Originally Posted by
TCinVA
Generally there's a lot of talking past one another that happens on this topic because people don't understand the frame of the other's thinking.
I don't work on speed because I want to be in a gunfight shooting .17 splits. I will shoot .17 splits in training to train my grip and my visual system at an uncomfortable rate. At that speed I'm right at the limits of my ability to actually intelligently control the gun. My sights (usually a dot these days) is an angry red smear but I can see that angry red smear moving within the target area I'm trying to hit and even though my trigger finger is moving faster than I can process what's happening I can still actually see that the movement is within a "good enough" window to stay on it. If my grip comes apart slightly in recoil I can't maintain that pace and fix it, but I can at least see it happening.
If one's target is a USPSA A zone at close range, that would be "good enough" to make both the A zone hits and drive on. Sometimes when you're running a stage you can sacrifice more points by trying to clean up a shot than you do by taking a charlie and pressing on with your stage plan uninterrupted. This is one of the reasons why I prefer falling steel matches to USPSA type matches because actually knocking the steel down often enforces a better hit.
The truth is that in the games that involve moving and shooting the shooting portion is only part of the equation. Moving and crucially planning exactly how you move to get to the targets most efficiently is actually more important than your shooting once you get to a certain level. I've done a number of different types of matches and done fairly well in most of them mainly because of shooting skill...but I don't move as good as the top guys and I sure as hell don't stage plan nearly as well as they do.
And to be blunt, I don't care. I find stage planning and the footwork stuff is the most boring, impractical, mind numbing part of shooting competitions. I genuinely could not care less about any of that. I shoot competitions primarily to force myself to shoot somebody else's program under stress when I know I'm up against people who do the gamer stuff way better than me. Going in knowing you are going to get your ass kicked puts your ego on the line and provides all manner of mental distractions to keep your focus away from focusing on the process of firing the shot when it's time to fire the shot. Those brief few seconds when you are behind the gun and there's a timer running and you're trying to remember what the fuck you're supposed to do next and where you should do your reload and shit, your gun just choked...
Forcing all of that shit to the sideline and making myself focus on the process of firing the shot when it's time is the whole reason I'm there. When I'm blasting on autopilot and start sucking, that moment where I tell myself to unfuck myself and make the goddamn hit...that's why I'm at the competition.
Putting yourself into a position where you are consciously asserting control over what is happening rather than just making the gun go bang really fast is the value in competition for a defensive shooter.
I call it "letting the monkey fly the plane".
When things are really stressful, the dumbest parts of you want to take over and make you do counterproductive shit. I picture it like you're in the pilot seat of an aircraft when all of a sudden you lose an engine and start dropping altitude. Now a chimp has absolutely no hope of resolving that situation...but there's always a chimp in the jump seat and when the warning klaxons are going off and the plane is dropping that unevolved motherfucker will be doing his dead-level best to take the controls even though all he can do is fling shit all over the place, hoot, and blindly mash buttons.
You have to stay on the controls of the plane to have any hope of a happy outcome. You cannot let the monkey fly the plane. This means you're fighting the monkey AND the plane. That's how it goes.
What pushing my speed allows me to do is bump up the speed at which I am intelligently in control of what's happening with the gun so that if I'm shooting at .3 splits, I have conscious control of the process. I can't gain that kind of control at that kind of speed if all I ever do is shoot half second splits for the same reason you won't be able to effectively control a car at 100 MPH if your training consists entirely of low speed maneuvers in a parking lot and getting your driving instructor's drycleaning.
It allows me to see when I'm not in control earlier, correct that sooner, and get a positive result from my actions in a better timeframe.
What you described with the bear attack was a whole lot of monkey flying the plane until somebody recognized "This isn't working" and then positively asserted control over what they were doing. They tried being spastic to no avail, recognized it wasn't accomplishing anything, and recognized "If I'm going to survive this, I have to..." and at that point they became deliberate. The more you practice becoming deliberate, the more quickly you become deliberate when all the alarms are going off. Ideally you become so familiar with the process of becoming deliberate that you are deliberate before the gun ever leaves the holster.
Shooting for self defense is a completely different phenomenon than action pistol shooting. You're aiming for a much smaller target with much bigger consequences on the line. As I tell people in class, when you press that trigger in the real world understand that your entire life changes from that moment on. Your freedom, your family, your financial future and innocent life are all on the line when you work through that 5-7 pound trigger. So can you really afford to be anything less than deliberate in how you go about that?
The juxtaposition is usually between accuracy and speed because those are the two things you can easily measure and it's where most people with a low-level focus end up. Shooting at the grizzly bear a bunch of times is inferior to shooting the grizzly bear once somewhere that matters. (This is where "you can't miss fast enough to win a gunfight" comes in)
But that's not a speed vs. accuracy argument.
It's an argument for being deliberate.
I want to be able to deliberately direct bullets exactly where I want them as fast as I possibly can. If I never push my speed I'll never increase the speed at which I can be deliberate. If I never hold myself accountable to an accuracy standard then I'll never actually understand what it is to be deliberate behind the gun.
This is why Cirillo said that suitability for their work could be assessed by guys who competed and hunted. The hunter understands the need for the deliberate shot. The competitor understands how to make a series of accurate shots quickly. Combine the two and you end up with somebody who has shooting skill and has the demonstrated ability to apply that to specific anatomy in tight time frames when playing for blood. That guy is probably going to do extremely well at stopping bad guys when it comes to gunplay.
Working with a timer and tight accuracy standards develops one's ability to discipline themselves into useful action in fractions of a second. The faster you are able to be deliberate...understanding that everyone has a speed that is as fast as they can't...the higher the chances that you're going to dominate a lethal encounter.
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