[Uncle Buck]

A lot of people do keep weapons in the home for self defense/home defense.

My buddy and I were discussing this the other day. We primarily have our pistols for target shooting and home defense is a secondary thought. We do keep loaded pistols in our houses.

But we read an article about a guy that was awakened by a home invasion, loaded his weapon and then ended up being shot at least once. Apparently the perpetrator was shot at but uninjured. It got us to thinking about how we practice for something like this (Being awoke at a strange sound and picking up the pistol.)

We set our targets at 7, 10, 15 and 25 yards. The pistol was laid on a table, loaded. One person would blow a whistle and the other would pick up the gun and began firing, first at the farthest target and then work towards the closest target. We timed the event.

I was very surprised at the results. We are both very good target shooters, but the pressure to shoot at the targets (so we could beat the others time) caused some misses at ranges we normally have no problem shooting. Even the seven yard target was missed on some occasions.

We plan on continuing this type of practice and see if we can improve our time/score ratio.

I am a former LEO and have been in combat. It has been a few years since I have had to practice firing under stress and I was surprised at how much speed/time/coordination I had lost, despite now being handicapped and having difficulties walking.

How often do you folks train? How many rounds do you folks usually use. On a normal range session for us, it is not unusual for us to shoot 300 - 500 rounds, through various handguns.