Some folks just need more practice than others I suppose....heck, some folks will never be competent regardless of the number of times they practice.
They can practice 10,000+ times and still screw it up.
But here's a bit of psychobabble to consider.....
If you have convinced yourself that you MUST practice 3000+ draws in order to be competent, then you will NEED to practice 3000+ draws in order to be competent.
You've already convinced yourself that any number less equals failure, regardless of the truth.
Or, one could very sensibly take the view that, practicing 3000+ repetitions of a motion is a small price to pay for ensuring one has the skills to call upon when the $#!& hits the fan, rather than discovering too late that one hasn't.
You can dismiss this if you like. It's your ass. But no one achieves unconscious competence without lots of practice. Tiger Woods isn't the best at golf just because he's naturally gifted. He's the best because he's gifted, and because he practices more than anyone else. Michael Jordan wasn't the best on the basketball court because he's naturally gifted, he was the best because he cultivated his talent with lots and lots of practice.
If this applies to sport, how much more so to defensive use of a firearm, where the stakes are orders of magnitude higher. If Tiger Woods missed a put, or Jordan missed a free throw, they only risked losing a game. If you screw up in a gunfight, you risk losing your life. If you really were in the army, then you must have heard the saying "you fight like you train."
It's a documented fact that people revert to training under this kind of extreme stress. In the investigation following the tragic CHP Newhall gunfight that left four CHP officers dead, it was found:
“…that officers would react to a situation exactly the way they were taught in training. This occurred with Officer Pence. After Officer Pence had fired his sixth and last round, he tried to perform and reload just the way he was taught at the academy. He dumped the expended rounds from his revolver into his right hand and put the expended rounds in his pants pocket, as he had done on the firing range, then reloaded 6 rounds into his revolver. This gave Twining enough time to flank Pence and put a bullet in the back of his head. After the California Highway Patrol learned of this they issued speed loaders to their officers and changed their firearms training program to reflect real life shooting scenarios.”
– Tom Kohl, STAYING ALIVE ON THE JOB - A SURVIVAL GUIDE FOR PEACE OFFICERS
This is a
perfect illustration of the principle that we fight like we train. We revert to it totally without conscious thought. Even when it makes no sense, even when it may be the worst thing in the world to do, people under extreme stress almost invariably tend to default and revert to the methods they have practiced and rehearsed. In this particular case, the training this officer had received caused him to put empty cases in his pocket, wasting precious seconds while a bad guy was moving to a better position to shoot him. No doubt he and his fellow troopers trained that way so as to save themselves the bother of scrabbling around in the dirt for empty brass after shooting. But it had the effect of ingraining a useless set of movements into his muscle memory that he unthinkingly reverted to in combat.
Now in the case of the draw, the reason you practice 3000+ times is so that you can do it smoothly and quickly, without conscious thought, even while running, crouching, turning, possibly even falling, and still get an
accurate first shot off from the holster as fast as possible. If you don't practice those 3000+ repetitions, it's a fact that you
won't be as fast or as smooth.
Maybe you'll still be lucky enough to shoot the bad guy first. If you want to depend on luck, be my guest. I'd rather stack the deck just as much in my favor as humanly possible, thank you very much.
