I see people who measure it often say their small gun scores are 10-15% under their performance with a full size gun.
In December I bought a P320 and P365xl and I have shot those two exclusively since then. I got curious about what the actual meaningful, for every day CCW, performance gap really is. As we all know that P365xl is easier to carry for most people. What am I really giving up?
But if the performance standard is only about non-LE CCW defensive encounters, there are some things frequently measured in most drills that just are not as important as others in my view. I decided the first thing that is not relevant in making this determination is a reload. It has no bearing on this decision.
The second thing I decided to “not consider” is shot to shot splits on the same target. There is no doubt that those are faster for me with the P320, but it only amounts to several hundreds of a second. That really does not matter to me in this context.
What does matter more that I wanted to measure? First round accurate hits have to come to the top of my list. Second is my ability to engage multiple targets. Third was measuring at realistic engagement distances.
I created 2 drills to come up with my “personal performance that matters” % difference number in this context. Both are modeling some worst case scenarios.
I call the first the “three bad guys”. Tom Givens has emphasized having a “3 bad guy gun” because of the increased incidents of bad guys working together, which he has indicated means 10 rounds or more. Both these guns meet that parameter. His data also suggests the likely ranges for criminal encounters for us are 3-7 yards. So I made the first drill 3 IDPA targets in an array at 3, 5, and 7 yards. Targets engaged near to far.
Start position for all my drills was facing the closest target. Concealed in my normal carry mode. Arms fully extended with both palms facing the target, hands in the classic Southnarc/Thompson “fence” which to me is a more realistic start position than some surrender position.
At the (random delay) start signal, draw and fire one round each. For any run where all three hits were not in the “0” chest zone I threw that string out as a failure. To get a real sample, I ran the drill 20 times with all good hits, and averaged the times for both the P320 and the P365xl. I think I threw out 4 runs from the average for a hit outside the 0 zone.
Second drill, I was thinking about the story Spencer Keepers told about encountering the 5 potential bad guys in the pickup truck at his mailbox, that resonates with me. I simply changed the array to 5 targets, this time 3, 5, 7, 10 and 15 yards. Same start position and stage procedure. Also averaged the 20 perfect hits runs.
While I am sure my times were about double what JCN or GJM or other very accomplished shooters here would have done on the same drills, all that matters in this test is what the difference is for me, and is my performance a worthy consideration for which of these guns I choose to strap on and carry out the door.
My results, 3 bad guys, the P365xl is 6.53% slower.
5 bad guys, 7.85% slower.
That is not a huge handicap in my view.