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Old February 20, 2008, 12:44 AM   #32
Covert Mission
Senior Member
 
Join Date: April 28, 1999
Location: West of the Pecos
Posts: 671
Quote:
The single most important skill you can develop as a civilian is the ability to hit your target quickly.
That's somewhat true, imho, with a caveat: under stress, and esp in an armed encounter with someone shooting back at you, your shooting skill degrades by 30-50% at least, it's been estimated. Any training you can do, such as FoF, which helps you operate better under that kind of stress will improve your performance in a real situation. If you're just a 70% shooter and that degrades by half, you may have a problem. Weapon operation, malfunction clearance, reloads etc all need to be practiced under some sort of stress, even if it's a USPSA match. That will reduce the level of degradation to some extent, in my experience.

In a real shooting you're dealing with tachypsychia, tunnel vision, degraded fine motor skills etc, all as a result of that adrenaline dump. Some of those physiological effects are pronounced and require training to offset, to whatever extent that is possible. I just shot some training with SIMS doing building clearing with multiple "BGs" and the stress from that was intense, in a good (beneficial) way. Very enlightening.

We just had a departmental SO shooting last night. Suspect fired at deputies, deputies shot back. The two deputies are good shots; I've qual'd with them. The ratio of misses to hits was about 5 or 6 to 1, and they were fairly close but it was night time outdoors. Their hit ratio on the range or on the simulator would have been 80-90% probably, but nothing can synthesize that real situation, and even prior shooting experience only helps some, I think (unless you have Jim Cirillo's experience and live to tell about it). Good news: both walked away unhurt (BG didn't). I'm looking forward to talking to and learning from them.
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