What's the best way to say this?

[thomas15]

If all you want is practice, why are you going to competitions at all?

This is, of course the thing that needs to be said. USPSA and IDPA are sports, not a way for you to fine tune your carry skills.

Having said that, they are a lot of fun, get you out shooting and meeting others of like mind and you will, if you do it on a regular basis get a lot of trigger time. This cannot but help you in your self-defense skills. What I think some really want is to go to a self-defense seminar/workshop.

 

[Jeff22]

Is Competitive Shooting relevant to self-defense?

I shoot both IPSC and IDPA fairly regularly and shoot PPC once in a while. IPSC and IDPA are best considered skill building exercises that have some training value and can be very entertaining. Any competitive event, of necessity, will not be able to duplicate the dynamics of a real gunfight.

But, depending upon the course of fire, there CAN be training value in the process, if you are shooting the IDPA classifier or an IPSC classifier that measures basic marksmanship and gun-handling skills. Some IPSC assault courses totally lack any connection to reality and are best avoided, but classifiers and most IDPA courses of fire are at least semi-realistic in the marksmanship challenges presented.

In such competitions I've always used whatever my duty gun was at the time. Currently I most often use a Glock 19 in SSP in IDPA matches and a Glock 22 in production class in USPSA matches. I am currently classified in all the different divisions of IDPA and USPSA.

I'm more interested in getting trigger time than in shooting the matches as a competitive activity. Of course, I'm not particularly fast, so if I WAS attempting to become the next USPSA champion, I'd be way out of luck . . .

In general I prefer the course design philosophy of IDPA. However, I've been shooting IPSC on a sporadic basis at the local level since 1978, and I belong to a club that holds outdoor matches in the summer and indoor matches in the winter and they're only 22 miles from home.

I particularly like the USPSA Classifiers and the IDPA Classifier match as methods to test basic skills. Also, several of the local IPSC clubs have LOTS more steel and movers and bobbers and so forth than what we have available at the police range, so the courses of fire they use on match days are much more innovative that what we can do during in-service training at the PD.

There was a similar thread on one of the other forums lately, and one poster had an interesting thought that kind of mirrors my philosophy -- he takes IDPA more seriously and competes in IPSC as a sort of structured practice session.

You'll get out of it what you put into it. Be safe and have fun with it. At the very least, shooting in matches can show you which skills to need to practice more . . .

Many clubs are now on the web and some post the course descriptions for upcoming stages on their web site. If clubs near you do this, you'll find this to be very useful. I don't look at the courses of fire in advance to figure out a "game plan" on how to shoot the course, but rather to get an idea of what skills I might need to practice before the match. (practice strong hand only and weak hand only shooting to start with, and engaging multiple targets from behind high & low cover)


Also, some clubs are more practically oriented, and some have more members who shoot purely as a competitive activity (usually the IPSC shooters, BUT NOT ALWAYS) and by looking at posted courses of fire you can determine which orientation the club has and if the matches they run have any value for what you're trying to accomplish. (Sometimes I'll look at the posted courses for one of the local clubs and if three out of five stages are "run & gun" assault courses [which don't fit in with my philosophy very well] I'll just go do something else that day . . . )

 

[NWcityguy2]

If all you want is practice, why are you going to competitions at all?

Because competitions are practice, and even if the scenarios aren't realistic, the shooting fundamentals that are used to shoot them stick around afterwards. Plus they are significantly cheaper than professional training, happen almost every weekend and can be used in conjunction with other shooting disciplines.

 

[waktasz]

You'd get a lot more out of going to the range by yourself for 2 hours and working on drills than you do going to a match for 8 hours and shooting 125 rounds

 

[Bart B.]

You're checking your just your shooting skills, not your correct positive reaction choices to a dangerous situation and skills performing them.

 

[ATLDave]

Yeah, if we were trying to design a sport to test/train correct reactions to real life situations, about 99.9% of the time the buzzer would go off and the correct/point-getting reaction would be to leave the gun in the holster and walk away or use a cell phone.

 

[Bart B.]

A US Naval District Marksmanship Instructor told me about a good handgun shooting skill that should be mastered before learning when and how to use it in self defense situations. It is based the firearms' ammo capacity as "X" in the following criteria: X rounds in X seconds fired at X feet inside X inches.

If all rounds do that, the score is 100. If half the rounds do that, score's 50. You have to average 80 three times over the course. It's good for 5 shot revolvers as well as 14 shot semiauto's. With large capacity semiautos, cut its capacity in half then use 2 targets, or in thirds to use 3 targets; average on each target is still 80.