As a result of the ever-escalating amount of point shooting vs. sight shooting material here, and how sight shooting methods are claimed to be a “failure”, it was suggested I contact an instructor advocating a point shooting approach and teaching it to a large agency.

Louis M. Chiodo is one such instructor and has instructed for the California Highway Patrol. His website gives a vague sense of the curriculum, which leads to a Task-Oriented Qualification Course but gives no standard of performance or results in the field.

I asked him about these things directly.

Mr. Louis Chiodo,

I was directed to you by a reader because of your training of the California Highway Patrol.

Since implementing your methods, what success rates have the CHP enjoyed in the field?

What is the course of fire for your Task-Oriented Qualification Course (TOQC) and Task-Oriented Combat Qualification System (TOCQC)?

Here’s his response:

First, success rate is something that can have many meanings. Especially when you refer to gunfights. Statistical data is generally not a valid way of determining “success” since there are so many factors involved in the data that is used for evaluation. I have a graduate school level education that dealt with using statistics to determine various results of one thing or another and the one thing I learned is that there are so many ways that figures can be gathered, reported and ultimately used to determine if something works or not to understand that it is difficult to use much of the data in a valid way.

When trying to using hit rates etc., to determine validity of a program, there are SO MANY variables that other than generalities, it is difficult to determine results from the data. As an example, what type of training has the person received? What level of intensity is that training (how real is it)? What is the frequency of training? How much training time is allocated for the officer/person’s training? Has the person been stress inoculated by using scenario based training and/or force-on-force training? If “X” amount of rounds were fire versus the amount of hits, how many rounds hit an intermediate barrier and didn’t penetrate to get to the suspect? Were any of the rounds used to suppress the suspect while moving to a better position to open up an angle on the suspect? The point being is that unless all of these are included in the way we analyze the shooting, the data obtained wouldn’t support “success” or lack of it.

So it leaves us to some pretty basic things that we can get out of trying to analyze “results”. We can first look at, are we losing any officers in gunfights? In general terms, are we hitting more using different (new) training methods and combat shooting methods as opposed to when we were using the old method of training?

In general terms, what I can tell you is that when the training was redirected and more appropriate and realistic combat shooting methods were put into the training curriculum, we stopped getting officers shot to death and we were hitting far more than missing and the hits were getting to the places that shut people down faster.

Regarding the Task-Oriented Qualification Course (TOQC), I designed it and  implemented it into the training program  as a standard department qualification course. I don’t pass the course of fire because  the course of fire is a verification that the officer has developed the skills that were required via the training program that they went through to pass the TOQC. In other words, the course of fire is a verification that they can do the base-line skills that were developed in their training.

The course requires 100% hits in the allotted times and it covers the types of skills that are common to what officers face in gunfights. It ranges form contact distances to 15 yards. There are several different variants of the basic TOQC that I use in various training programs and the beauty of this system of qualification is that each task is graded separately so there is no aggregate scoring. In short, the officer has to actually perform each task to standard without one task being able to make up for a task that they are having a problem with. Also, the TOQC can be developed to meet the needs of a specific unit such as a tactical team.