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:
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."