The following is from Karl Rehn

I’ll borrow a few more bits from Tom Givens:

He cites two examples: NYPD officers shoot 50-100 rounds a year, in timed fire qual courses, shoot Glocks with 9-12 lb triggers, and hit 30% or less of their shots. LAPD officers shoot monthly, courses of fire are more realistic, shoot Glocks with stock triggers and 1911s, and have a hit ratio over 70% dept-wide, above 80% for Metro division.

His point to students is that equipment, quality of training and frequency of training all play a role.
He encourages his students to dry fire twice a week, Wednesday and Sunday, because that ensures that if they get into a gunfight, the longest it will have been since they last practiced was 3 days. He cites adult-learning studies that claim that it’s not the quantity of practice, but the quality of practice and time since last practice, that matters.

There’s a long list of situations that trainers tell people “could happen” for which real world examples are almost impossible to find, including:

  • competitors using ‘match tactics’ and being shot or killed (0 examples in my files)
  • people getting shot in the hand and ending up shooting weak hand only (LEO examples only)
  • people doing reloads during a gunfight (LEO/mil examples only, Givens has 1 citizen student example)
  • armed citizens missing and hitting non-criminals (I have 2 LEO examples from the past 2 years though)
  • untrained armed citizens dying/being shot as a result of poor shooting (0 examples in my files)
  • armed citizen having a holstered, concealed gun taken away and used against them (one example in over twenty years)

I do have multiple examples of competitors, three I know personally, doing just fine in armed confrontations. All were competitive shooters who spent most of their range time focused on competition, shooting “race gear.”

I recently had the opportunity to take several days of training from 3-gun competitor Trip McIngvale, who is an Army Special Forces guy with 7 tours experience, surviving “over 100 gunbattles” (his words). Trip’s also an M-level shooter with all 3 guns. His comment to us was that 3-gun competition was excellent training in marksmanship and gunhandling under stress, with significant value in improving someone’s odds of being able to perform under pressure.

Back when Jim Cirillo (17 gunfights) was shooting PPC, and Charles Askins (27 kills) was shooting bullseye, both far less “tactical” than IPSC or IDPA, there wasn’t as much noise about competition “getting you killed on the street”, and nobody bitches about NRA High Power, or Bianchi Cup, or sporting clays having the same weakness. The one example everybody cites is Newhall, which happened because of a training artifact from law enforcement training, not any form of competition.

Many of the 58 students that Tom Givens (Rangemaster) has had involved in shootings competed in IPSC and/or IDPA at one time or another.

If you get on the brianenos.com forums and the various IDPA lists, you’ll see periodic postings about competitors who are involved in shootings. There are 2-3 a year. What you can’t find anywhere is data showing anyone ever died or got shot as a result of competition tactics. It’s a myth.

The history of the meme [“games will get you killed”] is real simple. It was rolled out en masse, without proof, stated as fact, by all the old gunwriter/Cooper-ite folks around the time IDPA started, to promote IDPA and denigrate IPSC. It was then picked up and repeated by some trainers, cops and other shooters who didn’t want their lack of skill to be revealed on a match day score sheet, giving them a convenient excuse to avoid that embarrassment.