Competitive Shooting

Action-based competitive shooting sports are both derided as the province of silk pajama-wearing game players, and praised as the single most important exercise you can do to improve your shooting. They are damned as a superb way to ingrain habits that will most surely get you killed on the street, and participation in them has been noted as a common characteristic of police officers who have won street gunfights by no less an authority than the late Jim Cirillo.

So what's the truth? Well, the politician's way out would be to say that the truth is somewhere in between. I'm not much suited for public office, though, and so I'll say that it seems to me that both sides of the argument are true. (Which is not the same thing)

The Good

You do indeed feel stress in a match. It's not life-threatening stress, to be sure, but it is stress. This serves two very useful purposes (besides the fun, if you enjoy the challenge that stress creates). First, it serves to inoculate you from some stress. This is more inoculation that you get at the range while plinking qualifying. You really don't want the first time you feel stress with a gun in your hand to be when you have to use it for real. It's like martial arts or boxing - neither is real fighting, but both give you some reasonable experience in handling stress, as well as providing you some useful skills.

Which brings us to the second benefit of competitive shooting, and that is the skill they develop in you. Simply put, there's nothing like matches and the training for them to

• a) get you familiar with your equipment to the point that you can unconsciously run your gun (load, reload, clear malfunctions, and so on), and
• b) teach you to shoot fast and accurately. Fast, accurate shooting is what survival shooting - the kind of shooting that cops do in the street - is all about.<.li>

Enter a local IDPA or IPSC match and if you thought you were fast, you'll be humbled. If you thought you were accurate at speed, you'll get a whole new perspective of what that means! Getting good at these sports will force you to practice; your badge is no substitute for a case of ammunition and a few hours on the range.

By the way, there's really no silk pajamas involved in the sport. A touch of polyester at the high end, yes, but hey, who doesn't enjoy that now and then?

The Bad

Doing well in a match, at least if you care about the score, will force you to perform tactics that are completely unsafe on the street. You will be forced to shoot from out in the open - indeed, you'll be forced to charge right out into the open from perfectly safe cover; you will have to expose way too much of yourself from behind cover; you'll frequently shoot from open doorways - the concept of the fatal funnel has no relevance in the sport shooting world.

The issue here is that you will react as you've trained in a real situation. In the real world, most often the safe and practical tactics to use involve obsessive use of cover, slow and deliberate clearing, light management, and stealth shooting, to name a few. These tactics are not practiced in competitive shooting, and in fact, you can't begin to score well if you apply them.

Perhaps the most dangerous habit you can ingrain from competitive shooting is that of quickly shooting at targets as you see them. Judgment and target discrimination have little place in these events (the no-shoot targets used in IDPA matches are too primitive to count as real judgmental training, in my opinion.)

The Bottom Line

If competitive sport shooting ingrains both valuable gun handling and shooting skills, and unsafe tactics, should you engage in the sports? Yes! The key is to keep the habits learned in competitive shooting separate from the habits you need for survival shooting. There's three ways to do this.

1) Only do a relatively small amount of competitive shooting. The key word here is relatively. If you will default to your strongest training - your deepest reflexive rut, if you will - then using competitive shooting as a way to enhance your speed and accuracy can be done safely so long as it's done in moderation compared to the survival shooting practice that you do. Lots of cops take this approach.

2) Compete, but forget about the times (and therefore the score), and run the stages correctly from a tactics point of view. You will be a heck of a lot slower on any given stage, but you will be ingraining the good tactics you already know. I know a couple well-known trainers who take this approach to the shooting sports.

3) Engage in both survival and competitive shooting practice heavy and often. Master competitive shooter Bryce Linskey of the Bristol, Connecticut, PD SWAT team takes this approach. I once asked him if he was afraid of defaulting to dangerous competitive shooting tactics while working SWAT. He replied, "Look, when I'm in uniform, wearing all my SWAT gear, my operating context is clear, and I have no trouble maintaining a real-life mindset."

Pick one of the above, but by all means, don't neglect to participate! There's a competitive shooting league somewhere close to you, and it will

1. force you to shoot more often
2. improve your shooting
3. give you some fun, and
4. let you shoot courses of fire that you don't have the time or equipment to set up yourself.

Are you afraid that your shooting isn't up to snuff? Well, you're probably right - the average competitive shooter is a better shooter than the average cop. But you know something? They already know that! A friendlier, more supportive bunch of people you'll never find. So swallow your pride and get to it!

Finally, one great way for Firearms Instructors to both improve officer's shooting skills and let them have a huge amount of fun is to set up an IDPA-inspired stage or two and run them through it. Now you're in control of the event, and you can dictate (and evaluate) proper survival-shooting tactics. If you use photo-realistic targets with hand overlays (such as those made by Law Enforcement Targets linked below), you can also incorporate decision-making into the event. Couple that with low light and you have a pretty realistic depiction of the kind of shooting situation that officers get involved in.

Nothing says that training can't be fun!