[green-grizzly]

The vast majority of encounters are resolved with mere brandishing. I don't see how training helps with that.

Police in general have a pretty awful record of putting bullets where they need to in real-life shootings. Police firearms training may not be all we would want it to be (although it certainly varies by jurisdiction), but it seems a little much that we demand citizens do even more training than that - especially considering how very unlikely it is that they will ever fire their weapon in anger.

I don't know if armed citizens are any more or less likely to shoot accurately in defensive shooting than cops, but they are less likely to shoot the wrong person. Citizens may not have the training, but they do have better information about what is going on and the victim of a crime is certainly going to beat the cops to the scene. It seems like the biggest concern with training should be making sure that shooters don't shoot the wrong person. We don't really care that much if they miss the bad guy, or just wing him - that will probably scare the bad guy off, or at least not leave the citizen in a worse position. Citizens are already pretty good at shooting the right peson, better than cops anyway, and it has nothing to do with training - it is just that they have more information about the situation and are closer to it.

Testing whether a trainee can shoot a small group at the range may have very little impact on their ability to use a firearms effectively in an encounter. Your ability to handle your weapon under pressure, coolness under fire and mindset probably have a greater impact. A lot of training can help with those things for most people, but it takes so much training - and retraining - that most people would lose the RKBA if we demanded it.

My state's "training" consists of instruction about the laws relating to firearms and self-defense, as well as basic gun safety. Basically all you need if you are never going to shoot your gun. The fact is that most of them never will, except at the range.

IMHO guns have more of a deterrent effect than anything else. Crime is reduced because criminals know people have guns and occassionally have a gun waived in their face. The number of criminals who are deterred by guns in this way is vastly greater than the number who are actually shot.

I have relatives who are cops and none of them have ever shot anybody. They have received a lot of training about how to put bullets on targets under stress, but they have never had to use it. That does not mean that their guns have been totally worthless in their jobs though. The guns were a deterrent, and a very successful one.