I come at all of this from a pure civilian perspective, and what was most surprising to me is that there isn’t a clear metric out there for when a person is “good enough” at shooting to carry concealed. Of course, there’s a lot more that people should be prepared for (legal considerations, willingness to disengage from a disagreement, etc), but here, I’m just talking about marksmanship.
To be clear, this is about personal standards, or perhaps what you’d suggest for a friend new to concealed carry—not about legal requirements. It’s my sense that the vast majority of people who carry concealed not only have no standard, but they don’t have a clear idea of their level of skill.
Here are some preliminary thoughts:
- No one is ever really “good enough.” No one leaves a defensive gun use thinking they spent too much time training, and you should always be aiming to improve your abilities. Still, it’s helpful to have some base level of standard to measure yourself against so you know when you can reasonably start carrying.
- It’s tempting to think that any carry is good. But if you can’t hit a B-27 at 3 yards 100% of the time, you’re not good enough. There must be some level of skill beneath which a responsible citizen would choose not to carry, even when legally permitted.
- If a CCW issuer has a marksmanship qualification, it’s invariably too easy. See the new SFPD CCW qualification, for instance.
Here are two that come to mind, as well as my rationale (based on my understanding):
- The 2019 FBI Handgun Qualification. Focuses on closer distances, but touches on distance. Target is quite large, but there will probably be a bit of time pressure on particular strings. Used by the FBI, so it has a degree of national legitimacy. FBI hires a lot of lawyer types and trains them from scratch—this isn’t an HRT qualification.
- The Five-Yard Roundup. Low round count. Focuses on the most common types of defensive gun uses, per Tom Givens (5 yards; 3 seconds). Probably somewhat more challenging to reach 80% on than the FBI qual, due to the time constraints. No exposure to long distance shots.
To the experts here: if you were a new shooter, but you knew what you know now, what standard would you set for yourself? Or put another way, if a friend was a new shooter and asked you this question, what qualification would you suggest for them?