've seen videos, talked with people who have been in the classes, read some of his work, etc----he has seriously good stuff. (This coming from someone whose background was martial arts and effective movement a long time before I really got into shooting, so I'm really frickin' picky about what I spend money on for combatives-type courses.)

And yet.......yet.....while I'm looking forward to his class immensely, I don't think that vast majority of people need anything remotely like it. Most people's self-defense situations simply will not include (among other things) the types of close-quarters, smothering, take-to-the-ground-wrestling situations that are a part of his class. Sure, it could happen---but that is separate from looking at training priorities, and working towards the "can handle 95% of the threats you'd likely face."

Now, LEOs? Man, I wish more departments could have their people take SouthNarc's classes. Given a job where you HAVE to close with someone and put hands on them, AND they know you have a gun...that sort of training could make a real, life-saving difference.

People who aren't an LEO? Well, what's their ability to get the gun out fast and put multiple rounds on target like? Perhaps they should drop one of the advanced tactics classes they have planned for the summer and take a class from someone who is all about shooting skills.

This isn't me saying that people shouldn't take SouthNarc's classes. (Or anyone else's.) After all, I'm signed up for it, as are several other guys from around here that I've tried to talk into it. I'm seriously looking forward to it, though I need to mold a new mouthpiece first because I like having teeth. In my case, though, I'm ALSO signed up for a shooting skills class this summer. And I have enough free time to be able to take SN's class even though the training curriculum for it really isn't anything that should be a priority for me in my current life situation, from a self-defense perspective.

.....large amount of blathering past, my point is this: What exactly are we measuring with this "competent, good, and great" set of levels?

If the answer is "if one was "good" you were better than 95% of the threats you'd likely face" ---then I'd like to know what skills are necessary for that to happen? According to many self-defense reports that I've read, it means you have a gun, have enough situational awareness to realize there is a problem, and can get the gun out fast and put shots rapidly on a target between 2 and 12 yards away.

That doesn't sound much like the skills tested in many of these drills and qualifications.

What are we rating, here?

[GJM]

In Duty gear I am about 2 sec faster on the FAST -- I have two modes of shooting, duty gear or concealment gear - and I (currently) am willing to lose a bit in concealment carrying IWB where it is roughly on my Duty/Battle Belt. I'm going to play around with AIWB for concealment carry as all the cool guys are doing it...


Leaving aside that I think the FAST is largely a reloading drill, two seconds suggests either an equipment or technique opportunity. OWB, I think the concealment time penalty should be more like .15-.20. Unfortunately my best FAST and the camera don't coincide, but this is a 4.04 down one body from OWB concealment:


http://youtu.be/pVDBm9jLztw


Sent from my iPhone

[jlw]

Hey I'm just the guy tossing the turd in the punchbowl.;)

In Duty gear I am about 2 sec faster on the FAST -- I have two modes of shooting, duty gear or concealment gear - and I (currently) am willing to lose a bit in concealment carrying IWB where it is roughly on my Duty/Battle Belt. I'm going to play around with AIWB for concealment carry as all the cool guys are doing it...

Without having one shooter running thru all the potential myriad of shooting courses its hard to make an apples to oranges comparison.

Also while you note it is not your chart, having taken a number of Mil/LE courses involving CQB and HR stuff, I would not rate SWAT/ and Vanilla SOF in the Master category in and of them being somewhere.

I think the FAST is a really good course of fire for a test. However shoot/no shoot (with 3D or Photorealistic targets) and some stressors would be good additions to something like that -- I've seem some GM's thru a house - and hose a few badge holders and no shoots based on it was out of their lane/element.


Leaving aside that I think the FAST is largely a reloading drill, two seconds suggests either an equipment or technique opportunity. OWB, I think the concealment time penalty should be more like .15-.20. Unfortunately my best FAST and the camera don't coincide, but this is a 4.04 down one body from OWB concealment:


http://youtu.be/pVDBm9jLztw


Sent from my iPhone

I am more consistent with duty gear than concealed carry gear. It is an artifact of more training time in the former and many, many more hours of carry in a duty rig than carrying concealed.

[Dagga Boy]

I'll drop another turd...it's my nature.

I found the biggest factor in performance was the ability to actually pull the skills you have out in a fight. One of the biggest things I took away from Ken that is very consistent with my observations and experience is the need to be on auto-pilot during the shooting part, because everything else will be highly chaotic and distorted. You can be the the best Grandeist Mega Super advanced FASTest coin carrying dude out there, and if you can't bring it in a fight and just stand there, you will get cleaned by the the 8 second FAST guy who is a Velociraptor in a fight. This also leads into the ability to remain calm in chaos. Again, not really taught but learned.

Two examples: One of the best performances I ever saw in an officer involved shooting was by one of my worst performing "test takers" on the range. Turns out he was an "A+" performer who had an exceptionally good "auto-pilot program" loaded into his "computer", and had both a mean switch and was calm under pressure.

One of my better shooters, and a total bad ass of a cop, failed badly in a shooting, with his first words to me afterwards was "I didn't do a single thing I knew I should....no sights, and no trigger". His program was in the computer, he just lacked the ability at the time to "turn the auto pilot on". A month later he was in an exceptionally good shooting, and his first words to me afterwards were "I fixed it.....had both sights and trigger".

This all goes back to my emphasis on balance. At this point in life, I am probably shooting at a solid "Good" as my world revolves around my kid's Volleyball and not high round count training. With that said, I already know that I will not have to sort out things like moral issues, fear of investigation, fear, or dealing with high level adrenaline dump and reaction to altered time that many far better "shooters" will have to deal with, so I can pick up some "time" there.

So, I think (as usual) our in house genius John Hearne is on to something with this, I just think we need to take a look at "incompetent, competent, good, and great" in regards to both gun handling/tactics and mindset along with the marksmanship that we have several testing standards for.

[jlw]

I'll drop another turd...it's my nature.

I found the biggest factor in performance was the ability to actually pull the skills you have out in a fight. One of the biggest things I took away from Ken that is very consistent with my observations and experience is the need to be on auto-pilot during the shooting part, because everything else will be highly chaotic and distorted. You can be the the best Grandeist Mega Super advanced FASTest coin carrying dude out there, and if you can't bring it in a fight and just stand there, you will get cleaned by the the 8 second FAST guy who is a Velociraptor in a fight. This also leads into the ability to remain calm in chaos. Again, not really taught but learned.

Two examples: One of the best performances I ever saw in an officer involved shooting was by one of my worst performing "test takers" on the range. Turns out he was an "A+" performer who had an exceptionally good "auto-pilot program" loaded into his "computer", and had both a mean switch and was calm under pressure.

One of my better shooters, and a total bad ass of a cop, failed badly in a shooting, with his first words to me afterwards was "I didn't do a single thing I knew I should....no sights, and no trigger". His program was in the computer, he just lacked the ability at the time to "turn the auto pilot on". A month later he was in an exceptionally good shooting, and his first words to me afterwards were "I fixed it.....had both sights and trigger".

This all goes back to my emphasis on balance. At this point in life, I am probably shooting at a solid "Good" as my world revolves around my kid's Volleyball and not high round count training. With that said, I already know that I will not have to sort out things like moral issues, fear of investigation, fear, or dealing with high level adrenaline dump and reaction to altered time that many far better "shooters" will have to deal with, so I can pick up some "time" there.

So, I think (as usual) our in house genius John Hearne is on to something with this, I just think we need to take a look at "incompetent, competent, good, and great" in regards to both gun handling/tactics and mindset along with the marksmanship that we have several testing standards for.



A guy who can barely peck out "Chopsticks" isn't going to be able to play "Moonlight Sonata" if all of a sudden he finds himself on stage at Carnegie Hall. :)

Skills and practice or more likely predictors of a positive outcome than is dumb luck.

I expect even good piano players get stage fright.

[John Hearne]

Guys - Thanks for the continued input. I really, really appreciate your willingness to do my work/thinking for me. :)

Please understand that I realize there is more to the equation than raw shooting skill. The classic triad of mindset, marksmanship, and gunhandling is a truism for me. I am convinced that cops prevail in most gunfights because they have the ability to function in a chaotic, high stress environment - not because they are great shooters. I am also convinced that the horrible losses in LE that we see are explained by the inability to function in a chaotic, high stress environment much more than pure shooting ability. Regardless of what your skill level is, you have to be able to apply that skill in the real-world.

I also believe that one cannot separate these components as they are all inextricably interwined. Superior skill CAN lead to superior confidence. That confidence CAN lead to coolness - the word that sums up mindset/crisis management better than any other word. As long as one doesn't think that superior skills supplants all other considerations, I believe that superior skill brings a lot of advantages in a firearms related conflict.

Let's suppose that Officer Jones has answered an unrelated call at the school/office/mall where your dearest loved one works. Suddenly gunshots ring out and Officer Jones begins to move to the sounds of the gun with just his/her pistol. As Officer Jones maneuvers aggressively towards your loved one and the active shooter, how good would you like Officer Jones to be with their pistol? If Officer Jones just barely passes the once a year POST qual course - are you happy with that? Do you feel better if Officer Jones is a bit of an enthusiast and can consistently shoot a sub-6 second FAST?

I would also offer that what is good enough will likely vary with context. For a variety of reasons, but primarily task complexity, the armed citizen will probably have an easier job than Officer Jones. I would also say that just because most armed citizen encounters are solved by mere possession of a firearm or reasonable facsimile, does not mean that the armed citizen never faces problems that would benefit from a higher level of skill.

Finally, I am also interested in the difficult question of what is "good enough" to allow you to focus on other skill sets. For instance, if I can consistently shoot a sub-6.0 second FAST, do I stop worrying about pistols, beyond sustainment of that level, and worry about fitness or empty hands or shotguns or rifles or whatever?

EDIT TO ADD: I have some skepticism about the USPSA ratings for real-world skill evaluation. The more I study, the more I like bullseye based tests that require reasonable time pressure like The Test. Fights are rarely won by 0.10 second but the ability to put bullets in a 5.25" circle at reasonable speeds can be decisive.

[Chuck Haggard]

I recall going through my first Sure Fire low light class back in the late '90s when Ken Good was still running that show. Ken is a hell of a shooter, but his partner in the runs through the barricade field I found was, well, horrible.

I was really, really put out that Wade could move and work the tactics the way that he was able to, since he had a 99% or so win rate in those FoF runs. I was just about beside myself when we did the Wed night low light live fire drills and I saw that he could barely hit paper at the ten yard line. His strength was that he could get to where he needed to be to make the shot. Shooting ability wasn't that big a deal at the ranges he was able to get to.

I think people actually need, for the most part, far less technical shooting skill than we often think, not to say that people shouldn't train, it's just that most real world pistol fights just don't require that much marksmanship.

[nycnoob]

I have been thinking along the same lines myself (setting measurable goals to be well rounded and "good enough" in a bunch of pistol skills).
This is part of a letter that I sent to a shooting buddy about training plans for the year
(which also include working towards IDPA Expert both auto and revolver). This is my take on a bunch of tests of useful/applicable skill for
concealed carry, that could be tested at the typical indoor ranges that I frequent. (I do not find the LAV/Hackathorn tests to be either
shootable at my gun ranges or something that I would envision needing to perform) This was a letter to a buddy but all the ideas
came from this forum. Unfortunately my shooting buddy is not really on board with the program since: "gaming will get you killed".


I have identified several "skills" that I think are practical and will be my personal focus this year.

1) Draw from concealment and hit a headshot (say 3x5 card). Really, if this is fast and accurate / every time,
you would hardly need any other skill for a gun fight, if you miss the first shot, then things are much more difficult.
Some instructors on Todd Greens board think it is important to practice more than one shot because a poor grip
will often work for one shoot but not work for multiple. So practice more than on shot to ensure you are not sloppy
but the real skill is a one shot head shoot. So perhaps the correct way to measure this is draw from
concealment and three shots to the head 1.5 sec for first shot .25 sec splits on the rest.

IF the above is true then perhaps the famous failure drill (two to the body one to the head) is shot backwards
perhaps you should try and take the headshot first and go to the body if you miss/can't take it.

All of this thinking comes from HeadHunter as typified by his signature on TPI

Quote:
Street Survival: Tactics For Armed Encounters
Q: What did you do wrong?
A: The biggest thing, I think, was to miss with my first shot...

He had another quote something about "after the first shot, everyone was moving and things got much harder"


2) I am a big fan of the LAPD Swat exam, though since I am currently interested in J-frame revolvers
I think it may be useful to make it 3 the body 2 to the head but I am not sure what the times would then be
also I would think a J-Frame would be slower then a fullsize semi auto but I think the idea of practicing speedy
head/body shots of known size target at multiple distances is a real WINNER.


First half of LAPD SWAT Exam

25 yards-2 body 4 seconds 3x
15 yards-2 body 3 seconds 3x
10 yards-2 body 1 head-3.5 seconds 2x
7 yards-2 body 1 head-3 seconds 2x
5 yards-2 body 1 head 2.5 seconds 2x
3 yards 2 body 1 head 2 seconds. 2x

10 yards to 3 yards on the move-6 body 1 head. 2x

All from the low ready. Add about a second for a draw from the holster.
Any round totally off the target is an auto DQ (100% hits).
Full points on the qualification is in an area of about a 3.5 card in a T. Body size is about an 8x11.
This is also usually shot in gear/uniform. We also did this in low light, single hand, in gas masks, etc.

[I don't understand why Neyti's test is not mentioned more on this board, I think its pretty neat.]


3) Accuracy drills There are two I wish to work on

A)
http://pistol-training.com/drills/dot-torture

I am interested in, what distance can you make 90% on demand.
so I will take 5 misses from a string of 50 shots

Though in truth, I never do the COF as specified, I have some slight modifications, mostly
because I can't remember and loose patients.

B)
Also do some form of Dot-Torture at distance (COF to be determined)


Tom Givens and Police Data both show that some sizable fraction of shootings do occur at distance,
so use a D-8 Target at 25 yards and some form of Dot-Torture, (and mark number not in black) or the traditional
10 shots scored for points out of 100. Or perhaps I will use Todd's body circle as the target.
I often prefer to use Shoot-n-c targets though, the big black shoot-n-c that I use is an
inch wider then a D-8 but I am more concerned with having standards then the exact standard I use.

[Chuck Whitlock]

John,
I'm betting this will be an after-hours roundtable discussion in Memphis.
I'm very interested to see where this takes you.

[GJM]

.25 splits to the 3x5 is not a realistic objective.

[nycnoob]

I think people actually need, for the most part, far less technical shooting skill than we often think, not to say that people shouldn't train, it's just that most real world pistol fights just don't require that much marksmanship.

Perhaps, but I must confess that I bring a notebook to my practice sessions but NEVER actually write in it, because my scores on my drills are always worse then "they should be". Which is a round about way of saying that I really do not have a clear idea of my limits/capabilities even in non stressful practice situations.


It is really clear to me why there are so many defensive shootings where all the bullets miss.

[John Hearne]

I think people actually need, for the most part, far less technical shooting skill than we often think, not to say that people shouldn't train, it's just that most real world pistol fights just don't require that much marksmanship.

I think you're right, the actual shooting problem faced in most real-world fights is not that difficult when simulated on a square range with optimal lighting BUT....

A guy that barely passes that his agency's qual course but is able to bring 100% of that skill to the fight will win almost all of the time. I'd also say that a guy that shoots 95% but can only muster half of it in the moment is going to have problems. I think that most of us accept that some degradation in our performance is possible (I did not say inevitable) due to the complexity of and physiological responses to the situation.

One of the ways to make sure you have enough technical skill in the moment is to have a bit extra to spare. For years, I've said that you need a reserve of speed and a reserve of accuracy and you must be able to intuitively know how much of each to use to solve the problem. My sense of things is that it is easier to get on the gas pedal than the brakes for most people but what we need, more often than not, are the brakes.

For me, an ideal standard would be one that forces one to choose the right speed in a compressed time frame with minimal warning of what that threshold is. Barring that, a standard that forces one to transition between the gas and the brakes is pretty good. I think that is why the FAST fascinates me. For firing 18 rounds (3 times, averaging the results) I think you get a lot of feedback on someone's technical skill.

(For those that don't know Ken's Head Shot Standards they require three targets at 5 yards. The shooter fires a single head shot to each target three times, left to right, right to left, and then center first using a different ready position for each string. There is a par time of 1.5 seconds. Passing is 7/9 rounds in the head box of an IDPA/USPSA target. This is what Ken thinks is good enough - what do you think?)

[Dagga Boy]

John,
I'm betting this will be an after-hours roundtable discussion in Memphis.
I'm very interested to see where this takes you.

Ya Think....;).

John, remind me in Memphis to have a discussion on "The finished gunfighter".

[TheTrevor]

Perhaps, but I must confess that I bring a notebook to my practice sessions but NEVER actually write in it, because my scores on my drills are always worse then "they should be". Which is a round about way of saying that I really do not have a clear idea of my limits/capabilities even in non stressful practice situations.

I don't know if you've seen my training journals, but here's a hint: take pictures with your phone instead of taking notes. Take a pen or pencil and note the distance, round count, drill type, etc right there on the target next to the bullet holes before you snap a pic.

On DT in particular, a clear pic of the finished drill target is all the record-keeping you need.

[John Hearne]

At the risk of too much detail, let me ask another question but with some background.

The human mind has two distinct memory systems - motor programs exist in explicit or implicit memory. Explicit memory comparable to memorizing capital's of all the states. It is more "fragile" and requires a lot of mental resources to access. Implicit memory stores motor programs that are well practiced. For instance a person may be senile to the point that they don't know their own name but if they played the piano their whole life, placing them in front of the piano will get you music.

On a physical level in the brain, motor programs in implicit memory are fundamentally different and heavily myelinated. Skills that exist in implicit memory are commonly called "overlearned" in reference to the process needed to create them. Skills that exist in this realm are said to have "automaticity" as they can be executed without any conscious thought (if you've ever tap-rack-banged a revolver, this is why). Skills that are overlearned and exist in implicit memory are very robust and not as subject to degradation under stress than other less well learned programs.

With these understandings, what level of performance do you think is indicative of someone who has overlearned the technical shooting skills? (Do you think that passing Ken's Head Shot Standards is indicative of overlearned skills or something that can be pulled off by a shooter who is still actively thinking through the process of shooting?)

(Mandatory Disclaimer - I am talking about the skills themselves, not other very legitimate concerns such as target identification. Target ID is a distinct skill and should be overlearned as well)

[SouthNarc]

What level of performance do you think is indicative of someone who has overlearned the technical shooting skills?


John I think I understand your question so I'll give you an example from my course work.

From an encroachment problem to verbal interaction and then into an entanglement from a sucker punch.

Most that I see that escape the entanglement and can access the gun, rarely are able to get it into their eyeline despite having the range to do so. They bowl the gun and point shoot from a below eyeline, half hip-ish position.

So from my perspective, I would say that a first time ECQC-er who can do that, has his presentation "overlearned".

Am I tracking with you and is that an appropriate example?

[John Hearne]

Am I tracking with you and is that an appropriate example?

I think that is a perfect example and one hell of a way to test the existence of the skill set.

That particular skill test is very complex because you are dealing with a novel situation and the person is likely in an elevated state. In theory, someone who has overlearned skills may not do it correctly the first time but once they recover from the novelty of the situation, could execute the skill in subsequent iterations.

(FWIW, training has a lot of goals and the teaching of motor skills is probably third. Good training should remove novelty and create valid mental maps for the problems a student is likely to face. As a complete aside, the students level of physical fitness can potentially mitigate some of the degradation.)

While I hate to use the words, a rough way to think of "overlearned" is "subconsciously competent." There is the saying that amateurs practice until they get it right and professionals practice until they can't get it wrong. Skills practiced until they can't be done wrong are overlearned.

[SouthNarc]

That particular skill test is very complex because you are dealing with a novel situation and the person is likely in an elevated state. In theory, someone who has overlearned skills may not do it correctly the first time but once they recover from the novelty of the situation, could execute the skill in subsequent iterations.

(FWIW, training has a lot of goals and the teaching of motor skills is probably third. Good training should remove novelty and create valid mental maps for the problems a student is likely to face. As a complete aside, the students level of physical fitness can potentially mitigate some of the degradation.)



That correlates exactly with what I've seen in 10 years now of open enrollment ECQC. So at this point I've witnessed north of 5,000 simulated, near full contact, simunitions based entangled gunfights.

The elevated state from being in front of the class, wearing the helmet, and not knowing what's getting ready to happen already produces a notable effect. Combined with deviating from a playlist into dialogue and then sudden close violence has consistently resulted in dropped guns, people shooting themselves, other people watching and missing the intended target all together.

But....you know this from doing the course.

That's one of the reasons I'm so hyper aggressive about adding the interactivity component to firearms training.

If you can sit in and observe the Experiential Learning Lab that I'm doing at the conference this year I think your input would be valuable.

[Mr_White]

With these understandings, what level of performance do you think is indicative of someone who has overlearned the technical shooting skills? (Do you think that passing Ken's Head Shot Standards is indicative of overlearned skills or something that can be pulled off by a shooter who is still actively thinking through the process of shooting?)

This is a really imprecise and subjective statement, but for myself, when I was coming up in training and taking a bunch of classes, I feel like I was getting the material pretty ingrained at somewhere like ~40 hours in. That included the usual drawing, shooting, keeping the gun running, incorporating movement to all of that, post-shooting procedure, theoretical instruction in avoidance, threat ID and assessment, and basic personal tactics, and could apply those consistently and successfully in scenario/FOF training (which, while good and intense to a degree, was not as intense as ECQC. It still engendered stress though.)

That's where I would subjectively rate myself as 'competent' for however much or little that is worth. Now, that doesn't mean I was very highly skilled at shooting and gunhandling. But I think I had ingrained those skills, such as they were at the time, to a subconsciously functional level. And that's approximate to what I see in students now.

There's certainly a lot of room to be better than that, from mindset and mental preparation, to tactics, to technical skills with the gun. I've since gotten a lot better, and I've seen a lot of peers and students get a lot better too.


I also believe that one cannot separate these components as they are all inextricably interwined. Superior skill CAN lead to superior confidence. That confidence CAN lead to coolness - the word that sums up mindset/crisis management better than any other word. As long as one doesn't think that superior skills supplants all other considerations, I believe that superior skill brings a lot of advantages in a firearms related conflict.

I strongly agree with this. That's a point that speaks directly to me and I think a lot of other people, too.

I am never going to amass a significant amount of experience in armed, hostile, and ambiguous situations. If I do a good job at awareness and avoidance, and am not unlucky, I'll never get any experience beyond awareness and avoidance.

I deeply believe in confidence being a cornerstone of success in conflict. Confidence allows unhesitating action and the aggressive application of solutions in a timely manner. Confidence is a vital component of an effective tactician. As you say, confidence can quite literally lead to the coolness that is so important. That's something I've seen develop in students, at least within the bounds of the training environments that we use. Confidence based on experience is great, and probably the best kind. But real experience isn't the only way to build confidence, and real experience won't be available to everyone. Confidence can also be built through questing for ever-higher levels of technical skill, through mental preparation, through the simulated experience created in scenario/FOF training, etc.

I think it is enormously counterproductive to spend time and energy wringing our civilian hands at the fact that we don't have actual, real experience.

For those of us who won't ever amass real experience, I think it is that much more important and productive for us to avail ourselves of what we can - mental preparation, simulated experience, and a high level of technical skill, to build a (rooted in worthy preparation) level of confidence that increases our likelihood of prevailing.


Finally, I am also interested in the difficult question of what is "good enough" to allow you to focus on other skill sets. For instance, if I can consistently shoot a sub-6.0 second FAST, do I stop worrying about pistols, beyond sustainment of that level, and worry about fitness or empty hands or shotguns or rifles or whatever?

To me, this is a very large and complex question.

There's a good argument to be made for acquiring the broadest array of basic competencies rather than concerning ourselves with driving toward a particularly high level of skill in any one area. In that way, whatever phase/segment/modality the fight is currently occupying, we are not unskilled and don't just straight up lose at that point out of total incompetency.

However, to quote TLG, 'without enjoyment, there is no mastery.' I find great enjoyment in pistol shooting, and that is the true driver at this point behind my continued efforts at mastery. I think that a really high level of skill at individual aspects of this puzzle can lead to additional capabilities that could become useful.

If a BJJ black belt can bring a fight to the ground grappling phase, they can then bring the very high level of skill they've built to bear, and stand a great chance at dominating.

If a highly skilled pistol shooter can get a fight to occur much outside of arms' reach, they should own it (from the technical perspective.)

The problem with seeking great breadth is that mastery of each component discipline (stand-up, vertical grappling, ground grappling, knife, pistol, and the connective tissue to fluidly switch between all of them as appropriate) is all by itself nearly a lifetime study. Maybe a really dedicated person with a lot of time and resources might end up a true master of two component disciplines. Three, I don't know. But I find it hard to believe that anyone is going to actually be a really high-level kickboxer, a BJJ black belt, equivalently skilled with a knife, and shoot a pistol at GM level or sub-4 FASTs or something. The necessity of tradeoffs is inherent. There are some people who are very good in several component disciplines. But I bet they are not truly world class in more than one or two, and maybe not in any. And this is all well outside what's going to be accomplished by anyone other than a truly dedicated and highly motivated practitioner with lots of resources.

So, I don't know the answer to your question, but for myself, I have gone the route of trying to get some semblance of well-roundedness, then focusing on one area for mastery as my time and resources allow. It could be that I never actually finish that quest for mastery and maybe never go on to even attempt to master anything else. It could be that all I'm going to have is a basic level of skill on the ground that hopefully keeps me from getting summarily creamed there, but if I can turn it into a pistol fight...


EDIT TO ADD: I have some skepticism about the USPSA ratings for real-world skill evaluation. The more I study, the more I like bullseye based tests that require reasonable time pressure like The Test. Fights are rarely won by 0.10 second but the ability to put bullets in a 5.25" circle at reasonable speeds can be decisive.

I mean this respectfully and am interested either in any data or subjective answer you can give: how do you know .10 seconds rarely makes a difference? I'm not saying it does frequently make a difference because I really don't know. I tend to think that whatever instances do occur where a small amount of time made a difference may be hard to discern and thus invisible to us, but I'm not so sure that they don't exist. It's easy to measure shot placement after the fact, but much harder to observe the time frames involved, and pretty much impossible to know what would have happened if a given participant were just a little faster or slower. I'm just interested in why you think what you think.

I personally feel like USPSA rankings are pretty meaningful when it comes to technical skill with the pistol used, despite the issues of the classification system. USPSA is about accuracy at speed. I know a bunch of people who shoot USPSA (mostly Production shooters) with a gun and holster that is at least close to what they actually carry. I think those people, as long as they don't fail on one of the other ingredients - awareness, tactics, mindset, etc. - are going to do particularly well with the gunhandling and shooting aspects of the equation. I'd really, really not want any of those people trying to shoot me with a pistol. Even less than I want other people to shoot at me with a pistol. Especially with a pistol like the one they use in competition. Perish the thought if it's actually the exact same gun and rig they have used repeatedly under a degree of pressure and stress to address difficult technical problems in competition.


.25 splits to the 3x5 is not a realistic objective.

Sure it is. Dave Sevigny hits a .26 split to the 3x5 on his official record FAST runs. Come on, dare to dream! ;) I'd say it could become a worthy objective at some point in the journey.

[Mr_White]

With these understandings, what level of performance do you think is indicative of someone who has overlearned the technical shooting skills? (Do you think that passing Ken's Head Shot Standards is indicative of overlearned skills or something that can be pulled off by a shooter who is still actively thinking through the process of shooting?)

This is a really imprecise and subjective statement, but for myself, when I was coming up in training and taking a bunch of classes, I feel like I was getting the material pretty ingrained at somewhere like ~40 hours in. That included the usual drawing, shooting, keeping the gun running, incorporating movement to all of that, post-shooting procedure, theoretical instruction in avoidance, threat ID and assessment, and basic personal tactics, and could apply those consistently and successfully in scenario/FOF training (which, while good and intense to a degree, was not as intense as ECQC. It still engendered stress though.)

That's where I would subjectively rate myself as 'competent' for however much or little that is worth. Now, that doesn't mean I was very highly skilled at shooting and gunhandling. But I think I had ingrained those skills, such as they were at the time, to a subconsciously functional level. And that's approximate to what I see in students now.

There's certainly a lot of room to be better than that, from mindset and mental preparation, to tactics, to technical skills with the gun. I've since gotten a lot better, and I've seen a lot of peers and students get a lot better too.


I also believe that one cannot separate these components as they are all inextricably interwined. Superior skill CAN lead to superior confidence. That confidence CAN lead to coolness - the word that sums up mindset/crisis management better than any other word. As long as one doesn't think that superior skills supplants all other considerations, I believe that superior skill brings a lot of advantages in a firearms related conflict.

I strongly agree with this. That's a point that speaks directly to me and I think a lot of other people, too.

I am never going to amass a significant amount of experience in armed, hostile, and ambiguous situations. If I do a good job at awareness and avoidance, and am not unlucky, I'll never get any experience beyond awareness and avoidance.

I deeply believe in confidence being a cornerstone of success in conflict. Confidence allows unhesitating action and the aggressive application of solutions in a timely manner. Confidence is a vital component of an effective tactician. As you say, confidence can quite literally lead to the coolness that is so important. That's something I've seen develop in students, at least within the bounds of the training environments that we use. Confidence based on experience is great, and probably the best kind. But real experience isn't the only way to build confidence, and real experience won't be available to everyone. Confidence can also be built through questing for ever-higher levels of technical skill, through mental preparation, through the simulated experience created in scenario/FOF training, etc.

I think it is enormously counterproductive to spend time and energy wringing our civilian hands at the fact that we don't have actual, real experience.

For those of us who won't ever amass real experience, I think it is that much more important and productive for us to avail ourselves of what we can - mental preparation, simulated experience, and a high level of technical skill, to build a (rooted in worthy preparation) level of confidence that increases our likelihood of prevailing.


Finally, I am also interested in the difficult question of what is "good enough" to allow you to focus on other skill sets. For instance, if I can consistently shoot a sub-6.0 second FAST, do I stop worrying about pistols, beyond sustainment of that level, and worry about fitness or empty hands or shotguns or rifles or whatever?

To me, this is a very large and complex question.

There's a good argument to be made for acquiring the broadest array of basic competencies rather than concerning ourselves with driving toward a particularly high level of skill in any one area. In that way, whatever phase/segment/modality the fight is currently occupying, we are not unskilled and don't just straight up lose at that point out of total incompetency.

However, to quote TLG, 'without enjoyment, there is no mastery.' I find great enjoyment in pistol shooting, and that is the true driver at this point behind my continued efforts at mastery. I think that a really high level of skill at individual aspects of this puzzle can lead to additional capabilities that could become useful.

If a BJJ black belt can bring a fight to the ground grappling phase, they can then bring the very high level of skill they've built to bear, and stand a great chance at dominating.

If a highly skilled pistol shooter can get a fight to occur much outside of arms' reach, they should own it (from the technical perspective.)

The problem with seeking great breadth is that mastery of each component discipline (stand-up, vertical grappling, ground grappling, knife, pistol, and the connective tissue to fluidly switch between all of them as appropriate) is all by itself nearly a lifetime study. Maybe a really dedicated person with a lot of time and resources might end up a true master of two component disciplines. Three, I don't know. But I find it hard to believe that anyone is going to actually be a really high-level kickboxer, a BJJ black belt, equivalently skilled with a knife, and shoot a pistol at GM level or sub-4 FASTs or something. The necessity of tradeoffs is inherent. There are some people who are very good in several component disciplines. But I bet they are not truly world class in more than one or two, and maybe not in any. And this is all well outside what's going to be accomplished by anyone other than a truly dedicated and highly motivated practitioner with lots of resources.

So, I don't know the answer to your question, but for myself, I have gone the route of trying to get some semblance of well-roundedness, then focusing on one area for mastery as my time and resources allow. It could be that I never actually finish that quest for mastery and maybe never go on to even attempt to master anything else. It could be that all I'm going to have is a basic level of skill on the ground that hopefully keeps me from getting summarily creamed there, but if I can turn it into a pistol fight...


EDIT TO ADD: I have some skepticism about the USPSA ratings for real-world skill evaluation. The more I study, the more I like bullseye based tests that require reasonable time pressure like The Test. Fights are rarely won by 0.10 second but the ability to put bullets in a 5.25" circle at reasonable speeds can be decisive.

I mean this respectfully and am interested in any data or subjective answer you can give: how do you know .10 seconds rarely makes a difference? I'm not saying it does frequently make a difference because I really don't know. I tend to think that whatever instances do occur where a small amount of time made a difference may be hard to discern and thus invisible to us, but I'm not so sure that they don't exist. It's easy to measure shot placement after the fact, but much harder to observe the time frames involved, and pretty much impossible to know what would have happened if a given participant were just a little faster or slower. I'm just interested in why you think what you think.

I personally feel like USPSA rankings are pretty meaningful when it comes to technical skill with the pistol used, despite the issues of the classification system. USPSA is about accuracy at speed. I know a bunch of people who shoot USPSA (mostly Production shooters) with a gun and holster that is at least close to what they actually carry. I think those people, as long as they don't fail on one of the other ingredients - awareness, tactics, mindset, etc. - are going to do particularly well with the gunhandling and shooting aspects of the equation. I'd really, really not want any of those people trying to shoot me with a pistol. Even less than I want other people to shoot at me with a pistol. Especially with a pistol like the one they use in competition. Perish the thought if it's actually the exact same gun and rig they have used repeatedly under a degree of pressure and stress to address difficult technical problems in competition.


.25 splits to the 3x5 is not a realistic objective.

Sure it is. Dave Sevigny hits a .26 split to the 3x5 on his official record FAST runs. Come on, dare to dream! ;) I'd say it could become a worthy objective at some point in the journey.

[GJM]

Realistic "standard."

[Josh Runkle]

I'd put 7-sec FAST times into "good" territory, and 5-sec times halfway into "great".

I think passing the POST qual should at least get you to the low side of "competent".

I'm not Hack but I think there's a distinction to be made between incompetent (i.e. dangerous to self, others) vs not competent (needs improvement but is aware of such). Too nuanced a distinction when speaking to a class, but I certainly consider those to be separate categories, i.e. dangerous idiot vs beginner.

I'd agree with all of these points.

Not sure what category I fall in, but for me: POST qual clean is fairly easy, Hackathorn headshot standards are fairly easy, even 9/9. A sub 7 sec FAST, on the other hand, is hard but doable for me.

[GJM]

Interesting thoughts on experience. There is a Kyle Defoor video going around where he takes the position someone with limited experience, and generalizing/teaching based on it, is extremely dangerous. Anyone have that link handy?

[jlw]

Poorly trained thugs versus poorly trained cops isn't an accurate data set to make a conclusion for poorly trained thugs versus well trained cops.

Third world armed militant data isn't an accurate data set for such comparisons either.

An issue with force on force as a measuring stick is that the adversaries all know its a fight when the scenario starts. We have some force on force training upcoming, and I am recruiting some guys who are shooters whom I think will be good roll players, but I am also going to recruit some guys who have no training at all. I'm curious to see what the data shows about those encounters.

[Mr_White]

Interesting thoughts on experience. There is a Kyle Defoor video going around where he takes the position someone with limited experience, and generalizing/teaching based on it, is extremely dangerous. Anyone have that link handy?

I think it's on the Ballistic Radio Podcast: http://ballisticradio.com/2014/01/20/podcast-ballistic-radio-episode-45-january-19-2014/

He talks about being able to reach 80% (240 points) on the Hackathorn Standards as being a probable indicator of 'Good' at 10:43.

I really thought the comment you are referring to was in that podcast, but skimming through it just now I couldn't find it. I still think it's in there though.

That podcast with Defoor is great. He's got a lot of good thoughts that I think are quite relevant to this thread.

[John Hearne]

Guys, I'm not looking for scientific certainty in these matters. There are too many confounding variables that will vary greatly across unique events to make hard definite statements. What I would like to see is some good old fashioned speculation. This forum has a collection of really smart folks who should be able to pull some opinions out of their butt about the subject. I'm just asking - What level of performance do you think is indicative of someone who has overlearned the technical shooting skills?

Alternatively - If we accept that hardwired shooting skills can mitigate the effects of an elevated state (mental & physiological) we tend to see it as a good thing. Assuming that you care about your loved one's, at what point do you think that someone's shooting skills are unconscious competence?

Alternatively - The premise of - amateurs practice until they get it right, professional practice until they can't get it wrong. At what point in technical shoot skills, as determined by commonly accepted manners (easily quantified) do we think someone has reached the point that they can't get it wrong?

Alternatively - I've heard it said that unconscious competence is like pornography - we know it when we see it and it can't be quantified. If you don't think it can be quantified, how does it manifest itself?

[Mr_White]

Interesting thoughts on experience. There is a Kyle Defoor video going around where he takes the position someone with limited experience, and generalizing/teaching based on it, is extremely dangerous. Anyone have that link handy?

Ok, here it is. The part you refer to is about 4:10.


http://youtu.be/KT0fUZ8Z0c4

[Mr_White]

What I would like to see is some good old fashioned speculation.

I love speculation!


Alternatively - I've heard it said that unconscious competence is like pornography - we know it when we see it and it can't be quantified. If you don't think it can be quantified, how does it manifest itself?

I'd probably go with this one. Here's why: I think someone being unconsciously competent is tied to their ability to execute their skills in the face of mentally burdensome circumstances, distraction by pain, unusual conditions or positions, while remaining situationally aware and responding to the fluid and dynamic factors in a given situation, etc. The skills executed can vary in skill level and that is separate from the quality of unconscious competence, and can range from what is really a pretty low level of skill, to total and complete beast mode skills.

This is kind of what I was getting at when I said that I thought was reaching a level of competency at around 40 hours of training. I was not particularly highly skilled then, but that was the point where I felt like (and proved, within the limitations of the training environment) that I could execute and apply those skills and get it done, and as far as it went, in real life too (which was just MUCing, essentially.) With my current thinking, I would also add, 'as long as I didn't run out of time or face a shot beyond my skill level.'

I think this also maybe speaks to some examples that others have cited, where one LEO who is mediocre in measured skill is still able to call upon that skill in a stressful time of need, whereas another who is more technically skilled, isn't. And this admittedly contains further variability based on the situation - I'm sure it's a lot easier to execute your skills when you're in a shooting that you initiate than when it's a gunfight that starts with half your lower jaw getting shot off.

So I think 'unconscious competence' is qualitative, not quantitative, and requires subjective evaluation.

[ToddG]

Another drive-by post from me, sorry that I won't actually be able to deal with folks' responses and counterpoints. Also sorry if some of this has already been covered, I didn't read every word of the thread to date. Also for obvious reasons my greatest knowledge and personal interest revolves around the FAST so a lot of this will address that.

First I think you need to define what kind of "great" you're talking about. Usain Bolt is a truly great world-class athlete but I bet he can't beat Michael Phelps in the pool. Or vice versa. Talking about what makes one a GREAT SHOOTER is different than talking about what makes one GREAT GAME-XYZ shooter. Sure some (perhaps many) of the skills overlap but that overlap gets very opaque when we start to incorporate each activity's idea of how to rank & classify shooters. I think there's also a really huge separation between the truly world-champion level guys and "great." Eric G seems unbeatable in IPSC but there are still plenty of people who I think we'd all consider "great" but just about any definition.

So looking at the FAST: At the one day I was on the SHOT floor this year I spoke to two USPSA GMs who've tried and failed (one guy multiple times) at winning a coin. One is a local superstar and one is a nationally recognized top/near-top contender. I'd also point out that except for Bob Vogel no one including the other GMs on the "coin list" has succeeded in his first try. I think that Gabe could tell you that there's more to it than just having a good run under good conditions. That's part of why the coins and pins exist: I cannot tell you how many students I've had show up and say they shoot it sub-7 or sub-5 every time but when the pressure is on they cannot pull it all together. That's not considered a criticism, it's just a fact and explanation of the process. I know I shoot the FAST in front of students with far less success than I do on the range by myself, and I've shot the FAST a few times.

Spencer Keepers recommended years ago that a true "FAST Test" should be three in a row and we've done that for KSTG with a lot of success. Pulling off three solid, clean runs -- even if they're not all sub-5 -- is a lot different than running it at the beginning and end of a long day of training.

If I had my druthers, I'd go back to the original rule that to win a coin it has to be the first six rounds fired through the gun of the day; but that's not compatible with teaching and trying to give folks a chance at the end of class.

I think all the attempts to compare IDPA and USPSA "level" -- almost all of which discussion originates with people who have a dislike of IDPA -- are misplaced. We've discussed here before just how easily the USPSA classification system can be manipulated. When I pull up a random GM's record and almost all of his classifiers are "B" rank what is that supposed to mean?

I'm sure the IDPA system can be gamed, too, and I'm not defending one over the other. It's just too apples-to-oranges to compare except for folks who enjoy telling themselves they're better because their favorite game is better. If you and the ten guys you compete against go to the local IDPA match, the level of competition is the same and you'll either beat them and win, or you won't.

It took me about an hour to write this with various distractions so sorry if it's not coherent. :cool:

[GJM]

Interesting post, that got me thinking about pressure. Other than Gabe and Jimmy, have any of the other coins been won in a AFHF or AFHS class?
.

[Mr_White]

Another drive-by post from me, sorry that I won't actually be able to deal with folks' responses and counterpoints.

I am just glad to see you up and posting. :)


Talking about what makes one a GREAT SHOOTER is different than talking about what makes one GREAT GAME-XYZ shooter. Sure some (perhaps many) of the skills overlap but that overlap gets very opaque when we start to incorporate each activity's idea of how to rank & classify shooters.

That seems quite right to me, and is why I think a variety of different tests/standards/rankings give a much more accurate view of a given shooter's skills than any single measurement.


I think there's also a really huge separation between the truly world-champion level guys and "great." Eric G seems unbeatable in IPSC but there are still plenty of people who I think we'd all consider "great" but just about any definition.

My suspicion is that longer, more complex sets of shooting tasks are often necessary to differentiate between a 'great' shooter and a champion shooter. I think a lot more people shoot a comparable score to a champion on a USPSA classifier than in a large, many-stage match.


So looking at the FAST: At the one day I was on the SHOT floor this year I spoke to two USPSA GMs who've tried and failed (one guy multiple times) at winning a coin. One is a local superstar and one is a nationally recognized top/near-top contender. I'd also point out that except for Bob Vogel no one including the other GMs on the "coin list" has succeeded in his first try. I think that Gabe could tell you that there's more to it than just having a good run under good conditions. That's part of why the coins and pins exist: I cannot tell you how many students I've had show up and say they shoot it sub-7 or sub-5 every time but when the pressure is on they cannot pull it all together. That's not considered a criticism, it's just a fact and explanation of the process. I know I shoot the FAST in front of students with far less success than I do on the range by myself, and I've shot the FAST a few times.

Yes. I'm just glad I was smart enough not to tell you how I was going to win a coin for sure when I picked you up at the airport. ;)


I think all the attempts to compare IDPA and USPSA "level" -- almost all of which discussion originates with people who have a dislike of IDPA -- are misplaced. We've discussed here before just how easily the USPSA classification system can be manipulated. When I pull up a random GM's record and almost all of his classifiers are "B" rank what is that supposed to mean?

I've come to ponder that aspect of the USPSA classification system myself. I'd be really interested to see what would happen and how everyone would shoot if every classifier score always counted and none were thrown out. Won't happen, but it would be interesting.

That said, I gravitate toward the 'USPSA B class basically equals IDPA M class' view, because for me, the two coincided - I was attaining B class when I could shoot the IDPA classifier at the M level, and that also coincided with when I won the FAST coin. That's just how the different measures added up for me. I'm sure they would add up somewhat differently for different people according to their personal strengths and weaknesses as shooters. And that's why multiple metrics of measurement mean more to me than any one alone.

[Mr_White]

Interesting post, that got me thinking about pressure. Other than Gabe and Jimmy, have any of the other coins been won in a AFHF or AFHS class?
.

That pressure is why I put more stock in rankings or accomplishments achieved in actual competition or testing in class - to me, USPSA, IDPA, the FAST, and to a degree, GSSF, plus a bunch of others - are more meaningful as measures of skill than things not required to be shot under 'match conditions', so to speak.

[GJM]

I think you are differentiating between "personal best" and on demand performance. Back to Nyeti's post, is "on demand" somewhat predictive of what you would expect "for real," or are they unrelated?

[Mr_White]

I think that's part of it. But there may be, or is, more difference due to possibly greater stress and chaos in the field.

Still, when your skills tumble a thousand feet down the mountain, or however far they are going to fall depending on a person's 'coolness', because of stress and all the difficulty there might be when it's for real, don't you want to start at the top of the mountain rather than close to the bottom?

[jlw]

So where on the scale would Jim Cirillo, Jelly Bryce, Frank Hamer, Tom Threepersons, Bill Jordan, Charles Askins, Bill Tilghman, et al, be?

Yes, Tilgman was killed by a drunken perp, but it wasn't in an active gunfight. They were fighting over a gun that Tilghman missed when he arrested the guy. Tilghman was 70 years old and in his 51st year as a peace officer when it happened.

[Chemsoldier]

So where on the scale would Jim Cirillo, Jelly Bryce, Frank Hamer, Tom Threepersons, Bill Jordan, Charles Askins, Bill Tilghman, et al, be?

Yes, Tilgman was killed by a drunken perp, but it wasn't in an active gunfight. They were fighting over a gun that Tilghman missed when he arrested the guy. Tilghman was 70 years old and in his 51st year as a peace officer when it happened.

Hard to say since these guys, by and large, predate modern training and competition methods used on the matrix. Cirillo, for instance, mostly shot bullseye and PPC (I think he shot Bianchi and bowling pins near the end of his competition career). They were certainly good gunfighters and some were exhibition shooters which show certain types of proficiency. In any event the matrix talks about shooting ability, these folks are largely know for their outcomes in shootings no matter their raw shooting ability. Frank Hamer was not neccesarily better with a firearm than Clyde Barrow, he was smart enough not to give Barrow a chance to be good with a firearm against him. Bryce and Jordan both did exhibition shooting that was amazing and certainly showed some amazing proficiency. Cirillo certainly seemed to be simmered down enough during shootings to get his hits in. Charles Askins appears to have been a good shooter and additionally had zero compunctions about dropping the hammer on a conceivable threat.

I don't think we can meaningfully put them on the scale. There would be a lot of potential rabbit holes we could end up running down with few potential gains in insight.

[Dagga Boy]

All of those guys are EXACTLY why you have to include the entire Combat Triad and not just marksmanship. Also, guys like Jelly Bryce were the Rob Leathams of their day.

[jlw]

Hard to say since these guys, by and large, predate modern training and competition methods used on the matrix. Cirillo, for instance, mostly shot bullseye and PPC (I think he shot Bianchi and bowling pins near the end of his competition career). They were certainly good gunfighters and some were exhibition shooters which show certain types of proficiency. In any event the matrix talks about shooting ability, these folks are largely know for their outcomes in shootings no matter their raw shooting ability. Frank Hamer was not neccesarily better with a firearm than Clyde Barrow, he was smart enough not to give Barrow a chance to be good with a firearm against him. Bryce and Jordan both did exhibition shooting that was amazing and certainly showed some amazing proficiency. Cirillo certainly seemed to be simmered down enough during shootings to get his hits in. Charles Askins appears to have been a good shooter and additionally had zero compunctions about dropping the hammer on a conceivable threat.

I don't think we can meaningfully put them on the scale. There would be a lot of potential rabbit holes we could end up running down with few potential gains in insight.


Frank Hamer's record in gunfights is very, very impressive sans Clyde Barrow.

The point that I was hoping to make is that the guys on the list were all men of noted firearms skill who also had repeated success in gunfights. While there in an intangible element, there is very much a common thread: skill.

[GJM]

Serious question -- is there a level of "too much" experience that can lead to complacency? My experience is that it can be a problem around aircraft and dangerous animals.

[jlw]

Also, guys like Jelly Bryce were the Rob Leathams of their day.

Which plays into exactly the theme of many of my posts. Skill matters. Would Bryce have been successful in all of those gunfights if he also didn't have the requisite skills? Remember, he was hired after the chief saw him at a pistol match.

If it is all a matter of dumb luck, then we can quit training and having qualifications as they are pointless

[Chuck Haggard]

Some of the old school guys mentioned were phenomenal shots within the realm that they worked, but frankly I think that none of them would have been able to hit GM in IPSC, as an example, or smole a FAST like some of the guys like Dave Sevigny have done. They were good enough to be good, better than the bad guys they went up against, but more importantly they could get all of that performance on demand, under duress. They also tended to be skill tacticians.

I was at a class with Jim Cirillo when he was in his 70s. He wasn't at all fast, but he could hit a pop can on the berm with an N frame, standing on his two feet man style, at 75 yards.

[TheTrevor]

Serious question -- is there a level of "too much" experience that can lead to complacency? My experience is that it can be a problem around aircraft and dangerous animals.

Too much skill development untempered by real-world experience can lead to complacency. Having to apply skills under stress, especially life-or-death levels of stress, tests both temperament and whether skill development has been prioritized appropriately.

I humbly submit that folks who get to "see the elephant" are always changed by the experience. For some, it leads to incremental improvements in mindset and priorities. For others, it triggers a complete re-evaluation of what they thought they knew. But nobody survives a serious fight and comes out exactly the same person on the other side.

ETA: GJM, I didn't directly answer your point. In the realm of small-aircraft operations, someone who preflights the same 172 twice per day for 20 years without logging anything more serious than "time for maintenance" can absolutely get dangerously complacent. The key is disruption of the mental routine, which could be anything from taking refresher training from a good instructor, to teaching someone else and in the process re-sensitizing themselves to the risks. Working with a partner to run failure drills on the ground can be good, too -- partner calls out the failure, you execute the response. The key thing is to break the hypnosis of things always going as expected.

[KevinB]

So where on the scale would Jim Cirillo, Jelly Bryce, Frank Hamer, Tom Threepersons, Bill Jordan, Charles Askins, Bill Tilghman, et al, be?

Yes, Tilgman was killed by a drunken perp, but it wasn't in an active gunfight. They were fighting over a gun that Tilghman missed when he arrested the guy. Tilghman was 70 years old and in his 51st year as a peace officer when it happened.

Would vary at what point of their career you picked to point.

Skills are very perishable -- a gun shooting 1,000 rds a day is going to be a lot more formidable than the same guy shooting 1,000 a month...


The Aussie SASR and 2Commando Regiment has posters up about Mastering Skills at their ranges, it talked about 40,000 hrs to truly master a skill - and the way from Novice to Master.
I don't recall all the steps nor the time frames involved, but I found it extremely interesting to note that they identified progression based on the Perfect Practice makes Perfect if you do it enough concept.

Lastly always train for the 2%'er the hardened trained criminal that wants to kill you.

Its cheesy but close only counts in horseshoes and thermo-nuclear weapons (trust me hand grenades don't count when close), there are absolutely no second place prizes in a gunfight.

[TheTrevor]

The Aussie SASR and 2Commando Regiment has posters up about Mastering Skills at their ranges, it talked about 40,000 hrs to truly master a skill - and the way from Novice to Master.

That's 8 hours/day, 5 days/week for 20 years, which isn't realistic for mastery of a complete skill-set, much less a single skill. If that were true, we'd have a problem, because the average age among SOF trigger-pullers would be a fair bit past the age of peak physical performance.

All of the studies and data I've seen puts mastery of domain expertise somewhere around 10k hours of applied effort, whether we're talking about designing/coding software, playing a musical instrument, or a specific shooting discipline. It's a pattern which repeats among high-level performers across multiple fields, from Bill Gates (who was one heck of a programmer back in the day) to sniper school instructors -- 10K +/- 2K hours is table stakes for mastery.

[KevinB]

I'm not good a math or reading - so I may have messed it up.

Pre 9/11 the preferred candidate for NLI/SMU selection was 27years old married with 2 kids. Peak performance was often seen at 35-38.
Mind you if you've seen Pat McNamara recently he's well over 50 and still fit as a fiddle and beat the crap out of anyone and out-shoot most of the planet too.

So yeah my math and reading comprehension levels are about Grade 4.

[TheTrevor]

I'm not good a math or reading - so I may have messed it up.

I've been reading PF long enough that your attempt at the "me dumb grunt, me no read so good" act isn't likely to work on me, dude. :)

[LSP552]

Great thread John,

A few random thoughts:

I believe you need to be able to draw from duty gear or concealed and make a chest hit at 5 – 7 yards in about 1.5 seconds on demand, 100% of the time. There seems, at least to me, a decline on the emphasis of speed in some circles. I personally think that you cannot overestimate of importance of drawing and getting a good hit fast. You can’t always go into a shooting with gun in hand.

I’m not sure that any sport classification or square range score/drill is predictive of the ability to win fights. I’m personally aware of really good shooters who failed completely at the moment of truth. I’m also aware of average shooters who prevailed because they flipped their kill switch, applied their training rapidly and kept on the front sight.

The key is being able to perform at a fairly basic level under the stress of a 2-way range. Force on force performance is probably much more predictive than competitive ranking or high range scores. Thinking back, most (not all) of the actual shooting problems I’m familiar with were pretty basic. The targets are large, generally close, and speed was critical. A typically unchallenging POST course will be more than adequate IF that level of performance can be delivered when shooting for your life.

Realistic, scenario based training is critical in helping shape the decision-making process and programming the correct response in the individual. This is important even without a force on force component. The individual preparing for the fight needs to have some important issues already worked out in his/her head, rehearsed, refined and ready to open on demand. All the worry and concerns about people popping, getting sued, etc. need to be settled before you start carrying a gun for real. This preconditioned response helps eliminates delays over less important things and allows time for the important ones, like can/should I shoot this person or persons and then doing it.

One of the hardest things to instill is the belief that the individual may one day shoot for their life. Most people, including those who carry a gun for a living, don’t really believe IT will every happen to THEM. When it does, they often lock up and fall seriously behind the curve. To win fights, you need to believe the fight is likely, or you will never really prepare yourself mentally or physically.

I believe competition is a great venue for learning how to run the gun under a form of stress. How great this stress is depends on the individual. It’s not a two-way range but it’s still valuable. It’s critical to be able to run the gun subconsciously in a shooting and competition does a good job of teaching this and forcing you to think about things other than the gun. You need to be focused on applying the tactics needed to win the fight, not thinking about how to make your gun work.

Ken

[LSP552]

Serious question -- is there a level of "too much" experience that can lead to complacency? My experience is that it can be a problem around aircraft and dangerous animals.

There is a difference between confidence and over confidence. In this business, I'd say its the inexperienced who are prone to complacency. I'd say that complacency also comes from never really believing you will shoot on a 2 way range. You wouldn't believe the number of people who carry a gun for living who never really expect to be involved in a gunfight.

Ken

[GJM]

Will try this again. Folks flying helicopters daily in the mountains where the engine burps and you likely die, following up many wounded buff/lions/leopard, soloing on hard rock, doing a nightly SF mission for months. Day one you are cognizant of the risk, but by repeatedly performing high risk activities you tune out the risk. My question is whether folks think you can perform a hazardous activity so much that complacency creeps in, causing you to be at higher risk due to your very high level of experience.

[LSP552]

Will try this again. Folks flying helicopters daily in the mountains where the engine burps and you likely die, following up many wounded buff/lions/leopard, soloing on hard rock, doing a nightly SF mission for months. Day one you are cognizant of the risk, but by repeatedly performing high risk activities you tune out the risk. My question is whether folks think you can perform a hazardous activity so much that complacency creeps in, causing you to be at higher risk due to your very high level of experience.

GJM,

I don't think that translates well to pointing guns at people. There is a difference between doing dangerous stuff and doing dangerous stuff against others. I ran a 60 man SWAT unit for a long time. Never saw complacency in than context. Could it happen, I'm sure it can but don't think it's a normal occurrence.

Ken

[LSP552]

Will try this again. Folks flying helicopters daily in the mountains where the engine burps and you likely die, following up many wounded buff/lions/leopard, soloing on hard rock, doing a nightly SF mission for months. Day one you are cognizant of the risk, but by repeatedly performing high risk activities you tune out the risk. My question is whether folks think you can perform a hazardous activity so much that complacency creeps in, causing you to be at higher risk due to your very high level of experience.

GJM,

I wanted to add to my last response but couldn't. There is a danger of complacency from doing things that are "routinely" not dangerous but have the potential to turn so. This is particularly true for law enforcement doing traffic stops and other stuff that could be dangerous but usually isn't. It falls back to the it will never happen to me thinking.

As I said earlier, I don't think this applies to well trained and experienced folks who are doing high-risk warrants, barricaded suspects, hostage incidents, etc. Looking back, I didn't clarify the context of my first response every well.

Ken

[John Hearne]

GJM - One of the problems I'm facing is that there is almost no publicly accessible information that relates directly to the domain of gunfighting. What I've been forced to do is look for research from other domains that might carry over and hope that it applies. I am particularly interested in domains that require fine motor control during periods of high stress. For instance, there is research from the surgical community on how to best structure practice routines for optimal performance. Another domain that I've explored, not fully yet, is the aviation domain. I found an interested article on what defines the expert aviator. They had an interesting models of the expert aviator and I saw a lot of potential carry over.

http://i1202.photobucket.com/albums/bb374/ajp3jeh/Gun%20Stuff/expert_aviator_zps546228ae.jpg (http://s1202.photobucket.com/user/ajp3jeh/media/Gun%20Stuff/expert_aviator_zps546228ae.jpg.html)

The authors examined pilots using interview and simulator exercises. The final simulator did not test ability to control a failing aircraft but the ability to deal with a mechanical failure in questionable weather. The better pilots recognized that the best response was to divert and land at one of several airports not directly in the original flight path so it wasn't under a huge time crunch like a gunfight.

The authors concluded that the primary difference between a competent aviator and an expert aviator is judgement. The best predictor of that judgement is the number of flight hours previously logged. The authors didn't find recency to be of value but since it was a decision making exercise, it makes sense. Variety of previous flight experience was useful as well. Amount of previous training had some effect but it wasn't as strong as the previous factors. What I found really interesting is that the expert aviators actually had less confidence than the pilots with lesser skills.

The book was "Decision Making Under Stress: Emerging Themes and Applications. The chapter was called "Understanding Expert Aviator Judgement" by Richard Jensen, James Guilke, and Robert Tigner.

[Chuck Haggard]

George, I heard Dave Smith give a talk one time and refer to officers having their "risk barometer" reset by having survived a certain level of risk repeatedly. KInd of the same sort of thing you are talking about. That is more mindset than skill levels I think.

[John Hearne]

http://i1202.photobucket.com/albums/bb374/ajp3jeh/Gun%20Stuff/overlearning_continuim_zps25aca663.jpg (http://s1202.photobucket.com/user/ajp3jeh/media/Gun%20Stuff/overlearning_continuim_zps25aca663.jpg.html)

I threw this together in hopes it might make it clearer what I'm trying to get opinions on. What common drills, qual courses, or rankings do you think might indicate the following. There is no correct answer, I'm just hoping for some consensus. If you want to go crazy, you could assume the scale ran from 1-20 from end to end. I might suggest that IDPA Expert is at the threshold between suggesting and strongly suggesting or 10.

[John Hearne]

I don't mean to be dismissive but folks of Robbie Leatham's caliber have almost no interest for me. The folks performing at a world class level have crossed into the area of performance only seen by a synergy between genetics and skill. Their levels of performance are akin to Major League Batters who have eye sight so amazing that it can't be measured accurately. I am far more interested in what can be done by the person whose base abilities lie in the range closer to normal.

If you want a fascinating explanation of the synergy between genetics, skill, and expert performance, I highly recommend "The Sports Gene" by David Epstien.

[Kevin B.]

Finally, I am also interested in the difficult question of what is "good enough" to allow you to focus on other skill sets. For instance, if I can consistently shoot a sub-6.0 second FAST, do I stop worrying about pistols, beyond sustainment of that level, and worry about fitness or empty hands or shotguns or rifles or whatever?

While I admittedly may have se the bar a bit high, I have come to define "good enough" as the following:

1. On a SR-1C target at 25 yards, 10 rounds slow fire into the black

2. On an IPSC A-zone/IDPA -0 Zone at 7 yards:

1.5 second draw
.3 second splits
.5 second transitions
2.25 second slide-lock reload


If you can consistently deliver that level of performance from your real-world equipment, in my opinion you probably have sufficient skill with a pistol. Those performance levels can then be extrapolated to establish baselines for other drills. For example, my standards would equate to a 3.0 second Bill Drill.

[DocGKR]

Concur with a lot of the comments here, including the original chart in the first post.

Once a person reaches the mid to upper end of the "good" level, then that is probably "good enough" for CCW/duty purposes and the time required to significantly improve might be better spent on other required tasks and skills. Guys I shoot with who are consistently passing the three Defoor tests, LAPD SWAT qual from the holster, FAST drill in the 6 sec or less, 500 pt Aggregate at 450 or better, etc... tend to be folks who I think of as good solid shooters.

I do think that complacency can set in when dealing with high risk situations on a frequent basis and not suffering any adverse events--it is easy to become over-confident and that can lead to serious trouble when you least expect it...

[YVK]

Will try this again. Folks flying helicopters daily in the mountains where the engine burps and you likely die, following up many wounded buff/lions/leopard, soloing on hard rock, doing a nightly SF mission for months. Day one you are cognizant of the risk, but by repeatedly performing high risk activities you tune out the risk. My question is whether folks think you can perform a hazardous activity so much that complacency creeps in, causing you to be at higher risk due to your very high level of experience.

I don't think you're at a higher risk from desensitization per se, after all, you have that experience to bail you out. I think that, given several solution options, you may choose a higher risk one, which I think, in general, usually is not the best solution.

[GJM]

GJM - One of the problems I'm facing is that there is almost no publicly accessible information that relates directly to the domain of gunfighting. What I've been forced to do is look for research from other domains that might carry over and hope that it applies. I am particularly interested in domains that require fine motor control during periods of high stress. For instance, there is research from the surgical community on how to best structure practice routines for optimal performance. Another domain that I've explored, not fully yet, is the aviation domain. I found an interested article on what defines the expert aviator. They had an interesting models of the expert aviator and I saw a lot of potential carry over.

http://i1202.photobucket.com/albums/bb374/ajp3jeh/Gun%20Stuff/expert_aviator_zps546228ae.jpg (http://s1202.photobucket.com/user/ajp3jeh/media/Gun%20Stuff/expert_aviator_zps546228ae.jpg.html)

The authors examined pilots using interview and simulator exercises. The final simulator did not test ability to control a failing aircraft but the ability to deal with a mechanical failure in questionable weather. The better pilots recognized that the best response was to divert and land at one of several airports not directly in the original flight path so it wasn't under a huge time crunch like a gunfight.

The authors concluded that the primary difference between a competent aviator and an expert aviator is judgement. The best predictor of that judgement is the number of flight hours previously logged. The authors didn't find recency to be of value but since it was a decision making exercise, it makes sense. Variety of previous flight experience was useful as well. Amount of previous training had some effect but it wasn't as strong as the previous factors. What I found really interesting is that the expert aviators actually had less confidence than the pilots with lesser skills.

The book was "Decision Making Under Stress: Emerging Themes and Applications. The chapter was called "Understanding Expert Aviator Judgement" by Richard Jensen, James Guilke, and Robert Tigner.

There has been a lot of research, as you would expect, in the aviation field.

Not sure how directly it applies, but three important factors for aviators are technical skills, experience (usually measured in flight hours) and judgment. Many regard judgment as most important, and you often hear things like, "I would rather fly with a mediocre stick with great judgment than a world class stick with mediocre judgment." Of course the hard part is most pilots think they have great judgment, even though that is not the case.

[BLR]

There has been a lot of research, as you would expect, in the aviation field.

Not sure how directly it applies, but three important factors for aviators are technical skills, experience (usually measured in flight hours) and judgment. Many regard judgment as most important, and you often hear things like, "I would rather fly with a mediocre stick with great judgment than a world class stick with mediocre judgment." Of course the hard part is most pilots think they have great judgment, even though that is not the case.

Excellent point, and well made George.

John - I would suggest looking through the literature for some of the USN and USAF fighter pilot studies on these topics. They've spend billions over the last half century trying to figure out a similar problem.

[joshs]

There has been a lot of research, as you would expect, in the aviation field.

Not sure how directly it applies, but three important factors for aviators are technical skills, experience (usually measured in flight hours) and judgment. Many regard judgment as most important, and you often hear things like, "I would rather fly with a mediocre stick with great judgment than a world class stick with mediocre judgment." Of course the hard part is most pilots think they have great judgment, even though that is not the case.

I've talked about this with my stepdad quite a bit (he has about 10k flight hours). He thinks that it generally takes a combination of luck and prior bad judgement (this could be considered experience in itself) to really know what good judgement even is.


Sent from my iPad using Tapatalk 2

[Dagga Boy]

http://i1202.photobucket.com/albums/bb374/ajp3jeh/Gun%20Stuff/overlearning_continuim_zps25aca663.jpg (http://s1202.photobucket.com/user/ajp3jeh/media/Gun%20Stuff/overlearning_continuim_zps25aca663.jpg.html)

I threw this together in hopes it might make it clearer what I'm trying to get opinions on. What common drills, qual courses, or rankings do you think might indicate the following. There is no correct answer, I'm just hoping for some consensus. If you want to go crazy, you could assume the scale ran from 1-20 from end to end. I might suggest that IDPA Expert is at the threshold between suggesting and strongly suggesting or 10.

Awesome sauce professor! Now I would suggest two more that deal with "Mindset" and one to deal with "Gun Handling/Tactics" and a way to make a balance of them look good. I would also add "of the appropriate skills" to the above statements. I have an example I use when I teach this. I always use actual events in my agency to show issues with "Triad Inbalance". In one case an exceptional LE PPC shooter was unable to engage a criminal gunman not due to Mindset (as he really wanted to shoot the guy) or Marksmanship (Easily had the skill set to shoot the guy at the near perfect engagement distance of 5 yards) or any other issues other than he had not "over learned" the skill at the appropriate speed needed for a street encounter. Everything he was doing at the time was non-dependent on draw speed or rapid presentation. Equally, I have seen skilled shooters unable to engage because of not preparing properly to actually use lethal force, or those who focus so hard on "just shooting" that they are fast yet cannot retrieve the actual over learned "skill" (sights,trigger follow-through).

Thanks for your work John, this is the stuff many of us have spent literally decades focused on unraveling the secrets.

[GJM]

GOOD JUDGMENT CAN’T BE BOUGHT OR LEARNED FROM BOOKS. PEOPLE AREN’T BORN WITH IT, AND IT ISN’T TAUGHT IN SCHOOL. ONLY SELF-AWARENESS AND VAST KNOWLEDGE OF CIRCUMSTANCES, THE ENVIRONMENT, AND POTENTIALITIES, WHEN COMBINED WITH PERSONAL EXPERIENCE, RESULT IN GOOD JUDGMENT. MENTORS CAN SPEED THE PROCESS, SUPPLYING INFORMATION AND EVEN EXPERIENCE THROUGH THE ARTFULLY TOLD STORY. OTHERWISE, THE BURNED HAND TEACHES BEST.

GOOD JUDGMENT IS THE RESULT OF EXPERIENCE, WHILE AN “EXPERIENCE” IS THE RESULT OF POOR JUDGMENT.

Mark Twight---Extreme Alpinism

I happened to notice this quote in someone's (you would know and respect) sig line, and thought it relevant to this thread. Back in my climbing days, Mark Twight was a demi-god doing rad stuff, we could only dream of, in an alpine setting, where unlike at the crags, the consequences of failure were often death.

[ToddG]

I continue to believe the "over learning"thing is a misnomer. Craig's discussion of drawstroke in ecqc is instructive. People are not just TOO GOOD, they're simply too specialized abd too lacking in the ability to choose techniques that are suitable over the wide range because they are chasing tiny specialized gains.

This is where I'd go into a lecture on the awesomeness of the press out...

[Kevin B.]

GOOD JUDGMENT IS THE RESULT OF EXPERIENCE, WHILE AN “EXPERIENCE” IS THE RESULT OF POOR JUDGMENT.

Mark Twight---Extreme Alpinism

I always liked this quote from Tony Blauer:

Experience is something you get shortly after you need it.

[John Hearne]

I continue to believe the "over learning"thing is a misnomer.

I've been working on a "research project" for some time now. I've been trying to examine serious academic research and answer questions relevant to our community. I primarily wanted to explore whether one must turn into a quivering mass of Jello under stress as so many suggest. As part of this, I've spent a lot of time looking at motor skill learning. The term "overlearned" is not something I invented but something directly out of the literature.

While it is a very complex subject involving a lot of other components, at some point we need to examine to what level the motor programs someone is trying to use are developed. There are really only three options - unlearned, learned, and overlearned. Overlearned motor programs are unique in that they tend to be less affected by heightened arousal states.

Since they are motor programs, fundamental skills like presenting the pistol, delivering hits, reloading, clearing malfunctions, etc. can be measured objectively - typically in terms of speed and accuracy. Generally speaking, the more practiced a motor program, the more efficiently it is is executed. High levels of efficiency tend to manifest themselves by shorter times. There are a ton of exercises that combine presenting the pistol, delivering accurate hits, reloads, etc. - they are called drills, qualification courses, and rankings.

While there are always going to be some genetic freaks, we should be able to speculate (and experts in a field tend to speculate more accurately) at which point we're seeing the benefits of overlearning from the standpoint of pure performance. Yes, we can better determine overlearning in more complex testing regimes like those described by Craig but ultimately, these are just motor programs. We should be able to point to certain performance thresholds that suggest overlearning is contributing to the observed performance.

There is far more to winning a gunfight/shooting than pure shooting skill - I GET THIS. What I'd like to hear is what a bunch of SME's and RKI's think is indicative of overlearning in the realm of technical shooting skill.

FWIW, the info I'm trying to gather will take two, maybe three slides, in a four hour presentation. I am trying to educate people whose world view of acceptable handgun performance is limited to passing a police qualification. I'd love to have a chart similar to what I originally posted that shows how low a standard that is and offer suggestions for acceptable levels of performance that would show some resistance to stress because they are formed by overlearning the skills.

[ToddG]

So apologies if I'm just missing something already discussed and confusing terms. Can you explain over learned to me and what the perceived negatives are?

[John Hearne]

There are not major negatives to overlearning if we want to perform well under stress. The only caveat I have is that one must be careful what one trains to the overlearned level. For instance, if you're training something that should be a branching decision, training just one side of that decision is bad. The classic example would be automatically drawing and shooting people just because they have a gun their hand. The drawing the gun quickly should be overlearned but the decision to shoot should not be.

[ToddG]

I think we are in complete agreement and I apologize if my misinterpretation from earlier suggested otherwise. That's why I called it a misnomer: I thought it meant something else. :-)

[John Hearne]

I apologize if my misinterpretation from earlier suggested otherwise. That's why I called it a misnomer: I thought it meant something else. :-)

Apology accepted. Now speculate....

[Dagga Boy]

Todd, John's work on this and his application to use of force training is some of the best stuff I have seen in a long time and absolutely mirrors much of what I have seen works in regards to application of training to field performance.

An example I think you could relate to is the press out. Your draw stroke is so "over learned" that it is something that if confronted with a violent threat, you would probably not even have to think about to execute...it is essentially the "auto-pilot" program. Positives would be that you can perform this task without thought. A "negative" may be that if you need something else or you have over learned an action that is not appropriate, you may find that your auto-pilot crashes the plane.

[ToddG]

DB - again mirrors my thought precisely and why I like the press out over other techniques that might provide different benefits in narrower contexts.

Also, agree 100% about John and the amazing brain power he is putting into this stuff in a synergized way.

[LSP552]

John,

From a research perspective, would't it be useful to examine actual shooting performance and contrast that with square range performance? Instead of us guessing what would be an acceptable standard, perhaps looking at actual performance vs training performance might give a measure of how bad performance degrades under two-way conditions? Would that help place square range performance on your chart?

I need to think a bit more about this.

Ken

[John Hearne]

From a research perspective, would't it be useful to examine actual shooting performance and contrast that with square range performance? Instead of us guessing what would be an acceptable standard, perhaps looking at actual performance vs training performance might give a measure of how bad performance degrades until two-way conditions?

Absolutely. The problem is that I am not really conducting any research but looking at the research done by others. If you would like to start a research think tank and hire me as the director, and pay for PhD along the way for the needed validity, I would be very willing to do that. Until someone ponies up some serious coin, I am stuck looking at the work of others. :)

FWIW, there are some researchers whose work is specific to the domain we are discussing. Lewinski's work with Force Science is great. I've found Kathy Vonk's heart rate research (she put high quality heart rate monitors on cops in the field) invaluable. There is a police research institute in the Netherlands of all places that has done some directly related work as well. I'm using these guys but am forced to look beyond as the amount of available research is limited.

Exactly how much one's performance degrades under stress is a highly personal question. There are so many variables in that "equation" that controlling for them all and only studying the quality of motor programs would be impossible. I have a "model" that attempts to descibe (but not quantify) this and there are factors within a person that vary from day to day that would also have effects.

One of my pet peeves is people who identify problems without identifying solutions. I find it very hard to stand in front of a group as a quasi-SME and say you need to train harder and make sure your skills are transferred to implicit memory (are overlearned) without being able to give them some guidance as to when that has likely happened. "You'll know it when you see it," when they have no real frame of reference, isn't very helpful.

The other issue I have is that the standards you train to tend to define the maximum performance you can expect in the field. You could have a police officer who shot his POST qual every week and dry practiced regularly. He could overlearn the skills at that level but his theoretical maximum performance would be mostly limited to what ever standard was in the POST course. I would like to be able to tell a bunch of SWAT cops that once your are able to pass the FBI instructor bullseye and FAM Qual on demand, you are probably "good enough" with a pistol. (I would still encourage them to work towards getting better)

After studying this for some time, everything that I can intuit is that the basic firearm skills required by armed professionals are not sufficient make those skills readily accessible under fight conditions. We could improve our officer's survivability IN PART by making them more technically proficient with their firearms. Improving technical skills by themselves would not do much but as part of a larger program, I think it would help and certainly wouldn't hurt.

[John Hearne]

John's work on this and his application to use of force training is some of the best stuff I have seen in a long time and absolutely mirrors much of what I have seen works in regards to application of training to field performance.

It is bad enough that you are destroying my limited credibility by agreeing with me. :) You co-own a company called Hardwired Tactical Shooting. Mr. HITS, tell me when you think pistol skills are in fact hard wired or when it might be or when it likely is.

[LSP552]

One of my pet peeves is people who identify problems without identifying solutions. I find it very hard to stand in front of a group as a quasi-SME and say you need to train harder and make sure your skills are transferred to implicit memory (are overlearned) without being able to give them some guidance as to when that has likely happened. "You'll know it when you see it," when they have no real frame of reference, isn't very helpful.

The other issue I have is that the standards you train to tend to define the maximum performance you can expect in the field. You could have a police officer who shot his POST qual every week and dry practiced regularly. He could overlearn the skills at that level but his theoretical maximum performance would be mostly limited to what ever standard was in the POST course. I would like to be able to tell a bunch of SWAT cops that once your are able to pass the FBI instructor bullseye and FAM Qual on demand, you are probably "good enough" with a pistol. (I would still encourage them to work towards getting better)

After studying this for some time, everything that I can intuit is that the basic firearm skills required by armed professionals are not sufficient make those skills readily accessible under fight conditions. We could improve our officer's survivability IN PART by making them more technically proficient with their firearms. Improving technical skills by themselves would not do much but as part of a larger program, I think it would help and certainly wouldn't hurt.

I agree, except for funding your PHD.:)

Let me think a bit more on this and try to fit some performance levels on your chart.

Ken

[Mr_White]

http://i1202.photobucket.com/albums/bb374/ajp3jeh/Gun%20Stuff/overlearning_continuim_zps25aca663.jpg (http://s1202.photobucket.com/user/ajp3jeh/media/Gun%20Stuff/overlearning_continuim_zps25aca663.jpg.html)

I threw this together in hopes it might make it clearer what I'm trying to get opinions on. What common drills, qual courses, or rankings do you think might indicate the following. There is no correct answer, I'm just hoping for some consensus. If you want to go crazy, you could assume the scale ran from 1-20 from end to end. I might suggest that IDPA Expert is at the threshold between suggesting and strongly suggesting or 10.

Ok, following your request for total rampant speculation, basically pulled out of you know where, and undoubtedly with a few things that don't really add up or are inconsistent with something else I've said, and with absolutely no insult meant toward anyone:

http://farm8.staticflickr.com/7377/12121755283_53538a1e0d_b.jpg (http://www.flickr.com/photos/52790396@N08/12121755283/) overlearning_continuim_zps25aca663_02 (http://www.flickr.com/photos/52790396@N08/12121755283/) by OrigamiAK (http://www.flickr.com/people/52790396@N08/), on Flickr

ETA: '5.0 Bill Drill' is about illegible and located above '10.0 FAST.'

[John Hearne]

Awesome. Thank you.....

[TheTrevor]

Ok, following your request for total rampant speculation, basically pulled out of you know where, and undoubtedly with a few things that don't really add up or are inconsistent with something else I've said, and with absolutely no insult meant toward anyone:

http://farm8.staticflickr.com/7377/12121755283_53538a1e0d_b.jpg (http://www.flickr.com/photos/52790396@N08/12121755283/)

ETA: '5.0 Bill Drill' is about illegible and located above '10.0 FAST.'

I concur with OAK's calibration on FAST and Mozambique drills, based on careful self-observation and training up through some of those levels in the last year.

The difference for me between a 7.0 FAST vs 5.0 comes from relaxed flow during the draw and presentation, and being able to execute the reload smoothly with very little conscious thought. In all areas my goal is to make my conscious mind the activity director that's initiating certain sequences at the right moment, rather than being intimately involved in the mechanics of what my body is doing. This is why a jacked-up reload is so slow -- the pace slows down by 2-3x if I have to consciously manage things. (I know I'm being Captain Obvious here, but explaining stuff helps me think about it.)

The Bill Drill numbers are harder for me to confirm as I rarely have a chance to do it outside of airsoft practice, but that seems about right.

[GJM]

John, can you define "over learned" again?

[TheTrevor]

John, if you want to look at a martial discipline where you literally cannot survive a fight against a skilled opponent unless you have overlearned a solid array of skills, check out sword fighting. I studied Toyama Ryu (Japanese practical swordsmanship) diligently for 5+ years under Sensei Mike Esmailzadeh. I was probably 3-4 years in before I could spar with the experienced folks and avoid getting slaughtered in the first 15 seconds.

When you're up against a skilled, aggressive opponent with a sword, there is no time to consciously traverse the decision trees to select responses and execute them. If you have not overlearned movement skills, reading of the opponent's intent, AND defensive/offensive sword skills, it's just a matter of time before your opponent figures this out and sets up an attack which is too fast for your conscious mind to handle.

Not exactly an everyday skill-set, but I figure if GJM can bring in aviation then I can put swordplay on the table. :)

[David Armstrong]

Ken said that in order to win armed encounters, you don't need to be great but you do need to be good.
>>This may have already been discussed, as I'm posting as I go through the thread<<
By that standard, a high percentage of gun owners are good. Let's face it, as a general rule at least half of all folks involved in a gunfight win, and it seems the good guys win far more than the bad guys. A quick check of most shootings indicate little if any formal training and of that most of the training is not anything beyond the level of basic CCW class. As for drills and tests reflecting ability, I remember when if you scored a 45 on an El Presidente one was considered to be an expert. Given the success of LEOs in actual gunfights that would seem to create a question about POST qualification being borderline competent/incompetent, unless one also wants to concede that low-level competence is sufficient to win most gunfights. Interesting question, just not sure what is being measured properly addresses the question.

[Mr_White]

Awesome. Thank you.....

Now that you've got me making leaps that I wouldn't normally, here is another attempt at a chart. Same disclaimers as before:

http://farm8.staticflickr.com/7450/12122402613_ec37136846_b.jpg (http://www.flickr.com/photos/52790396@N08/12122402613/) Skills_zps102fc8f7_03 (http://www.flickr.com/photos/52790396@N08/12122402613/) by OrigamiAK (http://www.flickr.com/people/52790396@N08/), on Flickr

[David Armstrong]

I recall going through my first Sure Fire low light class back in the late '90s when Ken Good was still running that show. Ken is a hell of a shooter, but his partner in the runs through the barricade field I found was, well, horrible.

I was really, really put out that Wade could move and work the tactics the way that he was able to, since he had a 99% or so win rate in those FoF runs. I was just about beside myself when we did the Wed night low light live fire drills and I saw that he could barely hit paper at the ten yard line. His strength was that he could get to where he needed to be to make the shot. Shooting ability wasn't that big a deal at the ranges he was able to get to.

I think people actually need, for the most part, far less technical shooting skill than we often think, not to say that people shouldn't train, it's just that most real world pistol fights just don't require that much marksmanship.
That tends to reflect what I have seen over the years. High levels of skill are nice but rarely do we find a situation where it matters. That is true of many things, not just shooting. Now when it matters it matters a lot. I learned some very high level driving skills that I never used....until a trip back to Oklahoma a couple of years back, when the difference between rolling down the side of a small mountain and not rolling down was based on a fw of those high level skills.

[John Hearne]

John, can you define "over learned" again?

One of the frustrations I've experienced reading across the various areas is that folks in different fields use different words to describe what are essentially the same phenomena. The guys that work with motor skills use the term overlearning. The guys that work with the memory systems would say that something that been transferred to implicit memory.

The Wiki* definition is "Overlearning is the pedagogical theory that practising newly acquired skills beyond the point of initial mastery leads to automaticity." Automaticity is "the ability to do things without occupying the mind with the low-level details required, allowing it to become an automatic response pattern or habit. It is usually the result of learning, repetition, and practice...After an activity is sufficiently practiced, it is possible to focus the mind on other activities or thoughts while undertaking an automatized activity"

(When we think about gunfighting, automaticity does seem to be a very worthy goal. Arguably my last diagram could readily substitute automaticity for overlearning. I avoid automaticity because it is a $5 dollar word and it is used in the cardiac world when describing the heart's ability to generate its own electricity)

Regarding different domains, I think that they are all valid examinations of the meta problem of performing "intricate" skills under life threatening conditions. One of the great lies is that natural responses are best. Natural responses are only valid for natural problems. If I want to bite and strike then natural is acceptable, though maybe not ideal even then.

If we are trying to solve non-natural problems, then we're going to have to use non-natural solutions. Implementing non-natural solutions under life threatening conditions isn't easy but it can be done and it's often the only valid solution. My goal is to figure out how to do this in the most efficient manner.

* Based on my reading in Wikipedia and the academic text books, I find the Wiki articles to be a great resource for a quick understanding of these issues. I have not found any glaring issues with the information in the Wiki articles. A lot of these concepts are largely accepted as the most accurate theories in their respective fields.

[Dagga Boy]

It is bad enough that you are destroying my limited credibility by agreeing with me. :) You co-own a company called Hardwired Tactical Shooting. Mr. HITS, tell me when you think pistol skills are in fact hard wired or when it might be or when it likely is.

Well somebody needs to go to our class that was purposely set up to go after yours at the Tactical Invitiational:cool:.

The key to what we try to do is to develop an auto-response of a variety of skills that can be applied in a crisis with little conscious thought. Essentially, freeing the brain to work with the rapidly changing complex variables by having pre loaded, easy to retrieve, mastered skill solutions already in the computer. We find the battle to be what skills you are loading and if they are going to be solid, efficient, legal, ethical and reasonable solutions for those problems YOU are likely to be needing. We also work to a standard that is not what your maximum performance is in a particular range skill, but what your maximum performance is in an actual encounter in its entirety.

[GJM]

One of the frustrations I've experienced reading across the various areas is that folks in different fields use different words to describe what are essentially the same phenomena. The guys that work with motor skills use the term overlearning. The guys that work with the memory systems would say that something that been transferred to implicit memory.

The Wiki* definition is "Overlearning is the pedagogical theory that practising newly acquired skills beyond the point of initial mastery leads to automaticity." Automaticity is "the ability to do things without occupying the mind with the low-level details required, allowing it to become an automatic response pattern or habit. It is usually the result of learning, repetition, and practice...After an activity is sufficiently practiced, it is possible to focus the mind on other activities or thoughts while undertaking an automatized activity"

(When we think about gunfighting, automaticity does seem to be a very worthy goal. Arguably my last diagram could readily substitute automaticity for overlearning. I avoid automaticity because it is a $5 dollar word and it is used in the cardiac world when describing the heart's ability to generate its own electricity)


Thanks for that definition.

Here is my question. In this thread, there has been an implication that "overlearning" implies some level of (desirable) competence, but I am not sure this is the case. For example, I believe my mom and Danica Patrick have both "overlearned" the ability to drive a passenger car, based on the Wiki definition. While both have "over learned," there is obviously an enormous difference in their competency. Two shooters may have "overlearned" the presentation, but one with a one second and the other with a three second draw.

I don't believe having "over learned" a shooting skill is enough. Rather, you need to have "over learned" and be able to do that an acceptable standard.

[John Hearne]

Let's face it, as a general rule at least half of all folks involved in a gunfight win, and it seems the good guys win far more than the bad guys....Given the success of LEOs in actual gunfights that would seem to create a question about POST qualification being borderline competent/incompetent, unless one also wants to concede that low-level competence is sufficient to win most gunfights.

I will have to respectfully disagree here. I see very few dominating wins in the LE world. What I see are exchanges of gunfire in which the person who sucks less is the LEO. If two guys empty magazines at each other and one runs off and the other is still there is that really a win for the guy left standing there? I realize that there are no solid numbers on LE hit rates but I see 15-18% as the most commonly accepted number. If LEO's are hitting with one of every six shots they fire is the testing methodology that deems them good enough valid?

I am aware of two studies that tried to correlate qualification scores with street performance. One found no correlation whatsoever and the other found a relationship but not a relationship that was statistically significant. If would offer that unless a qualification requires reflexive gunhandling, it probably won't be very predictive. I'd also point out that we still see some horrible losses on the LE side. I think it was the FBI data brought out the number of 85% of officers feloniously murdered never drawing their guns.

I would concede that in most instances a fairly low level of technical shooting ability is required. My question is how do we make sure that we can consistently bring that minimal level of skill to the fight - rain or shine, day or night, best day or worst day. My thought is that ONE way to do this is to have a level of technical skill that is accessible during periods of high arousal. As best I can determine, the skills that are accessible under high levels of arousal are overlearned to the point of automaticity.


Interesting question, just not sure what is being measured properly addresses the question.

What performance thresholds in common drills/quals/rankings suggest overlearning/automaticity is contributing to the observed performance?


High levels of skill are nice but rarely do we find a situation where it matters. That is true of many things, not just shooting. Now when it matters it matters a lot.

I won't argue. There are two aspects to risk assessment - probability and severity. The probability of needing to solve a high level technical shooting problem in the field are low. However, that is not the only metric we use. When you consider the severity of the penalty for not having a high level of technical shooting skill, it can be extreme and to me negates much of the probability arguments. To summarize - it's not the odds, it's the stakes.

I'd also offer that perhaps, we don't see a lot of high level of technical shooting in the LE world. Is this because there is no need for it or because very few people can pull it off? What about the LAPD guy, trained by Scottie Reitz, that shot the hostage taker at the Mexican Embassy some years back? If we had more cops in the field with that skill set (does anyone argue that there are lots of those guys out there) would be see it more?

IMPORTANT DISCLAIMER
Please understand, I am not saying that technical shooting skill fixes everything. I fully accept that technical shooting skills is but one of many variables that can explain performance. Technical shooting skill has the advantage of being easily quantified. I'd also point out, that experience and the judgement it leads to is not readily accessible to a lot of folks. While experience/judgement is the best solution, developing technical shooting skills is something that can be done by most anyone. And for a lot of us it is "fun" and something we are willing to do. FWIW, I will also address physical fitness which is another realm that can have an impact on your ability to perform under stress and one that we have ready access to control.

[John Hearne]

As an aside, if you want a really interesting domain with lots of carryover, take aviation and add guns and missles to it - aerial combat. I've found a lot of interesting material in this realm. It's not longer published but the book "The Ace Factor" (recommended by Ken Good) was fascinating.

[John Hearne]

I believe my mom and Danica Patrick have both "overlearned" the ability to drive a passenger car...While both have "over learned," there is obviously an enormous difference in their competency. Two shooters may have "overlearned" the presentation, but one with a one second and the other with a three second draw.

That's a really good example because the ability to drive is probably the domain that most people understand and have achieved mastery.

I would respond that if the goal is to drive from 123 Main St to 456 Columbus Ave during daylight, dry conditions, in low to moderate traffic and at the posted speed limit, Danica Patrick would not have a discernible advantage over your mother - she may look better while doing it though. :) It would only be if dropped the flag and let them go as fast as possible that Danica's advantages would manifest themselves. Overlearning's benefits can be limited to certain narrow areas within a general specialty.

This also why I don't care much about the extreme outliers like Leatham or Danica. The advantages they are enjoying are not limited to hard work. The simple ugly truth is that world class, elite athletes are different from the rest of us.

There are also clearly degrees of benefit conferred by overlearning. A B-Class shooter and a Grand Master are both competent shooters and better than most but the Grand Master will do better assuming they stay within a USPSA realm. If we made both shoot High Power competition, the advantages the Grand Master previously enjoyed would largely disappear. While the Grand Master would have the advantages of overlearning pistol shooting, it would have little carry over to High Power shooting (or skeet)

I do think that a fairer example would be this. We take your mom and a 15 year old with a learner's permit. We then give them free reins to drive that course as fast as they want. The fact that your mom was comfortable with fundamental driving skills would allow her to complete the course at speed better than the 15 year old with the learner's permit.

Your comment about overlearning to a particular standard is interesting. Earlier I said that the standards we train to tend to define our maximum reasonable performance so you're correct in that sense. I would offer that someone who shot the same POST course on a recurring weekly basis, although slower, would retain a greater percentage of their skill when aroused than a new hot-shot shooter who was gifted with a lot of twitch muscle.

The only reason I'm even asking the question is that the literature is pretty damn certain that overlearning/automaticity insulates skill from the debilitating effect of high arousal states. If there wasn't a documented advantage, I wouldn't care.

[Dagga Boy]

GJM, the "driving a passenger car" is way too "vague" to apply here. Also, your mom has over-learned driving a car a specific way, and my girlfriend, I mean Dani (little pet name) has over learned it a different way. I'll put this into your world.......the starting sequence on your 500 has a lot of variables. You can destroy the thing just starting it, so there is stress and other dynamics in the skill set. It also requires constant monitoring and analysis of a variety of inputs before you fire it. It is also condition dependent. You can probably start yours with total competence in a wide range of conditions and variables due to very regimented over learning process..........you don't want me starting it;), and I am actually a ways ahead of most folks on the specifics of the 500, yet would still be at an incompetent level.


John, again you are on the money. We used to have "successful police shootings" in which most of the time the bad guys did worse than the good guys with a ton of luck involved and tons of critical errors. After a specific process of training was put into place those trained this way began getting into dominating victories in which the bad guys were crushed in a very efficient and surgical manner, including several like Scott's guy at the Mexican Embassy (who was also trained exactly the same way).

[Mr_White]

Here is my question. In this thread, there has been an implication that "overlearning" implies some level of (desirable) competence, but I am not sure this is the case. For example, I believe my mom and Danica Patrick have both "overlearned" the ability to drive a passenger car, based on the Wiki definition. While both have "over learned," there is obviously an enormous difference in their competency. Two shooters may have "overlearned" the presentation, but one with a one second and the other with a three second draw.

I don't believe having "over learned" a shooting skill is enough. Rather, you need to have "over learned" and be able to do that an acceptable standard.

That's what I was getting at earlier in saying that I thought overlearning to be a qualitative thing, separate from the level of skill that is overlearned.


I would concede that in most instances a fairly low level of technical shooting ability is required. My question is how do we make sure that we can consistently bring that minimal level of skill to the fight - rain or shine, day or night, best day or worst day. My thought is that ONE way to do this is to have a level of technical skill that is accessible during periods of high arousal. As best I can determine, the skills that are accessible under high levels of arousal are overlearned to the point of automaticity.

This is where I think good old fashioned 'tactical training' does well - emphasis on all that square range stuff - threat ID and assessment, draw and hit, hit from ready, keep the gun running, basic use of cover, post-shooting procedure, incorporate movement into all of it, do it in the rain, in the sun, in the dark, with a flashlight, eventually one handed, etc. The stuff that comprises the 'multitasking/serial tasking square range dance', and to me, should basically comprise a large portion of a person's initial defensive handgun training.

I think then taking those base skills and dealing with more difficult circumstances further increases the robustness of the skills - the automaticity - add artificially induced stress, exertion, artificial penalty for failure, the scenario/FOF training modality, as well as greater spatial complexity, serial tasking, and time pressure as found in practical shooting competition.

That's my answer to your question in bold.

To further things from there, a person might want to sharpen their skill execution to highest level they can muster.


I won't argue. There are two aspects to risk assessment - probability and severity. The probability of needing to solve a high level technical shooting problem in the field are low. However, that is not the only metric we use. When you consider the severity of the penalty for not having a high level of technical shooting skill, it can be extreme and to me negates much of the probability arguments. To summarize - it's not the odds, it's the stakes.

Hear, hear.


I'd also offer that perhaps, we don't see a lot of high level of technical shooting in the LE world. Is this because there is no need for it or because very few people can pull it off? What about the LAPD guy, trained by Scottie Reitz, that shot the hostage taker at the Mexican Embassy some years back? If we had more cops in the field with that skill set (does anyone argue that there are lots of those guys out there) would be see it more?

Totally agree with you that low levels of skill, whether by LE or private citizen, can become a self-fulfilling prophecy with regard to the perceived likely difficulty of the problem and the skills a person can expect to have when it's 'for real.'


As an aside, if you want a really interesting domain with lots of carryover, take aviation and add guns and missles to it - aerial combat. I've found a lot of interesting material in this realm. It's not longer published but the book "The Ace Factor" (recommended by Ken Good) was fascinating.

Any succinct insights you can share? Not asking you to recount the whole book or anything...


This also why I don't care much about the extreme outliers like Leatham or Danica. The advantages they are enjoying are not limited to hard work. The simple ugly truth is that world class, elite athletes are different from the rest of us.

I don't know, I maybe come down more on the nurture side of the argument than you do. I think GMs, even champion ones, are much more made than born. Although I would agree that that question is largely moot for our purposes here, since even if GMs are made and not born, very few, especially in aggregate at the institutional or general public level, will have the motivation and resource to reach that level of skill.

[John Hearne]

Any succinct insights you can share? Not asking you to recount the whole book or anything...

In a sad statement on my nature, I'm pulling out my notes that are electronic and easy to cut and paste. If it's in quotes, it's the authors words, if not its my thoughts. This is what stuck out:


“A tiny minority run up a high score, primarily at the expense of the less gifted.”
5% account for 40% of victories
Very determined and excellent distance vision
Marksmanship is found among them, the best shoot better, difference between the high and low scoring aces; (when it all comes down to it, can you physically put rounds on target?)
Training – helps to a degree
Flying skill – few aerobats ever became an ace, no test pilots; aces as average flyers
“the most successful fighter pilots were men of first class judgement.”
Luck – essentially a defensive quality linked with survival and much less a factor in the attack
Determination – high degree of control of fear
Aggression – only useful when controlled, otherwise a danger
Distance vision and coordination
Coordination = natural athleticism?
“A long-sighted young man with light colored eyes, on the short side, with good physical co-ordination, quick reflexes, and a naturally good shot.”
No average pilots – just aces and turkeys
“Only one pilot in fifteen has a better than even chance of surviving his first decisive combat, but having done so, after five such encounters, his survival probability had increased by a factor of twenty.”
Situational awareness – “the ability of the pilot to keep track of events and foresee occurrences in the fast-moving, dynamic scenario of air warfare.”
“He who can handle the quickest rate of change survives.”
SA has no relation to flying ability or experience but the right sort of experience helps.
4 forms of friction: 1) less than perfect intelligence 2) psychological pressure 3) physical stress 4) demoralizing effect of unexpected
Survival instinct as counterproductive (in non-natural environment)
“Shock action or surprise is in fact the dominant factor in air combat” – the attacker is firmly grounded in cognition and the defender must struggle to remain there
If you can’t win, survive – importance of opting out
“The value of surprise and shock action”
Importance of knowing what the pilot himself can do with his weapons
Side with the biggest numbers win in wars of attrition; wars won by the numerically inferior are won quickly
The dual factors of surprise and shock action can be seen to be decisive
Dominant factor in air campaigns is pilot quality. Equipment advantage marginal at best
“It has long been held that aces are born and not made. There is an element of truth in this, but it is not the whole story.”
3 parts: what he can see, what he can do, what he can hit (marksmanship is 1/3)
Combination of courage, aggression, caution, instinct
Being attacked while one thinks they are on the offensive is very hard to recover from. – a major reorientation
Attack is the best means of defense
In some men, all these qualities appear to be present from the outset. In others, some qualities are present from the start while others develop slowly
The difficult part was teaching them what to look for.
The quicker a pilot became accustomed to “seeing” everything that happened beside him…
Importance of building observe – esp with a mentor (fto?)
Alertness – practice made perfect although a prerequisite was to live long enough to gain the necessary practice.
Marksmanship – good flying never killed anyone
Good pilots spent time zeroing their guns and checking ammo for reliability
“This, like many things, could be learned.” (So learn the things you can)
“I simply missed that Hun because I did not at that time possess that little extra determination that makes one get one’s sight on a Hun and makes one’s mind decide that one is going to get him or know the reason why.”
***Attack to help to overcome fear ***
Shooting ability and determination ranked over flying ability
Increased speeds compressed the time frames of fights making awareness even more important
Tuck’s ability to kill from incredibly long distances - marksmanship
Sixth sense – making correct deductions from incredibly sparse bits on information
"Whilst shooting, think of nothing else, brace the whole of your body, have both hands on the stick, concentrate on your sight ring."
“The object of the exercise as with all sets of instructions, is to give the learner, whose SA level is nil in most cases, as set of guidelines to enable him to survive long enough to commence the learning process.”
Pre-war training - “Seemed content to teach us to fly the Spitfire but not to fight it.”
“Our problem was how to get through half a dozen fights”
Hartmann – slow start then figured it out, remarkable for dealing with combat stress
Even very experienced veterans can be taken aback by an aggressive counter attack
Peace makes high attrition level unacceptable in training
“How do you train for the most dangerous game in the world by being as safe as possible?”
Paradox of selection – looking for those who do well organizationally versus can fight
If SA could be quantified, it would trump most everything
The fighters were being built for peacetime use; not for war, and the pilots followed the same pattern.
Soviets – as for training, they know and accept that people occasionally get killed; they try to minimize it, but not at the expense of realism.
To keep the workload within manageable limits, flying and maneuvering the fighter had to become second nature.
"The aim, through constant training and practice is for the pilot to achieve a high level of proficiency. This is analogous to professional sportsmen, particularly in the area of team ball. Like air combat, just a few of them are outstanding in their chose sport, the ace perhaps. No one knows what really makes them stand out against their fellows; it is equally certain that they have their spells of being off-form, but basically, they have flair. Other train and practice just as hard but cannot obtain the same results, except perhaps on rare occurrences. But no matter how hard the fighter pilot trains, there remains the indefinable something that makes the difference between being an ace and merely being good."
"They will be the ones with the mysterious ability to extract, retain, and project more from the available information than their fellows. They will be the ones with the ace factor.”
“we can only relate what we have done that worked effectively a good percentage of time in the past, and hope that these basic set of circumstances aid by forming a general background of knowledge from which you can draw instinctively when the chips are down.”
Two good aerial training fights a week at minimum to maintain proficiency
Assume every pilot you meet is the world’s best and maneuver your aircraft accordingly until he shows you he is not.
Actual leadership experience beats years in service

[Mr_White]

Thank you!

[Dagga Boy]

The nuggets and correlations to gunfighting in the above are staggering!

[John Hearne]

First, Dude, thanks for helping me think these things out.


I think then taking those base skills and dealing with more difficult circumstances further increases the robustness of the skills - the automaticity - add artificially induced stress, exertion, artificial penalty for failure, the scenario/FOF training modality, as well as greater spatial complexity, serial tasking, and time pressure as found in practical shooting competition.

I would tend to disagree. Automaticity is the result of the quality of the motor programs that have been practiced. The best way to build that quality to practice the skill in isolation and then add complexity. Adding complexity is valuable because it builds confidence in your skills but there isn't anything that suggests it will improve automaticity. I am not saying that the complexity is unimportant - confidence is crucial but the complexity won't improve the skill performance.



I don't know, I maybe come down more on the nurture side of the argument than you do. I think GMs, even champion ones, are much more made than born. Although I would agree that that question is largely moot for our purposes here, since even if GMs are made and not born, very few, especially in aggregate at the institutional or general public level, will have the motivation and resource to reach that level of skill.

I tended along the same lines and bought the 10,000 hour rule. The ugly fact seems to be that two people can do the same 10,000 hours and arrive at very different skill levels. There seems to be a clear synergy between your base composition and your ability to learn. The people with better base composition will learn more for the same effort in practice. Even if they just gain a .001% advantage for each hour of practice, at the end they are way ahead. The advantages seem to compound like interest.

Vision seems to be important in a lot of sports. Jelly Bryce swore that he saw every bullet he fired. I suspect that he did but very few of us have the visual acuity and see speed to do that. I heard an interview with Robby Leatham and he commented that at 50 years old he could still see the 45 caliber bullet holes in the target at 50 yards - that is visual acuity several orders of magnitude off the average and is really amazing considering that visual acuity tends to decrease after 30. I suspect that most anyone with a reasonable base could make GM but their ability to be competitive at the top levels just won't be there.

If I had multiple millions of dollars, I would love to study top shooters in the same fashion that top athletes in other sports have been studied. Epstein references a world class kayaker that could not win at the top levels. When their muscle composition was checked, they were very biased towards fast twitch muscle versus slow twitch. This kayaker switched from longer races to short ones and became absolutely dominant.

[GJM]

OK, here is my theory as regards the relationship between technical skills you possess and technical skills you can deliver in a lethal encounter.

1) You start out with your own level of technical shooting skills. These skills can be measured using a variety of tests.

2) During a first lethal encounter, there will be a extremely large variation in what percentage of "calm" technical shooting skills can be attained -- ranging from 0 percent of your technical skills to 100 percent of your calm technical skills. This is short hand for all bets are off for the first incident. I would't bet on research being able to successfully predict how someone does the first time. I believe a lot of the variation is related purely to how different individuals are wired.

3) After that first lethal encounter, there will be a narrower delta between calm technical ability and the percentage of your technical ability you can deliver in a crisis. There is fertile ground for research in studying both how to optimize technical training to deliver the highest percentage of calm skills in a crisis and what psychological characteristics are likely associated with your ability to deliver a high percentage of your calm technical skills.

After the range of performance loss between calm and crisis skills has been determined through research, the bean counters can then decide what level of crisis skills they are willing to pay for, and then the trainers can design programs to train to a level, that after deducting for the average crisis discount, they are satisfied with.

[1slow]

John,
Thanks loads this is really helpful!

[Chemsoldier]

3 parts: what he can see, what he can do, what he can hit (marksmanship is 1/3)


A lot of good material but this one really strikes me as one of the biggest take-aways.

[SeriousStudent]

As an aside, if you want a really interesting domain with lots of carryover, take aviation and add guns and missles to it - aerial combat. I've found a lot of interesting material in this realm. It's not longer published but the book "The Ace Factor" (recommended by Ken Good) was fascinating.

John, thank you for the book recommendation. I snagged a paperback copy off Amazon for $5.

Very interesting discussion, I have been wondering about things like this for a long time. I appreciate the research, and look forward to reading your dissertation after you publish it.

(Not talking smack of any kind, I'm serious.)

[John Hearne]

OK, here is my theory as regards the relationship between technical skills you possess and technical skills you can deliver in a lethal encounter.
2) During a first lethal encounter, there will be a extremely large variation in what percentage of "calm" technical shooting skills can be attained -- ranging from 0 percent of your technical skills to 100 percent of your calm technical skills. This is short hand for all bets are off for the first incident. I would't bet on research being able to successfully predict how someone does the first time. I believe a lot of the variation is related purely to how different individuals are wired.


There are some nuggets of truth in your theory, it just isn't complete, and I only see one point that I would heavily contest. Both Cirillo and Reitz were able to pull off very solid performances in their first fight. Cirillo's first fight was his most famous and his most difficult but his performance was utterly amazing.

My major point of contention (and you aren't saying this but I'm reading it in there) is that there is no relationship between the level of technical shooting skill and your ability to deliver that skill in a fight. Everything that I have read leads me to believe that once one's skill is sufficient to be overlearned to some degree, the odds of that skill being used increase. Overlearned skills are clearly insulated from the effects of arousal seen in critical events. The more they are overlearned, the more they are insulated and therefore they tend to be more accessible.

I would also offer, primary for evolutionary reasons, that it isn't until your third successful engagement that you really hit your stride and begin to deliver more of your potential in a fight. This is the theory behind force-on-force training. The idea is to get you through your first engagements with a safety net so that your first "real" engagement is not so tough to handle.

Your mind/body has two major systems it can use to solve problems. If you engage the lymbic/emotional system you see all of the effects that we're warned about (fight/flight/freeze/posture, SNS dump, etc.) and you won't access much if any of your technical skill. If you stay in your rational mind, you are far more likely to use your shooting skills, remain calm, and have a dominating win.

Much of my presentation is a review of existing research. One of the few original contribution is a flow chart that attempts to predict which mental system you're likely to use in an encounter. There are a lot of moving parts and I'm sure I'm missing some but it seems pretty solid. Because the chart is original, I'm hesitant to post it in a public forum right now.

It is probably incorrect to argue that the degree of skill accessibility is fixed during a fight. I offer that your degree of system use will vary depending on how well the unfolding events meet your expectations or mental map. Events unfolding in congruence with your expectations tend to keep the rational mind engaged. When the events unfold in contradiction to your mental map or you have no mental map, you slip into the emotional mind and you're brain will slip into fight/flight/freeze/posture.

[BJJ]

I just want to say that this may be the best, most enriching forum thread I have ever read. Thanks for all the thoughtful contributions. I'll go back to lurking and learning now.

[Chuck Haggard]

Ken wrote a paper on intuition and experience, not exactly on the same topic, but I strongly think the same factors come into play.

Very good reading IMHO;

http://www.strategosintl.com/pdfs/Intuitive-Techniques.pdf

[GJM]

There are some nuggets of truth in your theory, it just isn't complete, and I only see one point that I would heavily contest. Both Cirillo and Reitz were able to pull off very solid performances in their first fight. Cirillo's first fight was his most famous and his most difficult but his performance was utterly amazing.

Don't believe you got what I meant. I just said that the first fight range was much greater than successive fights, that the percentage performance loss ranged from 0-100 percent, and the explanation for the larger range was how different folks are wired. Cirillo doing great is perfectly consistent with my theory. Paul Kirchner, our mutual friend and author of a book on Cirillo would have some insights on this.



My major point of contention (and you aren't saying this but I'm reading it in there) is that there is no relationship between the level of technical shooting skill and your ability to deliver that skill in a fight.

Nope. Obviously the greater the technical skill you start with the greater the skill level you have to bring to the fight -- regardless of the percentage discount.


Everything that I have read leads me to believe that once one's skill is sufficient to be overlearned to some degree, the odds of that skill being used increase. Overlearned skills are clearly insulated from the effects of arousal seen in critical events. The more they are overlearned, the more they are insulated and therefore they tend to be more accessible.

I still think you are attaching greater significance to overlearned than I do. Most people have tons of overlearned skills -- everything from driving, to brushing your teeth, and most activities of daily living. The key to me isn't whether it is overlearned, but rather what is their level of technical excellence in these things they can do subconsciously.



I would also offer, primary for evolutionary reasons, that it isn't until your third successful engagement that you really hit your stride and begin to deliver more of your potential in a fight. This is the theory behind force-on-force training. The idea is to get you through your first engagements with a safety net so that your first "real" engagement is not so tough to handle.

Last I looked, I have 400 something hours in a level D flight simulator (considered realistic enough by the FAA you can log it as time of flight, and be legal to fly a type jet based just on the simulator training). I view simulator and force on force to really be three dimensional square range training -- and the reason for that is you (probably) won't die in the simulator or the force on force training. As soon as death as a result is off the table, the stress level dramatically changes.

[ToddG]

It seems to me that we're talking about preconscious competence which is essentially "what you can do when you don't have to think about it."

Most folks are familiar with the tree that stretches from unconscious incompetence (you don't know how little you know) to unconscious competence (you can do it without thinking about it). The problem I've always had with that model is it presumes there's a journey where the IC guy is shooting a drill in 10s and the UC is doing it in 5s.

Everyone has a UC "level" -- and based on a discussion I had with one of John's friends and fellow trainers I've learned it's more appropriate to refer to it as preconscious rather than unconscious for whatever that's worth to you. Preconscious skill level is what you can do when you don't get to think about how to do it before& during the act.

If you've never fired a gun before you have a level of preconscious skill: it's essentially zero, but it exists. And so that's the level of skill you'll be able to bring to bear. A lot of people with near-zero preconscious win fights because their opponents aren't any better, luck exists, and candidly the amount of real skill needed to point shoot someone in the chest at 10ft is amazingly low. As an aside, that's why I'm not as big a detractor of point/threat focused shooting for the undedicated as many of my peers: I think someone who spends a day getting confident at doing the easy part well under a little bit of stress is better prepared than the guy who is shown the perfect way to hold, sight, press but never builds those skills to the point that they can be called upon in a preconscious way.

As you get better, your preconscious skill -- what I've always thought of as true on demand ability rises because your brain has taught the muscles to do things with greater precision and speed with less direct input. You program yourself and an efficient program just executes better than an inefficient one.

The best example I can think of is SLG. He's never going to win USPSA Nationals and there are people on this board who will have personal records greater than his. But SLG can pick up a gun and do whatever he's going to do with it, every time, when he's angry and cold and hurt, and just execute the program properly. To me, for what I care about, that's a million times better than posting your best-ever one time video of a 3.5s FAST. It's not about what he can pull off when things are perfect and a little lucky. It's whether he's the guy who can walk through the doorway and deliver every time no matter what.

That's why my goals are based on things like lots of reps and getting technique right & understood. Write the program. Perfect the program. Execute the program. Sure that will mean over time you should be getting better at the conscious level (which in turn will eventually translate into the preconscious). But it also means you need to be careful about somersaulting around the training technique universe and trying fifty million different things looking for "the best" because you're robbing yourself of the overlearning necessary to program that efficient, on-demand program.

At the moment of truth, if the physical skill needed is to put a pair of rounds into a slowly moving 6" zone at 8yd in 2s -- based on whatever your unique circumstance is -- you can either do it, get lucky, or fail. Your tactics might be so awesome that they expand your success window; they might be so bad that you're on a tighter limit than you should have been. But once the necessary parameter is established for this one moment we're trying to live through, you can either do that on demand under distraction and stress thanks to your program or are just a rookie closing his eyes, pointing his gun, and jerking the trigger with hope in his heart.

[John Hearne]

Ken wrote a paper on intuition and experience, not exactly on the same topic, but I strongly think the same factors come into play. Very good reading IMHO; http://www.strategosintl.com/pdfs/Intuitive-Techniques.pdf

That was excellent, thanks for sharing. I'd have to say that his whole article tracks with my major themes. It really scary as I had already added pictures of of the Liberian firearms use to my presentaion. I'm using them as an example of the emotional use of a firearm but intuitive is essentially the same thing.

"Who's Training Who" has been one of my favorite training essays for years, now this one is fighting for top honors.

[Kevin B.]

What performance thresholds in common drills/quals/rankings suggest overlearning/automaticity is contributing to the observed performance?

I do not think that being able to demonstrate a skill at a high level of performance necessarily means that the skill is overlearned.

[John Hearne]

I do not think that being able to demonstrate a skill at a high level of performance necessarily means that the skill is overlearned.

Yes and no. Are there some folks who are genetically gifted and can learn and execute physical skills at much higher levels for levels of practice that are way below average? Absolutely, I work with one of those guys and I HATE him for it. There are definitely some folks on the low side of physical skill mastery - folks who can practice a lot and not make the same gains that the average person does for the same amount of practice. In the Epstien book, he referenced studies of aerobic and strength training. The range of improvement from solid programs was 0-300%. So there were people who lifted and gained no appreciable strength gains and people who gained way above average. I'd say the phenomena is out there and well documented.

When we look at the motor skills research (see for good starting points Schmidt's Motor Control and Learning or Proctor's Skill Acquistion and Human Performance) we see that overlearned skills have certain characteristics. Besides being better quantitatively (faster, more accurate), overlearned skills are differently qualitatively. I don't remember all of the differences but I do recall that the actual tension of the muscles during overlearned activities are reduced over those in merely learned skills. The idea that smooth is fast is in all likelihood the result of overlearned muscle programs and the different manifestations of overlearned skills.

Let's talk stop talking about shooting for a bit. Suppose I wanted you to field strip a Sig P226. I'd talk about it, show you how to do it, and then walk you through the process. At the point that you perform it once, without my input, the skills is technically learned. You have demonstrated the ability to perform the task but you certainly haven't mastered it. Now suppose that for the next six months, you spend 15 minutes a day taking apart and reassembling you P226. At the end of the six months, you will be able to complete the process much quicker than the first time you did it. If we measured the amount of mental effort you were using, it would be dramatically lower than when you started. If we measured the tension in your arm muscles, there would be less than when you started. At the end of six months, you could probably talk the whole time and the process would proceed for all practical purposes - automatically.

Now, let's say that after six months of practice, we suddenly add complexity to the field stripping process. We start yelling at you, we strobe the lights, we set off fireworks by your feet, we even cut off the lights and make you do it in the dark. The person who has really overlearned the process is going to be much more successful in completing the field strip under those conditions. They are certainly going to be more successful than the person who learned how to do it, practiced it twice, and then didn't touch a P226 for six months.

This is science so there nothing proven to 100% certainty - we only disprove a hypothesis. Are there outliers who could perform at high levels without overlearning - absolutely. For the bulk of the population is performance at a high level, and especially under stress, indicative of overlearning - I would say - YES!

[Kevin B.]

Re-reading my earlier post, I expressed myself poorly.

A better way to put it would be to say a skill does not necessarily need to be performed at a high level of performance to be overlearned. Consequently, measuring the performance of that skill to determine the level of overlearning seems flawed to me. I would agree that performing a skill at a high level is indicative of overlearning.

[GJM]

Something we haven't discussed much in this thread is recently of experience. When I discuss helicopter emergency performance during an engine failure, my instructor pilot friends at Bell and Canadian Helicopters (two of the highest regarded training outfits in the world) tell me that recency of emergency training way trumps total flight hours in predicting a happy outcome.

I certainly would want to test and understand the effect of recency of experience, both live and dry fire, on performance during a shooting. Pure speculation, but I would bet the person doing frequent live fire and dry fire practice would perform at a higher percentage of their calm experience.

[Kevin B.]

Something we haven't discussed much in this thread is recently of experience. When I discuss helicopter emergency performance during an engine failure, my instructor pilot friends at Bell and Canadian Helicopters (two of the highest regarded training outfits in the world) tell me that recency of emergency training way trumps total flight hours in predicting a happy outcome.

I certainly would want to test and understand the effect of recency of experience, both live and dry fire, on performance during a shooting. Pure speculation, but I would bet the person doing frequent live fire and dry fire practice would perform at a higher percentage of their calm experience.

My experience supports this. To the larger issue of training, I believe Ken Murray calls this the Principles of Primacy and Recency. It made a great deal of sense as he laid it out and I was able to identify a number of parallels in my training across a variety of disciplines.

[LSP552]

Something we haven't discussed much in this thread is recently of experience. When I discuss helicopter emergency performance during an engine failure, my instructor pilot friends at Bell and Canadian Helicopters (two of the highest regarded training outfits in the world) tell me that recency of emergency training way trumps total flight hours in predicting a happy outcome.

I certainly would want to test and understand the effect of recency of experience, both live and dry fire, on performance during a shooting. Pure speculation, but I would bet the person doing frequent live fire and dry fire practice would perform at a higher percentage of their calm experience.

Excellent point GJM,

That is certainly my personal experience and pretty easy to judge. Are you smoother and a better performer with weekly practice or after laying off for two months? If you work a particular skill set hard one session is it better on your next trip to the range? How long before you get some rust?

This is an area most agencies really fail at with annual, semi-annual and even quarterly qualifications. Qualifications are easy to do, focused training not so much. Generally, officers on the line during a qual don't receive coaching or any instructor attention other than safety. My personal opinion is it's better to qual once a year, or whatever the minimum State POST standard is, and use the other sessions for focused, intense training designed to build the skill set and keep it recent.

Ken

[John Hearne]

While I admittedly may have se the bar a bit high, I have come to define "good enough" as the following:
1. On a SR-1C target at 25 yards, 10 rounds slow fire into the black
2. On an IPSC A-zone/IDPA -0 Zone at 7 yards:

1.5 second draw
.3 second splits
.5 second transitions
2.25 second slide-lock reload



Where do you think those standards most likely place someone on the overlearning continuim?

[GJM]

Where do you think those standards most likely place someone on the overlearning continuim?

The Wiki* definition is "Overlearning is the pedagogical theory that practising newly acquired skills beyond the point of initial mastery leads to automaticity." Automaticity is "the ability to do things without occupying the mind with the low-level details required, allowing it to become an automatic response pattern or habit. It is usually the result of learning, repetition, and practice...After an activity is sufficiently practiced, it is possible to focus the mind on other activities or thoughts while undertaking an automatized activity"

I still am struggling with the notion that overlearning implies ANY specific level of proficiency, as I read in your question above.To me, overlearning implies you can do it, not that you are good at it. I would evaluate where you are on the continuum of overlearning differently, using measures like can you do it when you are startled, or do it a week from now.

[John Hearne]

Latest speculation in nifty graphic so it must be true. Corrections welcome.

http://i1202.photobucket.com/albums/bb374/ajp3jeh/Gun%20Stuff/speculation_zpsd69c93cf.jpg (http://s1202.photobucket.com/user/ajp3jeh/media/Gun%20Stuff/speculation_zpsd69c93cf.jpg.html)

[GJM]

I think your fundamental premise -- that proficiency is directly related to, and a result of overlearning, as suggested by the chart, is wrong. Your chart is comparing different measures of proficiency, not different levels of overlearning.

[John Hearne]

Wow, I'm going to end up giving my whole presentation, albeit in a disjointed fashion, in this thread. I agree that recency is an incredibly important consideration when discussing these issues. While vastly simplified, the brain writes its important programs on note cards and files them away. The filing is not based on any order but last used. The most recently used "stuff" is at the front and is going to be more quickly accessed ASSUMING EQUAL DEVELOPMENT. One of the advantages of overlearning/transfer to implicit memory/unconscious competence is that those programs seemed to be granted preferential position in the filing system and can be accessed more quickly and even during high arousal states.

GJM - When we corresponded earlier about aviation research, that was the kind of stuff I was looking for. I will be pestering you soon for your contacts.

[John Hearne]

I think your fundamental premise -- that proficiency is directly related to, and a result of overlearning, as suggested by the chart, is wrong. Your chart is comparing different measures of proficiency, not different levels of overlearning.

I'm not trying to be snotty or snide, here but please, humor me for a second.

My sum knowledge of overlearning/implicit memory is not limited to the Wiki articles. I have been spending a lot of time in a university library reading peer reviewed academic articles in this area for some time. While I haven't read them in their entirety, I have read the relevant chapters in the gold standard academic texts in these fields.

The literature very clearly accepts with scientific certainty that overlearning (some call even call it overtraining now) improves:

accuracy
speed
accessibility under stress
amount of mental resources needed to execute
fluidity of movement
ability to learn more complex tasks based on the overlearned material


My premise is that in the realm of technical shooting skill, these accepted advantages will manifest themselves in superior performance on commonly accepted standards. I am NOT saying that it is a perfect relationship. I am NOT saying that it is a 1:1 relationship. I am willing to accept that none of the common measures are perfect metrics for what we're trying to measure.

As people intimately familiar with the domain of pistol shooting and arguably experts within that field, we should be able to speculate about what levels of performance on common measures correlate with the advantages that overlearning is known to offer.

Regarding the chart, it is doing two things, comparing levels of proficiencies across different standards AND trying to guess at the relationship with degrees of certainty of overlearning. The labels on the chart are not stating anything with certainty, they clearly read "suggest."

So let's play a game. Let's take 5 minutes and pretend I'm right, that a relationship exists (even if you don't think it does) and speculate as to how these advantages might correlate with common measures of shooting performance. Pretty please, with f'ing sugar on top....

[Redhat]

Something we haven't discussed much in this thread is recently of experience. When I discuss helicopter emergency performance during an engine failure, my instructor pilot friends at Bell and Canadian Helicopters (two of the highest regarded training outfits in the world) tell me that recency of emergency training way trumps total flight hours in predicting a happy outcome.

I certainly would want to test and understand the effect of recency of experience, both live and dry fire, on performance during a shooting. Pure speculation, but I would bet the person doing frequent live fire and dry fire practice would perform at a higher percentage of their calm experience.

Continuing with the aviation theme...what about Capt Chesley Sullenberger's performance during his in-flight emergency. Has he written anything on performance under stress that might be useful here?

[John Hearne]

Continuing with the aviation theme...what about Capt Chesley Sullenberger's performance during his in-flight emergency. Has he written anything on performance under stress that might be useful here?

"One way of looking at this might be that for 42 years, I've been making small, regular deposits in this bank of experience, education and training. And on January 15 the balance was sufficient so that I could make a very large withdrawal."

[Redhat]

"One way of looking at this might be that for 42 years, I've been making small, regular deposits in this bank of experience, education and training. And on January 15 the balance was sufficient so that I could make a very large withdrawal."

Back when it happened I seem to recall reading he made regular trips to the simulator to practice emergency procedures. I was curious if he had written anything on training.

[Kevin B.]

Where do you think those standards most likely place someone on the overlearning continuim?

I would speculate that someone that is able to deliver that level of performance on demand has probably performed a sufficient number of correct repetitions to have overlearned those skills.

However, the point of my earlier post was that just because someone does not have a fast draw or a fast reload, does not necessarily mean that they have not overlearned the skill. I have shot with some pretty competent individuals with a significant amount of real world experience. I was surprised at their relatively slow draw (1.8-2.0 seconds)In looking closer at it, their training program did not require them to cultivate a particularly fast draw. They were able to meet the standard required of them with a draw at that speed. That level of performance was exported when they were required to execute the draw in isolation.

In the context of this discussion, I would absolutely say the individuals in question had overlearned the draw. I have no doubt they could execute the draw in a complex and stressful situation. In fact, some had. Nor do I question that they were probably capable of delivering a substantially better performance than they initially demonstrated. In fact, most, if not all, were able to get under 1.5 seconds in a relatively short period of time once that was that was established as the "acceptable" standard.

But the fact remains, the default draw speed that they had overlearned was substantially slower than what they were capable of delivering. Assessing their degree of overlearning based on their initial performance would have yielded a different result than assessing them based on their subsequent performance.

ETA: I am not trying to sharpshoot your premise, just reconcile it with my experience.

[John Hearne]

However, the point of my earlier post was that just because someone does not have a fast draw or a fast reload, does not necessarily mean that they have not overlearned the skill....their training program did not require them to cultivate a particularly fast draw....I would absolutely say the individuals in question had overlearned the draw...most, if not all, were able to get under 1.5 seconds in a relatively short period of time once that was that was established as the "acceptable" standard...Assessing their degree of overlearning based on their initial performance would have yielded a different result than assessing them based on their subsequent performance.

I think that were in damn near 100% agreement and I haven't fully described the overlearning phenomena.

Overlearning does not exist at a binary level - at its most basic level it is any degree of practice beyond simple skill mastery. There are very clearly degrees of overlearning and we tend to see the improvements associated with it as the degree of overlearning increases. One of the hallmarks of overlearning is that it allows one to learn more complex skills more quickly. I would offer that their previous overlearning was a sufficient base to allow them to quickly improve their degree of overlearning and meet the new standard.

Your story is also important because it shows how important institutional standards are in defining performance. ~85% of the people in an organization will shoot to whatever standard is defined as acceptable. If you increase the standard, you do increase performance on testing and probably in the field as well. Your standards are going to define maximum likely performance so setting them high is important.

[ToddG]

I know John didn't invent it but I hate the "over learning" term... it makes me think of overweight and similar negatively-connoted things. John has defined it for us multiple times now but someone of us -- myself included -- still seem to spin off into different definitions for some reason.

I do think George is correct that over learning and absolute skill level are separate. You can do a 2s Bill Drill until you've over learned it (can do it without thinking under stress, bad circumstances, etc). That doesn't mean you're as "skilled" as the guy who can do one in 1.5s when he's completely plugged in, calm, practiced, etc.

As I'm getting it, over learned (I still prefer preconscious or on-demand) is the ability to pull a particular level of performance out of your body without degradation under circumstances that would cause degradation in someone who isn't over-learned.

[KevinB]

People also retain learning under stress better than they do in a non stressed environment. Which I would strenuously agree with GJM's post about the recency of emergency training (or emergency non training)

I don't think you can ever come up with a fair/correct chart between different disciples, departments, agencies etc - as its all apples to oranges.

[David Armstrong]

I will have to respectfully disagree here. I see very few dominating wins in the LE world. What I see are exchanges of gunfire in which the person who sucks less is the LEO. If two guys empty magazines at each other and one runs off and the other is still there is that really a win for the guy left standing there? I realize that there are no solid numbers on LE hit rates but I see 15-18% as the most commonly accepted number. If LEO's are hitting with one of every six shots they fire is the testing methodology that deems them good enough valid?
I'm simply giong on what was the original premies as I understand it: "Ken said that in order to win armed encounters, you don't need to be great but you do need to be good." By that criteria I would stand by my statement. I'm not sure how one would determine a "dominating win" versus a "non-dominating win" without becoming mired down. One wins or one does not win seems the appropriate criteria if one is judging what is needed to win a gunfight.


I am aware of two studies that tried to correlate qualification scores with street performance. One found no correlation whatsoever and the other found a relationship but not a relationship that was statistically significant. If would offer that unless a qualification requires reflexive gunhandling, it probably won't be very predictive. I'd also point out that we still see some horrible losses on the LE side. I think it was the FBI data brought out the number of 85% of officers feloniously murdered never drawing their guns.
I certainly agree, it seems most if not all the research I've seen also indictes little or no correlation between qualification scores and actual performance. I'm not sure what relevance "officers murdered before they could draw" has to gunfighting.


I would concede that in most instances a fairly low level of technical shooting ability is required. My question is how do we make sure that we can consistently bring that minimal level of skill to the fight - rain or shine, day or night, best day or worst day. My thought is that ONE way to do this is to have a level of technical skill that is accessible during periods of high arousal. As best I can determine, the skills that are accessible under high levels of arousal are overlearned to the point of automaticity.
Again, I'm not sure there is some sort of need. If we regularly saw folks losing gunfights because of inability to utilize training during a fight that would be one thing, I just haven't seen that. What I see is that if a person has a gun and uses it in any manner they tend to win the fight.


I won't argue. There are two aspects to risk assessment - probability and severity. The probability of needing to solve a high level technical shooting problem in the field are low. However, that is not the only metric we use. When you consider the severity of the penalty for not having a high level of technical shooting skill, it can be extreme and to me negates much of the probability arguments. To summarize - it's not the odds, it's the stakes.
I'm still not seeing the penalty for not having a high level of technical skill. I'm seeing low levels of skill tend to be sufficient. As I've often asked, is the person who is capable of hadling 99.99% of the situations really that much better off than the person who is only capable of hadling 99.95%?


I'd also offer that perhaps, we don't see a lot of high level of technical shooting in the LE world. Is this because there is no need for it or because very few people can pull it off? What about the LAPD guy, trained by Scottie Reitz, that shot the hostage taker at the Mexican Embassy some years back? If we had more cops in the field with that skill set (does anyone argue that there are lots of those guys out there) would be see it more?
I would suggest there is little need for it.


IMPORTANT DISCLAIMER
Please understand, I am not saying that technical shooting skill fixes everything. I fully accept that technical shooting skills is but one of many variables that can explain performance. Technical shooting skill has the advantage of being easily quantified. I'd also point out, that experience and the judgement it leads to is not readily accessible to a lot of folks. While experience/judgement is the best solution, developing technical shooting skills is something that can be done by most anyone. And for a lot of us it is "fun" and something we are willing to do. FWIW, I will also address physical fitness which is another realm that can have an impact on your ability to perform under stress and one that we have ready access to control.
No disagreement. Technical skills are great things to have. I've just not seen anything to indicate not having good technical skills handicaps one to any significant degree.

[Chuck Whitlock]

John,
Your descriptions of overlearning bring to mind a little personal experience. For a while I was using the SSIII/070 Safariland holster. I practiced regularly with it, but on qual days I never struggled, but felt slow, or that I was doing the step-by-step thing. However, on the street, I remember at least three different times when my sidearm just "magically appeared in my hand". Is this kinda what you're driving at?

I also concur with the thoughts on recency. I have recently noticed that I have gotten sloppy with my grip and trigger control, which I directly attribute to not hitting the range nearly as regularly as I should. These are going to be my major immediate focus in my own practice regimen.

[John Hearne]

Everyone I've spoken to about this project has HATED the word "overlearn" and all of its variants. Since the goal of overlearning is automaticity, I've changed the word used to describe the performance level I'm looking for. Hopefully, I should only offend the cardiologists with the word change.

I would fully acknowledge that it is possible to have some automaticity if one isn't super fast. I would offer that it is impossible to be super fast without some degree of automaticity. I would say that lower levels of performance do not exclude overlearning and the resultant automaticity, but that higher levels absolutely require it (except for some genetically gifted freaks with incredible kinesthetic intelligence and eye sight)

Thoughts on this one?
http://i1202.photobucket.com/albums/bb374/ajp3jeh/Gun%20Stuff/chart_blue_zpsad08aec4.jpg (http://s1202.photobucket.com/user/ajp3jeh/media/Gun%20Stuff/chart_blue_zpsad08aec4.jpg.html)

[Mr_White]

Everyone I've spoken to about this project has HATED the word "overlearn" and all of its variants. Since the goal of overlearning is automaticity, I've changed the word used to describe the performance level I'm looking for. Hopefully, I should only offend the cardiologists with the word change.

My preference is for automaticity, too.


I would fully acknowledge that it is possible to have some automaticity if one isn't super fast. I would offer that it is impossible to be super fast without some degree of automaticity. I would say that lower levels of performance do not exclude overlearning and the resultant automaticity, but that higher levels absolutely require it (except for some genetically gifted freaks with incredible kinesthetic intelligence and eye sight)

I was going to bring this up as one of the standout remaining points of difference of opinion in this thread, but I am in full agreement with what you say above.


Thoughts on this one?
http://i1202.photobucket.com/albums/bb374/ajp3jeh/Gun%20Stuff/chart_blue_zpsad08aec4.jpg (http://s1202.photobucket.com/user/ajp3jeh/media/Gun%20Stuff/chart_blue_zpsad08aec4.jpg.html)

I like that one. I don't think I would have rated 'maxing POST qual' as highly as you did, but I am thinking of the Oregon qual, so there are probably some differences there. Overall I like it. Nice chart.

[John Hearne]

I don't think I would have rated 'maxing POST qual' as highly as you did, but I am thinking of the Oregon qual, so there are probably some differences there. Overall I like it. Nice chart.
This the the problem I'm facing. I haven't see all of the LE qual courses out there and I'm probably biased by the fact that ours is a bit more demanding than most. My main goal was for the cops to realize that most of them really aren't good shots and would benefit from additional work. I will definitely be changing that number now that I see where it is after a few days away from the project.

What about the FAM course and its positioning? I like the course because it's been around a long time, has this mystical quality to it (it SO hard), and is really easy to pass if you can shoot moderately well.

[Kevin B.]

I cannot see the chart, but I would put a passing score on the FAM qualification toward the upper end of competent.

[Mr_White]

This the the problem I'm facing. I haven't see all of the LE qual courses out there and I'm probably biased by the fact that ours is a bit more demanding than most. My main goal was for the cops to realize that most of them really aren't good shots and would benefit from additional work. I will definitely be changing that number now that I see where it is after a few days away from the project.

What about the FAM course and its positioning? I like the course because it's been around a long time, has this mystical quality to it (it SO hard), and is really easy to pass if you can shoot moderately well.

Given the large target zone on the FAM qual, I'd probably be inclined to put it a little lower, like maybe closer to USPSA B than A class. But not a huge difference from where you have it.

[JHC]

Is there any reason one of the more famous standardized drill/tests - El Presidente is not included on the continuum? Considering the reasons Cooper promoted it; combining as it does, a turn, draw, shooting, transitions, and a reload, it seems like a player.

[John Hearne]

Yes there is a reason - oversight on my part. :) Since you mentioned it, where does it fall? Assume classic definintion - 10 yards, targets 3 yards apart, IDPA or USPSA target, weapon loaded with 6 & 6.

Remember, I am trying to relate the skill performance level to a probable level of automaticity in basic technical shooting skill. You can make a comparison between levels but that is not the point of the chart. For instance, being a non-paper GM requires a good bit of match stradegy and footwork that is not relevant to basic techincal shooting skill

[ToddG]

I think EP is going to be really hard to add because at the top end it is so much about specific EP technique.

[jlw]

Is there any reason one of the more famous standardized drill/tests - El Presidente is not included on the continuum? Considering the reasons Cooper promoted it; combining as it does, a turn, draw, shooting, transitions, and a reload, it seems like a player.


It is included as part of the IDPA classifier.

[Mr_White]

Yes there is a reason - oversight on my part. :) Since you mentioned it, where does it fall? Assume classic definintion - 10 yards, targets 3 yards apart, IDPA or USPSA target, weapon loaded with 6 & 6.

I'd roughly gauge a clean-ish El Prez something like this:

under 4 seconds at the top end

5 seconds above USPSA M class

6 seconds about USPSA A class

8 seconds a little below USPSA B class

Those times might be slightly low because I am thinking of the targets being spaced closer to one yard apart.


being a non-paper GM requires a good bit of match stradegy and footwork that is not relevant to basic techincal shooting skill

Just a couple of comments:

1. The rank of GM is typically achieved via short-form classifier courses that almost exclusively test gunhandling and shooting skills and don't include much match strategy or footwork. The term 'paper GM' may be thrown around the internet a lot, for fun, derision, and mockery (I know you aren't using it that way), but I would consider anyone who's earned the rank of GM to be an extremely formidable shooter not to be underestimated.

2. Even though the point about match strategy and footwork may be valid in the totality of a match, I think that point is way overblown sometimes. GMs outshoot the lower ranked shooters, in the metrics of both accuracy and time. They might also play the game better, but they are generally shooting better too.

[John Hearne]

1. The rank of GM is typically achieved via short-form classifier courses that almost exclusively test gunhandling and shooting skills and don't include much match strategy or footwork. The term 'paper GM' may be thrown around the internet a lot, for fun, derision, and mockery (I know you aren't using it that way), but I would consider anyone who's earned the rank of GM to be an extremely formidable shooter not to be underestimated.

2. Even though the point about match strategy and footwork may be valid in the totality of a match, I think that point is way overblown sometimes. GMs outshoot the lower ranked shooters, in the metrics of both accuracy and time. They might also play the game better, but they are generally shooting better too.

Thanks for the input, my experience in the USPSA world is limited to three matches since 2008. I really need this input because you guys are smarter than me. I appreciate the issue of "paper GM' - that helps a lot.

To throw this out, is there that much percentage difference in basic skills (draw speed, emergency reload, etc.) at the upper levels. For instance, percentage wise is a USPSA-Master that much faster and accurate in raw shooting skill than an IDPA Master. Are IDPA Masters really 20% slower than USPSA Masters or are we really applying a lot of magnification to see the difference and the magnification exaggerates the difference?

[jetfire]

I'd roughly gauge a clean-ish El Prez something like this:

under 4 seconds at the top end

5 seconds above USPSA M class

6 seconds about USPSA A class

8 seconds a little below USPSA B class

Those times might be slightly low because I am thinking of the targets being spaced closer to one yard apart.


Yeah, the El Pres that appears as a USPSA classifier has the targets very close. The El Pres in the IDPA classifier has them staggered in height. El Pres has sort of become like "1911" it's a generic term for a turn, draw 6 r 6 drill on three targets.

[Mr_White]

Thanks for the input, my experience in the USPSA world is limited to three matches since 2008. I really need this input because you guys are smarter than me. I appreciate the issue of "paper GM' - that helps a lot.

To throw this out, is there that much percentage difference in basic skills (draw speed, emergency reload, etc.) at the upper levels. For instance, percentage wise is a USPSA-Master that much faster and accurate in raw shooting skill than an IDPA Master. Are IDPA Masters really 20% slower than USPSA Masters or are we really applying a lot of magnification to see the difference and the magnification exaggerates the difference?

One more comment on the USPSA GM issue: the caveat with USPSA rankings, as has been noted by several posters in the thread, is that while you do have to shoot at a certain level over time to achieve a certain ranking, you don't have to do it every time - it can be different than what's considered 'on demand' performance. That said, I personally would still consider anyone with GM next to their name to be a highly skilled shooter.

When you start looking at IDPA vs. USPSA rankings, I think it's possible to be confounded a bit by the fact that the two games are scored differently and thus one may play more to a given shooter's strengths than the other, like an IDPA M who only makes USPSA C because he's very accurate, but slow, or a USPSA A who only makes Expert in IDPA because he's really fast, but not supremely accurate.

But, from my own reference point on this (I could shoot on-demand IDPA Master classifier scores, but squeaked into USPSA B class around the same time) I think that generally, yes, there is that much of a difference.

[jetfire]

I think the IDPA Master/USPSA B is a pretty solid equation. With the new, tighter times on IDPA Master it may get a little closer towards mid-b, but when I was shooting USPSA frequently, I was already and IDPA master and shot right into middle b-class my first classifier match. The highest I ever got was a few points away from earning my Master card in L10, but then I basically quit shooting USPSA.

The problem with IDPA Master is that there is a HUGE disparity in skill within the Master class. At the bottom end you have guys who just squeaked in on a classifier run, or got a match bump from pounding a bunch of Experts, then there's this huge field of dudes in the middle, and finally you have the guys at the top who are legitimate contenders to win a championship and get promoted to DM.

[Mr_White]

The problem with IDPA Master is that there is a HUGE disparity in skill within the Master class. At the bottom end you have guys who just squeaked in on a classifier run, or got a match bump from pounding a bunch of Experts, then there's this huge field of dudes in the middle, and finally you have the guys at the top who are legitimate contenders to win a championship and get promoted to DM.

I think that is very true. When the National Champion guys are shooting the IDPA Classifier just under 60, and the cutoff is in the 90s, that is going to be a pretty broad ranking.

Someone relayed an interesting and partly similar comment from their instructor (a top USPSA guy in his time) to me a while back: that they considered USPSA B class to represent a huge range of skill levels, and be roughly the equivalent of having a black belt in some or another martial art, with further degrees of refinement in that black belt represented by advancement up the percentages to the A, M, and GM rankings.

An interesting thought, anyway.

[jetfire]

I think that is very true. When the National Champion guys are shooting the IDPA Classifier just under 60, and the cutoff is in the 90s, that is going to be a pretty broad ranking.

Someone relayed an interesting and partly similar comment from their instructor (a top USPSA guy in his time) to me a while back: that they considered USPSA B class to represent a huge range of skill levels, and be roughly the equivalent of having a black belt in some or another martial art, with further degrees of refinement in that black belt represented by advancement up the percentages to the A, M, and GM rankings.

An interesting thought, anyway.

That's actually a pretty fair comparison. B-class in USPSA means that you've put in the work to get good enough at shooting that you're not longer the middle/bottom of the pack. I had a pretty squared away GM tell me that once you're B-class, you know how to shoot, reload and do all that stuff. What gets you into A and higher is refining those skills down to the bare essentials.

[BN]

I'd roughly gauge a clean-ish El Prez something like this:

under 4 seconds at the top end
5 seconds above USPSA M class
6 seconds about USPSA A class
8 seconds a little below USPSA B class
Those times might be slightly low because I am thinking of the targets being spaced closer to one yard apart.
.

At the first few IDPA Nationals they ran the El Prez as a stage each year. If I remember correctly, Rob Leatham ran it in 7+ seconds clean and smoked everybody else. The targets were 3 yards apart, 10 yards away, maybe different heights and everybody was shooting from concealment.

John, there are a lot of apples and oranges in your chart. Some people specialize in some drills and can't do others well without practice. What can someone do cold?

[Chuck Haggard]

For a long string of our OISs we had a 100% hit rate going, and absolutely dominated the bad guys we were up against. This was with average coppers shooting a slightly upgraded state qual course, but with extra training on mindset, pre assault indicators, tactics, shooting from unconventional positions, and movement. Hence my observation that to win, or even dominate, a gunfight one doesn't necessarily need high speed shooting skills.

Is it nice? Yes, very. Will the ability to make more difficult shots on demand be useful in worst case scenario events? Of course.

[Mr_White]

At the first few IDPA Nationals they ran the El Prez as a stage each year. If I remember correctly, Rob Leatham ran it in 7+ seconds clean and smoked everybody else. The targets were 3 yards apart, 10 yards away, maybe different heights and everybody was shooting from concealment.

Bill, thanks for bringing that up. I remember reading an article by Ken Hackathorn where he referenced some pretty surprising times on the 'original' El Prez when shot under national match pressure by truly top shooters. I am unable to locate the original article, but did find some reference to it on another forum where they also had the times and scores of the shooters in question. So, take this for what it's worth - copied, unverified information that squarely matches what I remember reading in the article proper:



Leatham - 8.81 (1 pt. dn.) CDP
Yost - 8.53 (1 pt. dn.) ESP
Sevigny - 9.11 (2 pt. dn.) SSP
Gary Dunlap - 9.69 (1 pt. dn.) SSR

The original article was referring to an El Prez shot from a hands-up start, with concealment, at 10 yards, staggered height targets spaced 3 yards apart, at an IDPA Nationals, not sure which one.

[BN]

The original article was referring to an El Prez shot from a hands-up start, with concealment, at 10 yards, staggered height targets spaced 3 yards apart, at an IDPA Nationals, not sure which one.

I looked at my match booklets. They shot it in 1998 and 2001. They shot a modified version in 2000 where you had to knock down a popper with your hand and take cover behind a car to shoot. At the time people were shooting a sub 5 second USPSA El Pres. There was a lot of talk at the time, wondering if anybody would shoot the IDPA version in sub 5 seconds cold at a National match with a win on the line. :)

[John Hearne]

I'd roughly gauge a clean-ish El Prez something like this:
under 4 seconds at the top end
5 seconds above USPSA M class
6 seconds about USPSA A class
8 seconds a little below USPSA B class
Those times might be slightly low because I am thinking of the targets being spaced closer to one yard apart.


What if we said a CLEAN El Prez with a slide lock reload and stipulated open carry? I'm thinking that 10 seconds falls at the half way point with the FAM Pass. 7 seconds might fall at the border of "Impossible without?" Alternatively, what about IDPA style scoring in terms of time plus points down?

[Surf]

14 or so pages to catch up on from where I left off. It will take some thinking and time to come up with a reply so I am going to hold a place here before this grows 14 more pages and then my thought process will get even more confuddled.

[Dagga Boy]

For a long string of our OISs we had a 100% hit rate going, and absolutely dominated the bad guys we were up against. This was with average coppers shooting a slightly upgraded state qual course, but with extra training on mindset, pre assault indicators, tactics, shooting from unconventional positions, and movement. Hence my observation that to win, or even dominate, a gunfight one doesn't necessarily need high speed shooting skills.

Is it nice? Yes, very. Will the ability to make more difficult shots on demand be useful in worst case scenario events? Of course.

My experience mirrors yours. Use of the LAPD D qual instead of prior courses, 100% required "hits" along with passing score, heavily upgraded training on both mindset and the gun handling and tactics side. We also used IDPA type courses without the silly rules for our combat courses to supplement the quals along with some very tightly monitored FOF and upgraded defensive tactics training.

[John Hearne]

For reasons I don't fully understand, I love analogies when trying to explain something. There seems to be some confusion over what I'm trying to accomplish so I figured I try this.

Suppose I was interested in the benefits of physical fitness in stressful situations. We have two common metrics, aerobic capacity and strength - think speed and accuracy. I don't care how fast you can run a 1.5 mile per se. I care about the benefits conferred by having good aerobic capacity and am merely using your 1.5 mile time to gain some sense (albeit imperfectly) of your overall fitness level. I get that running a 1.5 mile test v. a 3.0 mile fitness test is different but both would offer a measure of your aerobic capacity.

What I'm trying to find is a benchmark that we can say "this person is definitely fit in an aerobic sense" or "this person has reasonable strength." If that's run the 1.5 mile in under 10:00 then that's one benchmark. We could come up with a similar benchmark for running 3.0 miles and that could be another perfectly valid benchmark of aerobic fitness. We also recognize a point beyond which gains in your 1.5 mile don't mean much from the standpoint of the benefits that aerobic fitness confers.

Does this help?

[Chuck Haggard]

I get it John, however you would also need to determine how healthy is "healthy". Does one need a 50 BPM resting heart rate, or should one go for 40? 35?.....

I think for the most part the guy looking for GM skills to take to a gunfight is trying for the 40BPM........

And, to run with that analogy, you'd also need to determine if that level of aerobic ability negatively impacted other markers. Yes, I can run an ultramarathon, but I can't do 1 rep of body weight bench press, or even 30 push-ups........

[David Armstrong]

Bill, thanks for bringing that up. I remember reading an article by Ken Hackathorn where he referenced some pretty surprising times on the 'original' El Prez when shot under national match pressure by truly top shooters. I am unable to locate the original article, but did find some reference to it on another forum where they also had the times and scores of the shooters in question. So, take this for what it's worth - copied, unverified information that squarely matches what I remember reading in the article proper:

The original article was referring to an El Prez shot from a hands-up start, with concealment, at 10 yards, staggered height targets spaced 3 yards apart, at an IDPA Nationals, not sure which one.
IIRC, Cooper felt that if you could shoot a clean EP in 10 seconds you were an expert. This was with duty-type guns and ammo, of course.

[JHC]

I'd roughly gauge a clean-ish El Prez something like this:

under 4 seconds at the top end

5 seconds above USPSA M class

6 seconds about USPSA A class

8 seconds a little below USPSA B class

Those times might be slightly low because I am thinking of the targets being spaced closer to one yard apart.



.

Personally I think those are too high a standard for this exercise since those I've seen shoot to that level on vid seemed to be shooting guns/gear a far cry from the service pistol and serviceable holsters used commonly for the FAST (note the continuum isn't using sub 3 sec as a marker) or POST quals or FAM, or even the IDPA qual.

Maybe <7 sec <8 sec <10 sec might be it. IDK

{you are on outlier ;) }

[Mr_White]

I'd roughly gauge a clean-ish El Prez something like this:

under 4 seconds at the top end

5 seconds above USPSA M class

6 seconds about USPSA A class

8 seconds a little below USPSA B class

Those times might be slightly low because I am thinking of the targets being spaced closer to one yard apart.


What if we said a CLEAN El Prez with a slide lock reload and stipulated open carry? I'm thinking that 10 seconds falls at the half way point with the FAM Pass. 7 seconds might fall at the border of "Impossible without?" Alternatively, what about IDPA style scoring in terms of time plus points down?


Personally I think those are too high a standard for this exercise since those I've seen shoot to that level on vid seemed to be shooting guns/gear a far cry from the service pistol and serviceable holsters used commonly for the FAST (note the continuum isn't using sub 3 sec as a marker) or POST quals or FAM, or even the IDPA qual.

Maybe <7 sec <8 sec <10 sec might be it.

Certainly, there are El Presidentes and El Presidentes: slidelock vs. in-battery reload, concealment vs. open, stock-ish gun vs. race gun, one yard vs. three yard spacing, staggered vs. uniform heights, guaranteed clean vs. clean-ish.

I don't think most of those factors make a large difference. Maybe a total of a second or a little more to account for concealment, slidelock reload, three yard spacing, and staggered target heights combined?

What I think does make a big difference is a 'guaranteed' clean run vs. a close-to-clean run. I think that is going to jack up any shooter's time, by a lot. This factor being emphasized under the IDPA scoring system is why I think the El Prez times of those top shooters that were cited earlier are as high as they are.

Maybe I am off base, but that's what I tend to think (continuing in this thread's custom of unqualified speculation, of course.) :D

[Lomshek]

For reasons I don't fully understand, I love analogies when trying to explain something. There seems to be some confusion over what I'm trying to accomplish so I figured I try this.

Suppose I was interested in the benefits of physical fitness in stressful situations. We have two common metrics, aerobic capacity and strength - think speed and accuracy. I don't care how fast you can run a 1.5 mile per se. I care about the benefits conferred by having good aerobic capacity and am merely using your 1.5 mile time to gain some sense (albeit imperfectly) of your overall fitness level. I get that running a 1.5 mile test v. a 3.0 mile fitness test is different but both would offer a measure of your aerobic capacity.

What I'm trying to find is a benchmark that we can say "this person is definitely fit in an aerobic sense" or "this person has reasonable strength." If that's run the 1.5 mile in under 10:00 then that's one benchmark. We could come up with a similar benchmark for running 3.0 miles and that could be another perfectly valid benchmark of aerobic fitness. We also recognize a point beyond which gains in your 1.5 mile don't mean much from the standpoint of the benefits that aerobic fitness confers.

Does this help?

Never been in a gun fight so I may be way off.

From what those with experience in gunfight survival/training gunfight survivors say that seems to be somewhere in the middle of your chart. A USPSA C or B shooter or a 7 or lower FAST probably possesses all the physical skills needed to come out ahead (if such a thing can be said) and at that point it comes down to the mental game.

Based on the "average shooting" if you read the Armed Citizen the requirements are "own a gun" but that gets into the scare the bad guy away range of skill not beating a determined opponent.

Being a GM (sub 5 sec FAST) is nice and gives one more margin to err but such a high level of shooting skill is rarely needed to triumph.

[John Hearne]

For those who may be interested in further reading, I found this great short article that discusses overlearning, automaticity, and fluency. These are all very similar, if not the same, concepts that help explain the performance of skills based on amount of practice:
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2733607/pdf/behavan00020-0147.pdf

[ToddG]

Good find, John.

[John Hearne]

Soliciting some more opinions from the brain trust.

Background: On of my pet peeves is when someone completely discounts some experience or modality as completely worthless. I believe that different modalities have different values but none of them are worthless. I was trying to come up with a way to show the relative value of different, common experiences. To clarify, I define a "shooting" as a one way exchange of gunfire and a "gunfight" as a two way exchange of gunfire. I assign two different values to physical fitness based on the context of the person. For folks who are expected to engage in physical activity and shoot (police & military) physical condition is more important than those who will not have to exert themselves significantly before shooting (CCW).

What do you think AND where do you think hunting falls on the continuum. Let's define it two ways, a "General Hunting" and "Hunting Hogs (on foot with a service pistol)"

http://i1202.photobucket.com/albums/bb374/ajp3jeh/Gun%20Stuff/perfect_analog_zps64bfa282.jpg (http://s1202.photobucket.com/user/ajp3jeh/media/Gun%20Stuff/perfect_analog_zps64bfa282.jpg.html)

[Dagga Boy]

John, I would also incorporate being present at a shooting/gunfight and present at multiple shootings/gunfights. I was at so many shootings without firing that my nickname was the "bridesmaid" for a few years. In the right scenarios there is as much if not more decision making going on as when I was in actual shootings. You build a lot of "experience" in the demands of these situations that pay off in many ways. You will find that a lot of the folks from places like LAPD Metro and SIS that run very high success numbers in actual shootings and gunfights have been present at a bunch as well. Additionally, in the cases where you have fully made a decision to shoot and started a trigger press fully expecting to finish it and something changes that stops the process is also a huge builder of experience that translates very well to the situations where you finish the press.

[ToddG]

"Winning" one is not something I'd place terribly highly. I realize that may sound self-serving and I don't discount that there are many things someone is likely to learn after the fact that can't be learned the same way without the experience. But I've been around students -- my own and others -- who've prevailed in fights not out of skill but simply out of luck and lack of meaningful opposition.

I beat someone at bowling once. And I don't know how to bowl.

[John Hearne]

John, I would also incorporate being present at a shooting/gunfight and present at multiple shootings/gunfights....You will find that a lot of the folks from places like LAPD Metro and SIS that run very high success numbers in actual shootings and gunfights have been present at a bunch as well.

I will try to work that in there. I can see where it can help desensitize you, especially if the outcome was "positive." You wanna throw a number on it? It's also interesting because I read somewhere that the people who don't fire at a shooting often have more psychological problems than the shooter.

[John Hearne]

"Winning" one is not something I'd place terribly highly....But I've been around students -- my own and others -- who've prevailed in fights not out of skill but simply out of luck and lack of meaningful opposition.

The use of "winning" was very intentional. There are a lot of folks who won by virtue of sucking less than their opponent. I think we can all point to instances where someone very clearly won the fight versus merely survived it.

I would also point out that there is some evidence that people's performance in a subsequent fight tends to be better than the last one. I would offer that even if you made it out by the skin of your teeth, it could have the effect of making you serious about this for next time.

[Chuck Haggard]

I agree that the incident has to be looked at for lessons learned, both good and bad. LE is really, really bad about "everything came out OK, we must have done it right".

I am found of telling people that fortuitous outcomes reinforce poor tactics.

[TheTrevor]

I agree that the incident has to be looked at for lessons learned, both good and bad. LE is really, really bad about "everything came out OK, we must have done it right".

I am found of telling people that fortuitous outcomes reinforce poor tactics.

I'm guessing you've been met with a lot of blank stares or pained grimaces when discussing OIS incidents...

[Dagga Boy]

I agree that the incident has to be looked at for lessons learned, both good and bad. LE is really, really bad about "everything came out OK, we must have done it right".

I am found of telling people that fortuitous outcomes reinforce poor tactics.

You forgot about the giving them a medal for totally screwing up:confused:. Some of the spin on why screwing up was worthy of a medal was something Washington DC would have been awed by..

Some of my thoughts are going to be delayed as it is what I am going to be talking about at the Tactical Invitational in a couple weeks.

Todd, in regards to "winning" I sort of agree. I divided events into things like "lost" "didn't lose" "survived" "won" and "crushed". The "won and crushed" are the ones I look at as successes and things to see what worked and the relationship to training. A ton of my training doctrine is based on seeing the difference in a lot of shootings. A bunch of them were considered "wins" by our admin, and were examples of what not to do in my mind. I looked at things like on demand hostage shots, single round surgical dumps, on demand failure drills done on purpose, etc. All of the folks who executed those types of responses were trained a very specific way, and the others were trained differently. We also looked at failures and several things were painfully obvious and very relative to training.

[John Hearne]

You just described a Likert scale for fights. Like the agree, strongly agree, surveys you see.

Strong loss-loss-nuetral-win-strong win.

Sent from my HTC One X using Tapatalk

[Dagga Boy]

You just described a Likert scale for fights. Like the agree, strongly agree, surveys you see.

Strong loss-loss-nuetral-win-strong win.

Sent from my HTC One X using Tapatalk

This is what I hate........I don't know if I feel good about that or if I should have known what a Likert scale is. I really think that going to an epic party school for college may have not been the best bet:(.

[Kevin B.]

I would not discount the value of experience, either good or bad. However, in order for the experience to have value, a thorough, critical analysis is required. Therein lies the problem. A good outcome frequently leads to high-fives rather than a thorough critique.

John, you may want to look for an article regarding a study on combat experience as a predictor of surviving combat. It was based on the U.S. experience in Vietnam. The main point was that statistically, the likelihood of becoming a casualty was significantly reduced after being in two engagements. I was struck by the article's similarity to the Navy's study that led to the formation of Top Gun.

If I recall correctly, it came out about a year ago, though that may just be when I saw it. Unfortunately, I do not recall the publication and I am away from my notes.

[John Hearne]

I would not discount the value of experience, either good or bad. However, in order for the experience to have value, a thorough, critical analysis is required.

No disagreement, if you to hear something amusing some time, ask me about how I learned to deliver radio traffic slower.



John, you may want to look for an article regarding a study on combat experience as a predictor of surviving combat. It was based on the U.S. experience in Vietnam. The main point was that statistically, the likelihood of becoming a casualty was significantly reduced after being in two engagements. I was struck by the article's similarity to the Navy's study that led to the formation of Top Gun.

I will try to track it down. FWIW, the Navy study is in the Ace Factor, the book I mentioned earlier in the thread. This is supposed to be the idea behind FOF, to get your first couple of gunfights under your belt safely.

[John Hearne]

I dont' think I was clear when I posted the second pile of speculation. I'm not saying that the values are correctly ordered and any input/insight on why one may be more valuable than the other are appreciated. I'm also not saying that the numbers are precise. Something that is a 10 is only twice as good as a 5 - just that 10 is better than 5.

[Chuck Whitlock]

Soliciting some more opinions from the brain trust.

To clarify, I define a "shooting" as a one way exchange of gunfire and a "gunfight" as a two way exchange of gunfire.

http://i1202.photobucket.com/albums/bb374/ajp3jeh/Gun%20Stuff/perfect_analog_zps64bfa282.jpg (http://s1202.photobucket.com/user/ajp3jeh/media/Gun%20Stuff/perfect_analog_zps64bfa282.jpg.html)

John,
Just to clarify.....based on the above definitions, at the +5 level shouldn't "Man-on-Man Shooting" be "Man-on-Man Competition" or such?

[John Hearne]

Just to clarify.....based on the above definitions, at the +5 level shouldn't "Man-on-Man Shooting" be "Man-on-Man Competition" or such?

Nope, I'm pretty hard core. :eek:

Yes, that's right any kind of man-on-man competition or shooting event where someone is shooting at the same time you are, preferrably with their target array in your peripheral.

[Dagga Boy]

John, based on my experience and talking to a bunch of others, I would switch "winning a gunfight" and "winning multiple shootings". The guys who have been in a bunch of "shootings" where the other side has not gotten a shot off obviously have "something" figured out. The first thing that comes to mind is "be faster than the other guy, or don't even give him a chance. I think you will find that the "won a gunfight" will be in shootings after the experience of being in a two way contest.

Also, I would include "High level professional training class" and "Multiple High level training classes".

[KevinB]

John, based on my experience and talking to a bunch of others, I would switch "winning a gunfight" and "winning multiple shootings". The guys who have been in a bunch of "shootings" where the other side has not gotten a shot off obviously have "something" figured out. The first thing that comes to mind is "be faster than the other guy, or don't even give him a chance. I think you will find that the "won a gunfight" will be in shootings after the experience of being in a two way contest.



I'm a firm believer in the only fair fight is the one you win...

[Mr_White]

Also, I would include "High level professional training class" and "Multiple High level training classes".

Where would you put those on this new chart?

[justintime]

misfire

[David Armstrong]

I'm a firm believer in the only fair fight is the one you win...
Our version was "if it is fair it isn't a fight, it is a contest."

[nycnoob]

John


You have not discussed decay of skills. It is well known that the people who perform a the highest levels of performance see their skills decline the most rapidly without practice, also some skills need not be maintained once masted, riding a bike is the famous one, but I remember the difficulties I had learning to drive and I have never had those again even if I do not drive for a while, though when I learned to fly I had many of the same issues.

[John Hearne]

You have not discussed decay of skills.

While I haven't addressed it in this thread, there is a whole section in my presentation called "Myth: Teaching Them Once Is Enough or Recency is a Cruel Bitch." While this section isn't as well developed and is still an ongoing research interest, it is being addressed. I've been using this thread to consult the brain trust in areas that my knowledge and/or experience is more limited. I've been spending a lot of time at the local university library for the academic research.

I did the first run of the most recent version and have discovered that I have about five hours of material and that's moving through at a brisk pace. This does not include the additional material that I really want to see included. If you were to receive the "full brain dump" it would be an eight hour experience with a lunch break.

Part of the reason that the overlearning/automaticity/fluency mentioned earlier is so important, is that it mitigates a lot of the "hits" your performance takes. Whether those hits are recency, stress, or something else, possessing the skills at a high enough levels takes care of a lot of concerns. A good analogy, is getting an object into orbit. You have to expend a phenomenal amount of energy to get it up there, at the start is where most of the energy is expended, but once it's up there, you don't have to expend a lot of energy to keep it up.

[TheTrevor]

While I haven't addressed it in this thread, there is a whole section in my presentation called "Myth: Teaching Them Once Is Enough or Recency is a Cruel Bitch." While this section isn't as well developed and is still an ongoing research interest, it is being addressed. I've been using this thread to consult the brain trust in areas that my knowledge and/or experience is more limited. I've been spending a lot of time at the local university library for the academic research.

I did the first run of the most recent version and have discovered that I have about five hours of material and that's moving through at a brisk pace. This does not include the additional material that I really want to see included. If you were to receive the "full brain dump" it would be an eight hour experience with a lunch break.

Part of the reason that the overlearning/automaticity/fluency mentioned earlier is so important, is that it mitigates a lot of the "hits" your performance takes. Whether those hits are recency, stress, or something else, possessing the skills at a high enough levels takes care of a lot of concerns. A good analogy, is getting an object into orbit. You have to expend a phenomenal amount of energy to get it up there, at the start is where most of the energy is expended, but once it's up there, you don't have to expend a lot of energy to keep it up.

I'd sit still for the full brain dump. But I'm weird that way.

That learning curve you describe perfectly matches what it's like to get up to speed on complex UNIX-based server operating systems. It's a hell of a steep curve, but once you achieve basic mastery the rest of the learning & skills maintenance is orders of magnitude easier than getting there in the first place.

[John Hearne]

Since this thread has been so productive, I thought I'd continue to seek the group's input. I was looking for another way to convey the idea in the other chart in a slightly clearer way. I thought that the following chart might be better:

http://i1202.photobucket.com/albums/bb374/ajp3jeh/Gun%20Stuff/accuracyspeedchart_zpsabe75801.jpg (http://s1202.photobucket.com/user/ajp3jeh/media/Gun%20Stuff/accuracyspeedchart_zpsabe75801.jpg.html)

I realize that speed and accuracy are relative and I'll throw these numbers out there. I'm not writing this in stone and is fully subject to revision:

Accuracy – Primary Zone
Low: Primary Zone > 63.6 square inches (> 9” circle)
Medium: Primary Zone 63.6 square inches to 38.45 square inches (9”-7” circle)
High: Primary Zone <38.45” (<7” circle)

Accuracy – Head Zone
Low: <15 square inches
Medium: 15-12 square inches (3x5” to 3x4”)
High: <12 square inches (3x4”)

Speed – Draw
Draw time to 8” target at 7 yards
Low: > 2.0 seconds
Medium: 2.0-1.65 seconds
High: <1.65 seconds

Speed – Splits
Split time for 8” target at 7 yards:
Low: >0.30 seconds
Medium: 0.30-0.20 seconds
High: <.20 seconds

Any thoughts?

[ToddG]

For The Test are you looking at 100 points or 90 (all in the black) which is what Ken normally considers passing? If the former, high accuracy; if the latter, medium.

I'd definitely agree on all the rest.

For something that is med-speed high-accuracy I'd suggest Frank Garcia's Dots (http://pistol-training.com/drills/frank-garcias-dot-drill). Also, coincidentally, if you want to shoot a drill that makes you really want to hit yourself in the face, I'd recommend Frank Garcia's Dots... :cool:

[ToddG]

Also:

Low accuracy, medium speed: sub-10s El Prez

Moderate accuracy, medium speed: Hackathorn Headshot Standards

[Chuck Haggard]

While I haven't addressed it in this thread, there is a whole section in my presentation called "Myth: Teaching Them Once Is Enough or Recency is a Cruel Bitch." While this section isn't as well developed and is still an ongoing research interest, it is being addressed. I've been using this thread to consult the brain trust in areas that my knowledge and/or experience is more limited. I've been spending a lot of time at the local university library for the academic research.

.

There was an old ASLET journal article, I only have a paper copy and need to find it, ref recency of training and such, that quoted bits from an Army test of physical skills. In that case it was troops donning a pro mask to standards. IIRC after a year about 85% could do it to time and standard, after a year and a half it was down to like 50%

[Rich]

I'd argue most of the gun game classifiers are utterly not relevant as most folks run them in game gear - not gunfighting gear.

As well as SURF mentioned how can you classify experience?

I'm sorry but I see this as an exercise in futility that will end up in a Johnson measuring contest between followers of different dogma.

I'm not trying to justify my own mediocrity in this, I'm generally not a fast guy with a pistol, but I also have never shot anyone I did not want to ;)


I agree!

[fn/form]

John Hearne, you mention your presentation development. Can you be more specific on intended audience? Department heads/supervisors, instructors, industry pros, SWAT, line officers or all the above?

My first thought after reading the intial post was regarding Paul Howe's pistol and rifle standards (http://www.combatshootingandtactics.com/standards.htm) using his targets (http://www.letargets.com/estylez_item.aspx?item=CSAT). And those in a similar vein by Jason Falla, Jeff Gonzales, etc. I find these the most practical standard to strive for in fighting pistol.

The competition drills are great for development, but not as useful skill-inclusive, repeatability-demanding as the above standards.

Thank you to all who have participated in this roundtable. It's taken me about 4 days of lunch and dinner breaks to make it through. Worth every minute.

[Chuck Haggard]

John's information would be useful to anyone who teaches anything combative, hands/sticks/knives/guns, or users of, and agency or .mil admin types.

[ToddG]

The competition drills are great for development, but not as useful skill-inclusive, repeatability-demanding as the above standards.

You're talking about two completely different things. As you said, drills are for development... standards/tests are for measuring performance. If all you do is shoot a test over and over again you're probably slowing if not halting your development.

Take the Hackathorn Standards. Great test. Lousy practice program. In the time it would take you to run through it twice you could get in a tremendous amount of practice on the fundamental skills it tests. You could get better. Running through the test twice won't likely result in any skill gain. You'll simply prove that you can shoot a certain score.

As an aside, that's why I've always loved JodyH's 99 Drill (http://pistol-training.com/drills/99-drill). You shoot each string of fire enough times, and each string of fire is discrete enough in the skills employed, that it is meaningful practice, but it's also a standards/test that is easy to score and use as part of your performance tracking.

[John Hearne]

John Hearne, you mention your presentation development. Can you be more specific on intended audience?

My presentation is for a mixed audience - both armed citizen and armed professional. I've taught it to a mixed LE/citizen group, the RM Tactical Conference, and I just ran it a state SWAT conference. It's most applicable to those interested in optimizing training but there is a lot of relevant information for non-trainers.


My first thought after reading the intial post was regarding Paul Howe's pistol and rifle standards (http://www.combatshootingandtactics.com/standards.htm) using his targets (http://www.letargets.com/estylez_item.aspx?item=CSAT). And those in a similar vein by Jason Falla, Jeff Gonzales, etc. I find these the most practical standard to strive for in fighting pistol.

Thanks for reminding me of the Howe standards. They are certainly good. My only issue is that I have cleaned them and I am no shooting whiz. Passing them certainly denotes reflexive gun handling but there are definitely tougher standards out there. They do definitely seem "good enough" for a reasonable standard of proficiency.

I don't have CSAT target in front of me but it looks like the primary zone is 14 x 6 inches or ~85 square inches which pushes it into the low accuracy standard. The long skinny nature of the zone makes it harder but it generous in raw square inches. I do like the times and think they just need a smaller target. I've been developing my own set of 25 round standards and they feel redundant now.


The competition drills are great for development, but not as useful skill-inclusive, repeatability-demanding as the above standards.

I'm not worried about the skill development per se. I am trying to make the point that the level of reflexive gun handling needed to perform well under stress is best indicated by shooting well on any number of shooting drills. My main goal is to move cops past the idea that "I qualified" or "I shot it clean" is good enough. It just isn't a solid enough standard - especially as we remove 25 yard stages.

[John Hearne]

The comments on Paul Howe's standards really got me thinking. One view of mine that has changed since beginning my research is how to balance speed and accuracy. I've moved towards a high accuracy, moderate speed point of view.

A good example of this is what do you do once you can hit an 8" circle at 7 yds from the holster in 1.5 seconds. A lot of people will push and try to bring that speed down while keeping the target size the same. I now think that once you meet that standard, you start to shrink the target and keep the time stable. I like the idea of working to pass the Howe standards clean as described. Once you can do that consistently, keeping the times the same and moving to a target with a smaller hit zone makes a lot of sense to me.

[jlw]

The comments on Paul Howe's standards really got me thinking. One view of mine that has changed since beginning my research is how to balance speed and accuracy. I've moved towards a high accuracy, moderate speed point of view.

A good example of this is what do you do once you can hit an 8" circle at 7 yds from the holster in 1.5 seconds. A lot of people will push and try to bring that speed down while keeping the target size the same. I now think that once you meet that standard, you start to shrink the target and keep the time stable. I like the idea of working to pass the Howe standards clean as described. Once you can do that consistently, keeping the times the same and moving to a target with a smaller hit zone makes a lot of sense to me.


Would you consider increasing the distance to be the same thing as shrinking the size?

[John Hearne]

Would you consider increasing the distance to be the same thing as shrinking the size?

Certainly. While it isn't a perfect, linear relationship moving the target out effectively shrinks it. Roughly speaking, an 8" circle at 10 yards is about the same as a 5.6" target at 7 yards. The "black" of the commonly used bullseye runs 5 1/4" to 5 3/8" in diameter.

My latest favorite drill is to shoot a Bill drill on a bullseye. With concealment, I'm working to keep the par time under 3.0 second and trying to see how many points I can score with the six rounds. 48 points would be the same as a "normal" Bill drill so anything above 48 is mo' better. My best is 57 points (95%) in 2.82. It has been my casual observation that shooting for points instead of everything in the 8" makes me track the front sight with greater diligence.

[LangdonTactical]

So I have read part of this thread but not all of it for sure.

I will say that I agree with Ken. Not to mention I consider him a good friend. Like I would jump on a plane and head to Montana if he said he needed me kind of friend. Hell I would drive my truck there if I needed to.

So I have put a ton of thought to this over the years. What is the difference between good and great? How good is good enough? What I would say is most of you are putting the bar way to high for good. But, that is a really tough line call. Do you want to be just good enough to win? I would also say we have a tendency to compare ourselves to the guys that win the matches. Is that fair? Do you need to be good enough to be 90% at a USPSA match to win a gun fight? Is that what you consider good?

I believe it was 2004, I had a plan to win ESP at the IDPA Nationals (I had won SSP twice and CDP the year before, Todd remembers this for sure). I did not, I came in 4th if I remember right, behind Daniel Horner (who was like 17 at the time) Taran Butler and Matt Mink. Between the four of us was 2.21 seconds if I remember correctly. All great shooters! Hell they are crazy good and I should have been happy to have been 4th behind them.

I kind of had a long talk with myself at the time. I asked myself, what I could have done to get those 2.21 seconds back. What skill should I have been working on? How should I have trained better? And then it dawned on me that maybe pistol shooting was not the only thing in the world I should be working? Maybe I should spend more time shooting in the dark with my flashlight? Or maybe I should spend more time doing real force on force training and working on decision making skills under stress? Or maybe I should work on my ground fighting skills? Or maybe shooting my rifle?

I would never be one to say that good is good enough. That is a fine line and you start heading quickly to a qual course (I am not a fan). But at some point let's be real, there are other things to work on. Don't get too wrapped up in how fast you can do this or that drill, or if you are an "A Class Shooter"? Can you shoot A class scores with your real carry gun, from concealment? On demand? In front of people that are watching and waiting to see you do this or that? Can you do it when someone is shooting back at you (I don't recommend that test)? Goals are great and very important to progression. I am also a big believer in "you are getting better, or getting worse, there is no such thing as maintaining when it comes to skill at arms"! So please don't take this as "your good enough, stop practicing all ready".

I read these forums and hear the times that people post. I watch the videos of these crazy times that people can shoot. I say to myself these guys are great! I can't do that stuff. That is faster than I can do it for sure. So I wonder if I am good enough to meet the standard of what you guys are calling good?

I have won matches over the years, not because I was the best shooter there, not by a long way I assure you of that. But I shot the way I can shoot, and that day it was good enough.

I hope you guys can all do the same if it really matters.

[fn/form]

My presentation is for a mixed audience - both armed citizen and armed professional. I've taught it to a mixed LE/citizen group, the RM Tactical Conference, and I just ran it a state SWAT conference. It's most applicable to those interested in optimizing training but there is a lot of relevant information for non-trainers.

Very interesting, and a very broad audience. There would appear to be certain commonalities at both ends of the spectrum (excluding genetic superiorities and simpletons). The more I think about it, it seems the topic is best treated on two fronts. The issue of Standards, and the issue of Individual Development.


Thanks for reminding me of the Howe standards. They are certainly good. My only issue is that I have cleaned them and I am no shooting whiz. Passing them certainly denotes reflexive gun handling but there are definitely tougher standards out there. They do definitely seem "good enough" for a reasonable standard of proficiency.

To clean them cold every time is no accident. To train TO them is wrong, but to have the mentioned recency and automaticity to pass them—this I consider readiness. It is definitely the “good enough”, and it's a point where one of your Audience can divert attention to developing or maintaining other elements of conflict resolution to similar standard.

Any firearm performance and practice beyond the standard is always desired, but not at the cost of the other conflict resolution skills.


I don't have CSAT target in front of me but it looks like the primary zone is 14 x 6 inches or ~85 square inches which pushes it into the low accuracy standard. The long skinny nature of the zone makes it harder but it generous in raw square inches. I do like the times and think they just need a smaller target. I've been developing my own set of 25 round standards and they feel redundant now.

For individual development, I am in 100% agreement with your assessment of the CSAT target. It did make me think of the anatomically graphic targets such as the VTAC (http://www.letargets.com/estylez_item.aspx?item=VTAC-P), as well as photorealistic targets/3-D of accruate body sizes.

For a standard, as mentioned in the original thread post, I think Howe’s target reflects a realistic tolerance for individual stress performance in a real shooting.


I'm not worried about the skill development per se. I am trying to make the point that the level of reflexive gun handling needed to perform well under stress is best indicated by shooting well on any number of shooting drills. My main goal is to move cops past the idea that "I qualified" or "I shot it clean" is good enough. It just isn't a solid enough standard - especially as we remove 25 yard stages.

To apply what you are saying, if I understand it correctly, to my perspective: My goal is an array of drills to maintain the recency/automaticity to pass any one of the Howe/Falla/etc. accepted combat standards. POST quals and basketball-sized point zones excluded.


The comments on Paul Howe's standards really got me thinking. One view of mine that has changed since beginning my research is how to balance speed and accuracy. I've moved towards a high accuracy, moderate speed point of view.

A good example of this is what do you do once you can hit an 8" circle at 7 yds from the holster in 1.5 seconds. A lot of people will push and try to bring that speed down while keeping the target size the same. I now think that once you meet that standard, you start to shrink the target and keep the time stable. I like the idea of working to pass the Howe standards clean as described. Once you can do that consistently, keeping the times the same and moving to a target with a smaller hit zone makes a lot of sense to me.

This is professionalism. It is a responsibility both of the individual (ultimately) and the agency or unit culture. Both should be reminded of their duties and commitments in this arena.

[TheTrevor]

Would you consider increasing the distance to be the same thing as shrinking the size?

I know the question was for JH, but it did get me thinking about an older shooter I did a couple of coaching sessions with last year.

This particular shooter knew that they could be shooting better but couldn't figure out how to get there on their own. Two things were holding the shooter back: some basic technique changes, and challenges with visual acuity related to shifting focus between the front sight and targets at distances over ~10yd.

Normally the progression would be to keep the target size constant (e.g. 8" shoot-n-sees, shooting for the center 5") and move it further out as progress indicated. In this shooter's case, though, that didn't work -- the wheels started to come off at 15yd and things got ugly at 20yd, despite good technique.

So, what we did instead was keep the target at 10yd (where they had no trouble with focus or convergence) and use blue tape to fence in decreasing-size acceptable hit zones over the course of a couple of range trips. When the shooter could >90% consistently place shots in a 4" zone at 10yd, I pulled the training wheels off and pushed them out of their comfort zone. A fresh 8" shoot-n-see was pasted on over the one they'd just been working on, and run out to 20yd. The immediate anxiety was palpable.

I pointed out that if they could shoot a 4" group at 10yd, they could bloody well hit an 8" circle at 10yd even if all they could make out was a fuzzy circle on the target backer, just by shooting exactly the same as they had been. Result: a lovely 6" 10-shot group almost perfectly centered on the bull.

Moral of the story: It's the angular width of the target that determines the difficulty of the shot, not the distance from the shooter. Shooters with perfect vision can use this to simulate further-off targets, but it can also be used to help a shooter with distance-vision challenges master hitting a pseudo-distant target before pushing them to shoot (successfully!) outside their comfort zone.

[ToddG]

But it's specifically the depth of focus thing that makes shooting a 20MOA target at 5yd easier than shooting a 5MOA target at 25yd. That's why it's important to practice both and everything in between and everything beyond.

[ToddG]

A good example of this is what do you do once you can hit an 8" circle at 7 yds from the holster in 1.5 seconds. A lot of people will push and try to bring that speed down while keeping the target size the same. I now think that once you meet that standard, you start to shrink the target and keep the time stable. I like the idea of working to pass the Howe standards clean as described. Once you can do that consistently, keeping the times the same and moving to a target with a smaller hit zone makes a lot of sense to me.

I'm not sure getting locked in to one OR the other is the right answer.

If you want to become more accurate at a given speed, then you work on that. It's a very good, very smart goal.

If you want to become faster for a given acceptable target zone, then you work on that. It's a very good, very smart goal.

If I set 1.5s to the 8" as my starting goal and reached it, I'd start to look at how fast I could do a 3x5, and trying for the 8" in 1.25s.

[Dagga Boy]

I'm not sure getting locked in to one OR the other is the right answer.

If you want to become more accurate at a given speed, then you work on that. It's a very good, very smart goal.

If you want to become faster for a given acceptable target zone, then you work on that. It's a very good, very smart goal.

If I set 1.5s to the 8" as my starting goal and reached it, I'd start to look at how fast I could do a 3x5, and trying for the 8" in 1.25s.

Todd, I am kind of 50/50 on your response specifically in regards to John's work and my experience how do we train to dominate CONUS lethal force encounters.
My biggest issue that I have is "acceptable target zone". The problem is that the "acceptable target zone" is in a dynamic, rapidly changing thing in actual shootings. It is why I go simply ballistic with "Police Firearm Instructors" who ever utter the words "spreading the trauma" or that those who are shooting tight, small clusters are shooting "too slow", or that "you don't want to have the rounds go in the same hole". REALLY?.....trust me, I don't care how good you are....they aren't going in the same hole on a dynamic moving human. The other issue is that it doesn't take much to miss a spine or heart and tag them with a round a 1/2" away from the first.

Wayne and I like the "fist" standard as an "acceptable target zone" (which is very different than "everything" you can see). The ability to consistently shoot into a "fist" size group (that happens to conveniently be about the size of the black on a B8 bull) will handle a body shot that starts as a full frontal on the start of the press and becomes a full side profile by the end of the press.....this is EXACTLY what happened on the shooting I was in, and I am damn glad that I trained to a small standard, even when shooting from retention. Another one of my guys did a text book failure drill on an obese male. Both rounds of the pair to the chest were fatal, but the officer saw simply blubber wiggle and immediately continued his pre-programmed response to the head for an immediate end to the encounter. All the shots were in that "fist" standard. So I think that the key is to what you define as "an acceptable target zone" for YOUR world (an acceptable target zone on a running combatant in an overseas military environment is very different than a felon in a US coffee shop).

Now, where I agree is that once you are at a sub-conscious level response to a problem, then trying to get that response a little faster on the larger target, while also working to maintain the ability to deliver the "8" speed on a "3x5" is gold, and what many are failing to do. I have actually seen the reverse. Once a decent goal is barely met on the 8", then it is an excuse to move to a 10" or full size silhouette plate with much more speed. Might be a good thing for scoring strategy in sport shooting, but is not the way to go for shooting in matches where second place is really bad.

[ToddG]

TWayne and I like the "fist" standard as an "acceptable target zone" (which is very different than "everything" you can see). The ability to consistently shoot into a "fist" size group (that happens to conveniently be about the size of the black on a B8 bull) ...

There's a reason the main target zone on my Q-PTC is a 6" circle (the black of a B8 is about 5.5"). I'm with you 100%. From a building speed standpoint I like to give them the 8" specifically for the reasons you state. But we do a ton of back and forth between different sized targets (8" 6" 3x5 2" 1") with the real goal being hit what you're given on demand.

[quote[Once a decent goal is barely met on the 8", then it is an excuse to move to a 10" or full size silhouette plate with much more speed. Might be a good thing for scoring strategy in sport shooting, but is not the way to go for shooting in matches where second place is really bad.[/QUOTE]

Again we're in total agreement. The only thing the rest of my target is for beyond those scoring zones is "looking sorta humanoid" and running a few specific drills like Triple Nickel. While there's a big grey torso around the bottle, I've always considered anything off the bottle effectively missing a human altogether. Putting bullets where they're not doing any near-immediate good is just wasting time and ammo.

[Dagga Boy]

I'm scared again at our level of agreement these days......it is not as fun as when you were an idiot;).

I did a pile on to John's presentation at the Tactical Conference that was essentially "Training habits of highly successful gunfighters". While it is very much a work in progress, one of the consistent things I have seen from those guys who are very good at winning gunfights is that they train using very small areas or targets on humanoid targets. Two major benefits come from this. It teaches to unfocus on all the input that is no longer important (the lethal force indicator that is usually in the hands-gun, knife, etc..) and to focus on exactly what you want to hit, and then to switch focus to however much visual verification (sights) is needed to make that sub 6 inch area shot.

[JeffJ]

But it's specifically the depth of focus thing that makes shooting a 20MOA target at 5yd easier than shooting a 5MOA target at 25yd. That's why it's important to practice both and everything in between and everything beyond.

This, big time, at least for me - I can get away with looking through my sights with an intermediate focus out to somewhere between 15 and 20 yards, but once I hit that 20 yard line I really need a true front sight focus. I really feel like I did myself a great disservice by spending a lot of time shooting small targets at 3-10 yards because it just doesn't translate well for me when I get further back.

[ToddG]

I really feel like I did myself a great disservice by spending a lot of time shooting small targets at 3-10 yards because it just doesn't translate well for me when I get further back.

That is, just to be clear, the exact opposite of what I believe and emphasize in my classes. I think the ability to make precise shots within that 3-10 yard range or so is a far more critical skill than most "defense" instructors give credence to. It doesn't mean you ignore longer distances but from a likelihood standpoint, a guy showing just his head and hands around a corner 5yd away is a bigger concern than a guy standing out in the open 50yd away.

[JeffJ]

Do you think that longer range shooting translates to smaller targets at close range, or do you think it is a separate skill set?

[ToddG]

Do you think that longer range shooting translates to smaller targets at close range, or do you think it is a separate skill set?

I think any time you work on improving your trigger manipulation and visual control over the gun you're building both. But there are differences and thus benefits to practicing both discretely as well.

[John Hearne]

The main purpose of the chart was not to compare standard to standard but to relate various standards to the odds that the results are the result of some degree of automaticity. The comparing seems to cause a lot of butt hurt so the table was a way to show the same thing without stepping on so many toes. I tried to use specific draw times, splits, etc. to make it more objective - kinda how Rogers does - 1.5 for a draw, .25 for each shot, etc.

Latest version, very open to comments:
http://i1202.photobucket.com/albums/bb374/ajp3jeh/Gun%20Stuff/speedaccuracychartv2_zps71ef283e.jpg (http://s1202.photobucket.com/user/ajp3jeh/media/Gun%20Stuff/speedaccuracychartv2_zps71ef283e.jpg.html)

[Josh Runkle]

The main purpose of the chart was not to compare standard to standard but to relate various standards to the odds that the results are the result of some degree of automaticity. The comparing seems to cause a lot of butt hurt so the table was a way to show the same thing without stepping on so many toes. I tried to use specific draw times, splits, etc. to make it more objective - kinda how Rogers does - 1.5 for a draw, .25 for each shot, etc.

Latest version, very open to comments:
http://i1202.photobucket.com/albums/bb374/ajp3jeh/Gun%20Stuff/speedaccuracychartv2_zps71ef283e.jpg (http://s1202.photobucket.com/user/ajp3jeh/media/Gun%20Stuff/speedaccuracychartv2_zps71ef283e.jpg.html)

It would be nice to have more than 3 categories in each direction. For example: There was a time when I could win a local dueling tree or bowling pin match, but I still couldn't shoot anything close to a 7 second FAST, yet that's considered low speed.

While I would completely agree that a 7 second FAST is low speed based upon the average pistol-forum member, it is not at all low speed compared to the average shooter. Shooting the most basic NRA evaluation might actually be an accomplishment for a shooter, yet is laughable compared to this chart. Is the goal of the chart to evaluate good or bad within the shooting community as a whole, or only within the training industry?

[John Hearne]

It would be nice to have more than 3 categories in each direction. For example: There was a time when I could win a local dueling tree or bowling pin match, but I still couldn't shoot anything close to a 7 second FAST, yet that's considered low speed....While I would completely agree that a 7 second FAST is low speed based upon the average pistol-forum member, it is not at all low speed compared to the average shooter. Shooting the most basic NRA evaluation might actually be an accomplishment for a shooter, yet is laughable compared to this chart. Is the goal of the chart to evaluate good or bad within the shooting community as a whole, or only within the training industry?

Those are really solid observations and a good question. The goal is not to evaluate good or bad within a particular community but to use reality based standards for performance.

My thoughts are, if the "average" person can only draw and hit an 8" circle at 7 yards in 2.5 seconds, it doesn't change the fact that a reasonble level of performance, possible by most of the population with some work is 1.5 seconds. If you have a "known good" standard for a skill (draw, reload, etc.) then you should be able to evaluate common standards. For instance if we state that a hit in 2.5 seconds from the holster is "slow" and a split for that same target is 0.5 seconds then requiring two hits at 7 yards in 3.0 seconds would be slow. (FWIW, 2 rounds in 3 seconds from the holster is a stage in my agencies qual course)

We know that a 5.0 second FAST is 2 heads in 2.0 seconds, a 2.0 second reload, and the remaining rounds in a second. That certainly seems fast to me. Assuming you're getting the hits, a 7.0 second FAST would be 2 heads in 3 seconds, a 2.5 second reload, and the remaining rounds in 1.5 seconds. Those times for those skills don't seem to that demanding for someone who can shoot without a lot of conscious thought. Am I the only one?

There seems to be a very strong desire to "dumb down" all manner of standards these days. In the private sector, it is done to make students feel better about themselves so they return. In the public sector, it is often because the staff lacks the time, resources, and/or ability to bring shooters up to a reasonable standard. Whether we can easily meet a standard is a completely different question from whether the standard is reasonable. What I am looking for is some good input on what standards reflect a level of performance that is indicative of a well-practiced skill. We can dicker about the standard for a draw, whether 1.5 is too fast or 1.7 is OK but I think that accepting 2.5 doesn't do anyone any good.

[Josh Runkle]

My thoughts are, if the "average" person can only draw and hit an 8" circle at 7 yards in 2.5 seconds...

My subjective experience is that the average person who takes any training...when you combine hunter-ed, NRA experience, former military from 20 years ago, CCW course, etc...combined with serious shooters probably doesn't even average out to 7 yards in 2.5 seconds. That is not the average shooter though.

[ToddG]

FWIW, about 10% of the students who show up to one of my classes make the sub-7 time once out of four tries over the course of two days. And that's from a pool of shooters dedicated enough to spend $500 plus travel, ammo, etc. to take an intermediate-level technical pistol skill-building class.

A higher percentage of shooters make Basic (greater than 10 seconds) than make Advanced (less than seven). And again, that's best out of four tries.

[John Hearne]

Are times low based on marksmanship penalties or the inability to move faster?

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[jetfire]

FWIW, about 10% of the students who show up to one of my classes make the sub-7 time once out of four tries over the course of two days. And that's from a pool of shooters dedicated enough to spend $500 plus travel, ammo, etc. to take an intermediate-level technical pistol skill-building class.

A higher percentage of shooters make Basic (greater than 10 seconds) than make Advanced (less than seven). And again, that's best out of four tries.

I'm actually surprised it's that low. At the Aim Small Get Some class (I forget the name) it was over 50%.

[ToddG]

Are times low based on marksmanship penalties or the inability to move faster?

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Yes

[John Hearne]

Karl Rehn's presentation at the 2014 Tactical Confernce included an analysis of current standards and how they compared. He spent a lot of time crunching expected draw, reload, split, transition times, etc. This is what he came up with:

http://i1202.photobucket.com/albums/bb374/ajp3jeh/Gun%20Stuff/rehn_numbers_zps9933616c.jpg (http://s1202.photobucket.com/user/ajp3jeh/media/Gun%20Stuff/rehn_numbers_zps9933616c.jpg.html)

My concern is that when we examine the "population as a whole" the relative skill value is zero because most people don't shoot at all. I like the approach that determines what the maximum peroformance is and working backwards. The only point I'd consider is that I'd place what the elite guys can do at 110% and work back from there.

[JSGlock34]

I'm actually surprised it's that low. At the Aim Small Get Some class (I forget the name) it was over 50%.

I seem to recall my Aim Fast Hit Small class managing 50% or better at Advanced FAST scores as well - but then again AFHS was limited to students who had already scored an Intermediate at Aim Fast Hit Fast, and we had six attempts.

[nalesq]

Assuming you're getting the hits, a 7.0 second FAST would be 2 heads in 3 seconds, a 2.5 second reload, and the remaining rounds in 1.5 seconds. Those times for those skills don't seem to that demanding for someone who can shoot without a lot of conscious thought. Am I the only one?

I suspect that for the most part, the only people who can shoot like this unconsciously and on demand are people who train pretty regularly on their own with a shot timer.

Indeed, it seems to me that the use of a shot timer for personal training is so rare, you could almost make shot timer ownership some kind of indication of likely competence with a pistol.

[Randy Harris]

Hey John, I finally signed up here...

One fly in the ointment not tested by standardized tests is how does the shooter do if the targets are not just paper and cardboard. I know several high ranked IDPA and IPSC guys that I don't have a lot of confidence in them applying those skills when you add in human interaction and targets that fight back. You pretty much need an NTI type FOF component in there too...which opens up other problems in comparisons.

Also what about the stone cold killer who has only nominal gun handling skills but has a "go switch" set to "at the drop of a hat". Looking back at your own presentations about who the guys are that kill cops and by extension who we are actually likely to be fighting, where do you rate the typical cop killer as far as gun skills goes? Does mindset and a lightly tripped "psycho switch" trump a certain amount of skill? Things to ponder .................

[LtDave]

This quote from The Shootist sums up Randy's point:
Gillom Rogers: [Books is giving Gillom a shooting lesson] Mr. Books, How is it you've killed so many men? My spread wasn't much bigger than yours.
John Bernard Books: First of all, friend, there's no one up there shooting back at you. Second, I found most men aren't willing, they bat an eye, or draw a breath before they shoot. I won't.

[John Hearne]

One fly in the ointment not tested by standardized tests is how does the shooter do if the targets are not just paper and cardboard. I know several high ranked IDPA and IPSC guys that I don't have a lot of confidence in them applying those skills when you add in human interaction and targets that fight back. You pretty much need an NTI type FOF component in there too...which opens up other problems in comparisons.

When I originally proposed the question, I had no illusions that it was perfect. "Willingness" is a major factor that trumps most everything. The question was what level of skill suggests that the basics are being performed without any drain on the main pool of mental resources.


Also what about the stone cold killer who has only nominal gun handling skills but has a "go switch" set to "at the drop of a hat". Looking back at your own presentations about who the guys are that kill cops and by extension who we are actually likely to be fighting, where do you rate the typical cop killer as far as gun skills goes? Does mindset and a lightly tripped "psycho switch" trump a certain amount of skill? Things to ponder .................

Again, no big disagreement. I would point out that while not all cop killers are great shots - some certainly are. Platt and Matix were shooting ~1500 rounds a week to hone their skills. The bad guys in the Newhall Massacre has been shooting earlier that fateful day. The cop killers who aren't great shots generally know this and will manipulate the cops to a contest that benefits their limited set of shooting skills. They'll feign compliance, allow the cops to get close and then unleash overwhelming violence.