Ohio native Robert Vogel was a police officer for 8.5 years in Kenton, Ohio before switching gears to shooting competitively and training others in shooting full-time. Still an auxiliary officer with his department, more often than not he’s one-the-move with Team Safariland. Vogel recently won the 2016 IDPA Indoor National Championship for the ninth year in a row. IDPA is unique in that it has shooters compete in challenging no-light and low-light scenarios for speed and accuracy.
LET: Do you ever miss “the daily grind”?
RV: A little bit. I miss some of the guys I work with and the nature of the work. Just being a cop in general is hours of boredom followed by moments of excitement…But I did miss [going] into work, not knowing exactly what’s going to happen. The possibility of something exciting happening is always there and I do miss that a little bit.
LET: So how did you get involved in competitive shooting?
RV: I’ll go back to the very beginning. I grew up on a farm so I was shooting since I was real little. Hunting was always a big part of life. About 15 is when I realized...I wanted to be a cop. Number two, I really just kind of became infatuated with shooting handguns and so those two things went together. I was in a gun culture but nobody in my family did competitive shooting; I didn’t know anything about that. I had just kind of discovered on my own.
IDPA was really the first [competition] I had heard of. After high school I went into the police academy and that’s when I shot my first match. I just went to a map on the website and found the closest match was an hour away in Tinley, Ohio. It was kind of intimidating; I think I had to lie about my age. At the time I was supposed to be 21…but I won the match. I had never shot against anybody other than friends and family and there were about 20 guys there and I won. It just kind of hooked me from there.
LET: When you’re doing the low-light/no-light scenarios what’s going through your mind?
RV: When I’m out shooting the stage [I] try to plan what [I’m] going to do as much as I can. Probably over half the stadium is shot in the dark with a flashlight, and the thing that made it more challenging was, there were a lot of moving targets—a lot of unpredictable, fast moving targets and you had just a second or two to shoot at some of these and they’re gone. There are also no-shoot targets really close. So that made it especially hard.
I’m just trying to stay in the zone and do things at the pace and the level that I know I can perform.
LET: Are there any reminders that apply to law enforcement too?
RV: Most of it is just being familiar with the gun…[always knowing] the condition of your gun…you pick it up and you can feel—is it loaded? Is it unloaded? Is the slide closed? Is it not? Being able to draw the gun quickly, deploy it quickly…pretty much on-target. All that stuff is a benefit. Bottom line is the more time you spend with a gun in your hand overall, the better you’re going to be. That’s what you’re doing when you’re shooting competitively—you’re getting a lot of time on the gun.
[As far as tactics], IDPA really tries to put in place some of those tactics that make you use cover or stand out in the open. You have to shoot targets in certain orders, you don’t expose yourself to the targets…and that’s all good.
One of the things I like the most is that it’s about the accuracy and speed. Most people that shoot get the accuracy—they can hit the pop can or target, but most people don’t realize they need to be able to do that fast. [This is] very important in real life when the targets are not going to stand still. They’re going to be moving; they’re only going to be there for a second or two and IDPA rewards me [for being fast].
LET: So the reward is more of an incentive.
RV: If you’re going to do a certain shooting drill, and we’re going to say ‘I’m going to give you 10 seconds to do it and that’s your time,’ the problem is it doesn’t reward the guy that can do it in 6 seconds or the guy that does it in 9 seconds. It’s like the same score. Wherein reality, the guy that can get the same hits faster is a lot better than the guy that did it in 9 seconds. But if you’re not rewarding that, then guys will never push to be faster and to be better. In reality, you might have one or two seconds….that might be it.
LET: What are some ideas law enforcement can borrow from competitive shooting?
RV: The main thing that I like to discuss when I do training is doing something that’s measurable. For instance, if you were a bowler or a golfer you would have an idea of how good you are (a bowler bowls a 200 or 190 or whatever) you kind of know where you’re at. But most people with shooting don’t really have a clue; they don’t know what score [they] can get on a particular drill. You don’t have to be a competitive shooter to do this—not at all. There are plenty of different standards out there: non-competitive things you can do to see, skill-wise, where you stack up.
I encourage people to get more into it…take it a little more seriously…delve into what you’re doing. Having a shot timer [helps]. The shot timer that we use beeps, electronically picks up the shot and tells you how fast you are. I really think the speed aspect is very important; it’s very important to be able to do things in shooting and do it fast. Not out of control, but fast. Anybody that’s been in any kind of a real incident, gun fight bar fight, cop, whatever, knows how fast is fast.
From a competitive side I always tell people, [doing what I do] you get used to living in a world where tenths and hundredths of a second matter, where you can actually tell the difference between tenths and hundredths of seconds. That translates in the real world—just being in different fights and things and wrestling people as a cop I just thought that, naturally, I was able to think faster and make decisions faster that other people because I’m so used to doing things fast. That’s such a huge advantage. When you’re in something with somebody and you think of something a second or half a second before they think of it ... that’s all the difference in the world.
LET: Anything else?
RV: I always tell people, just because someone is a high level competitive shooter doesn’t mean they’re going to do well in a fight or a gunfight. So much of that depends on your mind-set and how you prepare and think about things. Some people when they walk around they’re actually envisioning these things happening, and they’re envisioning what they think they would do in this situation or that situation and they’re preparing themselves mentally to have that warrior’s spear and that fighter’s mind. That’s a whole other topic, but it all goes together.
