[BlueTrain]

It's probably a good thing targets don't shoot back in competitive pistol shooting, don't you think? If nothing else, it might result in slightly modified positions.

If one reads the available literature from over the years, it is remarkable the differences there are, as well as the similarities. Different writers also certainly had different ideas about the standards for proficiency should be, too. One school thought you needed to be a high-scoring formal target shot before you should even considered anything else handgun-wise. Yet a different school thought that formal target shooting, while fun, was detrimental to combat shooting, meaning where the target could shoot back.

The remarkable thing was that on the combat shooting side of things, the stances were relatively the same. But that was then. Since then, combat shooting games have developed, for which you could thank Jeff Cooper, and an entirely new thinking developed around combat handgun shooting. Little of it seems to resemble the old-styles of handgunnery. About the only thing in common is that handguns do remain in use. The thinking with the new technique seems quite rigid to me, though there are some progressive elements. But since it is all based on what are essentially games, I still wonder if it would hold up under real-life combat situations.