Exibition shooters may have an edge in a S.D. senario

Posted by Ankeny: Can someone give me just one example where a "top competition" shooter did not do "very well" in a gunfight? Just curious.

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That, of course begs the guestions of how many "top competition shooters" have in fact been involved in gunfights, and under what circumstances.

Ankeny said:

Can someone give me just one example where a "top competition" shooter did not do "very well" in a gunfight? Just curious.

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The only ones I know who have been involved in gunfights did rather well. I'm thinking Ross Seyfried and Bruce Nelson. I hadn't heard about John Pride having done poorly in a gunfight

Posted by hatt: ...very few people are able to regularly attend weekend classes and shoot a thousand rounds a month. It's just fantasy to suggest that it's required..... Armed citizens seem to have a very good track record.

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Seem? Yeah, you do see the occasional article in The Armed Citizen about someone who was able to grab a shotgun and protect himself or herself, often without firing.

I don't hear of many failures.

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Well, they don't list those, do they?

There is no central file containing reports about the details of civilian encounters involving weapons. The closest thing to one is the summary report in Tom Givens' Lessons from the Street, which covers data from about five dozen civilian defensive shootings and gives details on ten of those.

All of the participants were trained.

So, absent actual data on the subject, there is only one way to test the hypothesis that citizens with little training are likely to do well in defensive encounters against violent criminal action: simulation.

Of course, the folks we read about in The Armed Citizen do not often sign up for high priced programs and travel to places where they can perform FoF exercises with simunitions.

So the best we can do is base our conclusion on the demonstrated fact that persons do not fare as well in such exercises at the outset as they do after some good professional instruction. We can certainly infer from that that persons with little or no training at all are unlikely to fare well at all, unless they just happen to be lucky.

I am not talking about range practice here. I'm talking about defensive shooting training from qualified instructors.

How does one know that such training is needed to improve the likelihood of surviving an attack? Well, people who have had such training know it; listening to them would be a start.

For those who may not accept that advice from others, an alternative would be to bring in some people of average skills and set up some AirSoft simulations. The results are usually quite convincing.

To address the original question, however, I do not believe that it is necessary to be an exhibition shooter to be safe on the street or in one's home.

hatt said:

What's practical is the question. Most folks don't have the time and money to drop $5K a year on weapons training.

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For less than the cost of a new handgun, you can attend a 2 day class and learn the basics of correct usage which would make anyone better able to respond to a threat properly.

From that training, you can dry practice the techniques in your home and hone your skills. You would verify them in live fire or better yet, by participating in your local monthly IDPA match for $15 and <100 rounds of ammo...so for just over $1 a day, you could maintain minimal proficiency.

Posted by hatt: Sure they do [report failures]. The Brady Campaign has likely compiled every case they could muster where civilians didn't fare well when they had a gun. They sure have a list of anyone with a concealed carry permit that's ever been charged with something.

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Actually, no.

The question was, how might one have any idea whether the comment "armed citizens seem to have a very good track record" is valid, and why it might be that one would not "hear of many failures".

There simply is no way to find out. The Armed Citizen lists whatever successful defensive actions happen to be reported, and on a hit or miss basis. News reports may or may not chronicle whether an armed citizen who does not successfully defend himself or herself attempted to do so and failed, or why or how. One will simply know whether anyone was shot, wounded, or killed, and whether anyone was apprehended.

There are reports for LEO confrontations, compiling the number of rounds that were fired, the enumber that hit, causalties, etc. However, those have little or no applicability to civilian encounters, for several reasons:

1. Civilians are generally expected to retreat, while sworn officers cannot.
2. Civilians do not make traffic stops, in which many shootings occur.
3. Civilians do not perform drug busts.
4. Civilians are not summoned to taverns to break up fights.
5. Civilians are not called to investigate domestic disturbances.

Thus, police data are not at all not applicable to what the civilian faces.

While police reports of LEO engagements will cover every determinable aspect of every encounter for a number of important reasons, reports of civilian shootings are designed only to determine whether a crime has been committed. The investigators simply do not care whether there was a failure in training, weapons, ammunition, tactics, or procedure when a homeowner or a civilian in a parking lot has been shot. News accounts are unlikely to include any more than the public portion of the police report, and there is no central reporting.

So, we have no real way of knowing how well armed citizens do perform in the rare instances in which they are forced to resort to the use of deadly force. The question still is whether it is prudent for an armed citizen to face danger without the kind of training described by 9mmepiphany.

And anyone who has ever availed himself or herself of the training and learned just how difficult it is to draw and present a weapon and fire it quickly and effectively enough to stop one or more fast moving violent criminal actors with however many hits it takes knows that the answer to that qustions is "most probably not".