Why Passing a Police Firearms Qualification May Not Mean Readiness for a Gunfight

For as long as I have been involved in law enforcement firearms training, I have watched agencies wrestle with the same question: How good is good enough? It sounds like a simple issue. After all, every agency has a qualification course, every agency has a passing score, and every agency has a policy that defines who is authorized to carry a firearm in the performance of their duties. Yet beneath that apparent simplicity lies one of the most consequential decisions a training program can make.

The debate has become even more complicated in recent years. Some agencies have moved toward increasingly stringent qualification standards, with a few requiring officers to achieve perfect scores in order to pass. The logic appears sound on its face. If accuracy matters, then more accuracy should be better. If accountability matters, then demanding perfection should produce better outcomes. The problem is that qualification scores and real-world performance are not necessarily the same thing. Decades of officer-involved shooting data have repeatedly shown that hit rates in actual armed confrontations often fall far below the kind of performance officers demonstrate on a square range. Depending on the agency, the methodology, and the circumstances being studied, reported hit rates frequently land somewhere between sobering (35%) and uncomfortable (15%) (Donner & Popovich, 2019; Force Science Institute, 2006; Rostker et al., 2008) with many clustering near the lower end of that spectrum (NYPD, 2023). As an aside, the number that I hear most frequently (and that I tend to use myself when instructing or lecturing) is >25%, or 24%.

That should raise a question for every firearms instructor and every police executive responsible for certifying armed officers. If some officers can shoot a perfect score during qualification and later perform at a fraction of that level in a deadly force encounter, what exactly are our qualification standards measuring?

Part of the answer begins with recognizing what a qualification session is, and perhaps more importantly, what it is not. We have all heard it said countless times over the years: training is training, and qualification is not. Time spent running officers through a qualification course cannot, and should not, be counted as training time. Training is where skills are introduced, refined, reinforced, and developed. Qualification is where those skills are evaluated. One is intended to build competence. The other is intended to measure it. When agencies blur that distinction, they often end up giving themselves credit for training that never actually occurred.

Qualification as Certification, Not Training

That distinction matters because qualification standards are still treated in many organizations as little more than administrative necessities. They are scheduled, conducted, documented, and filed away until the next cycle arrives. Officers show up, shoot the prescribed course, receive a score, and return to work. In some agencies, the process has become so routine that few people stop to examine the assumptions embedded within it. The qualification course exists. The passing score exists. The paperwork is complete. Therefore, the standard must be appropriate. That is a dangerous chain of reasoning, not because qualification is unimportant, but because it is far more important than the way it is often treated.

The reality is that qualification is not merely an administrative exercise. If training develops competence, qualification is the formal mechanism by which that competence is recognized and documented. In practical terms, a qualification session functions as a certification event. Several years ago, while serving as an expert witness in a court case, I was asked to define certification. My response, though admittedly verbose, captured both the essence of certification and the purpose it is intended to serve: Certification is court-defensible documentation of formal exposure to, and evidence of demonstrated knowledge and proficiency within, and performance to, a minimum standard of adequacy which conforms to industry-recognized and accepted tactics, techniques, procedures, or methodologies for a specific educational, occupational or operational discipline (Hanson, 2026).

Viewed through that lens, the law enforcement firearms qualification process becomes something far more significant than a periodic range event. It becomes the agency's formal certification that an officer has demonstrated a minimum level of proficiency with a deadly weapon and has met the standard deemed necessary to carry that weapon in the performance of official duties. The qualification score sheet becomes court-defensible documentation. The course of fire becomes the evaluation methodology. The passing score becomes the minimum standard of adequacy. Every officer who passes is, in effect, being certified by the agency as competent to perform one of the most consequential responsibilities entrusted to a law enforcement professional.

The Liability Question Agencies Cannot Ignore

Once we recognize qualifications as certification events rather than training events, an entirely different question emerges. If qualification is certification, what level of performance are we willing to certify as competent? That question cannot be answered by tradition, convenience, or habit. It cannot be answered by pointing to whatever course of fire the agency inherited 20 years ago. It cannot be answered by saying every other agency in the region does it the same way. Those may be explanations for how a standard came to exist, but they are not defenses of the standard itself.

This is where liability enters the conversation, and it enters quickly. Law enforcement use of force remains among the most heavily scrutinized aspects of public service. Every officer-involved shooting is likely to be examined by investigators, administrators, prosecutors, plaintiffs' attorneys, expert witnesses, the media, and increasingly, the public. In those moments, training records often become evidence. Qualification standards become evidence. The agency's definition of competence becomes evidence. It is not enough to show that an officer qualified. The deeper question is whether the agency can defend what it meant when it declared that officer qualified.

For years, conversations surrounding firearms qualification standards have tended to polarize into two predictable camps. One side argues for dramatically raising standards, often pointing to elite military units, specialized tactical teams, national-level competitors, or the highest-performing officers in the agency. The other side argues that qualification standards must remain realistic for the average officer, citing staffing demands, limited range time, ammunition budgets, union concerns, remediation burdens, and the simple reality that most officers are not firearms enthusiasts. Both perspectives contain truth. Both also contain blind spots.

The Defensible Minimum Standard

The challenge is that firearms qualifications serve multiple purposes simultaneously. They measure competence. They document compliance. They reduce risk. They create an agency record. They influence training culture. They also establish, in writing, the level of skill an agency considers acceptable for officers carrying firearms in public. That means qualification standards cannot be built around instructor ego, administrative convenience, or political comfort. They must be built around professional responsibility.

Over the years, I have come to view the issue through a framework built around two guardrails. The first is the lowest acceptable standard that can be professionally, ethically, and legally defended. The second is a performance standard that meaningfully elevates capability without creating an exclusionary system that only rewards unusually talented or unusually motivated shooters. Together, those two guardrails create a framework that is both defensible and practical.

The first guardrail is what I refer to as the defensible minimum standard. This is not the standard of excellence. It is not the standard that identifies the best shooters in the agency. It is simply the lowest level of performance an agency can reasonably certify as competent. That distinction matters because many qualification programs were never designed through a deliberate examination of risk, performance, liability, and human capability. They evolved. Courses were inherited. Scoring systems were copied. Passing scores became institutional traditions. Eventually, nobody remembered why the standard existed in the first place.

The danger in that approach should be obvious. A standard that exists merely because it has always existed offers little protection when challenged. The fact that an agency has used a particular qualification course for two decades does not automatically establish that the course is appropriate today. The fact that most officers can pass it does not automatically establish that it measures the right things. The fact that it is easy to administer does not mean it is defensible.

A defensible minimum standard must measure skills officers are reasonably expected to perform in the field. It must require accountability for shot placement. It must include some meaningful time component because time pressure is one of the defining characteristics of armed confrontation. It must require basic gun handling and marksmanship under conditions that are administratively manageable, but still connected to the operational reality of police work. It must distinguish acceptable performance from unacceptable performance in a way that reflects the consequences of missed rounds, poor hits, delayed decisions, and degraded execution under stress.

Why Perfect Scores Can Still Miss the Point

This is where many qualification programs run into trouble. In some agencies, scoring systems allow officers to accumulate marginal hits and still pass. In others, large scoring zones allow rounds that would be difficult to justify in an actual deadly force encounter to count the same as precise, accountable hits. In still others, officers are given time limits that bear little resemblance to the compression of time experienced in real encounters. The result is a certification process that may produce clean paperwork while failing to answer the deeper question: Can the agency defend this level of performance as adequate?

The issue is not perfection. No qualification course can perfectly replicate a deadly force encounter. It cannot reproduce the ambiguity, fear, movement, noise, lighting, physiology, decision-making demands, or emotional consequences of a real shooting. Human performance under stress is influenced by attention, arousal, perception, motor control, and cognitive load. Research on skill development and expertise has long demonstrated that performance depends on structured practice, feedback, and conditions that approximate the demands of the task (Ericsson et al., 1993; Salas et al., 2012). Firearms qualification, by itself, is not a substitute for that kind of training.

Nevertheless, approximations should remain connected to reality. A qualification course does not have to be a simulation to be valid. It does have to measure something meaningful. If the standard allows a level of inaccuracy or delay that would be difficult to defend after an officer-involved shooting, agencies should not be surprised when that standard becomes the subject of scrutiny. If the qualification allows poor hits, excessive misses, or barely controlled performance to be documented as adequate, then the agency has created a record of what it was willing to certify.

That does not mean agencies should swing to the opposite extreme and create artificially difficult qualification standards in an effort to look serious. That approach often creates its own problems. Standards that are designed around the performance of the best shooters in an agency may look impressive on paper, but they can become operationally fragile. If the standard is so high that a large portion of otherwise functional officers cannot meet it without extensive remediation, the agency may face predictable administrative, political, and staffing pressure. When that pressure builds, the standard is often softened in practice, even if it remains unchanged on paper.

Raising the Middle of the Agency

That brings us to the second guardrail: the median-inclusive performance standard. If the defensible minimum standard establishes the floor, the median-inclusive standard establishes the bar agencies should actively train toward. The phrase is intentional. The goal is not to create a standard that only the top 10 percent of shooters can meet. Nor is it to keep the bar so low that the bottom tier can pass with little effort. The goal is to establish a meaningful, challenging, achievable performance standard that improves the middle of the agency.

That middle matters more than many firearms instructors like to admit. The top performers are usually going to perform well regardless of minor changes in the qualification course. They are motivated. They practice. They seek training. They dry fire. They buy ammunition. They take pride in performance. The lowest performers, by contrast, will require intervention under almost any credible standard. The real influence of a training and qualification system is found in the broad middle of the organization. These are the officers who are neither exceptional nor deficient. They are competent, imperfect, busy, and often responsive to the expectations placed in front of them.

Those officers represent the median. They are the officers who may not train independently, but will work if the agency creates the right structure. They may not seek out advanced classes, but they will rise to a standard that is clearly communicated, consistently enforced, and supported by useful training. They are not trying to become competitive shooters. They are trying to do the job. A serious qualification system must be designed with them in mind because the performance culture of an agency is not defined by its outliers. It is defined by its middle.

When standards are set too low, the middle learns that minimal effort is enough. Practice becomes unnecessary. Improvement becomes optional. Qualification becomes a ritual. Officers learn that the agency says firearms proficiency matters, but the standard tells them something else. That disconnect is corrosive because officers are very good at identifying what organizations actually value. They watch what gets measured. They watch what gets enforced. They watch what carries consequences.

Qualification Should Be the Audit, Not the Curriculum

When standards are set unrealistically high, the middle may respond in a different but equally predictable way. Some officers improve. Others become frustrated. Supervisors become concerned about staffing. Administrators become concerned about failure rates. Instructors become pressured to coach, adjust, explain, accommodate, and retest until the results become politically acceptable. Over time, the agency may preserve the appearance of a high standard while quietly reducing its meaning.

The median-inclusive standard avoids both traps. It says the agency expects more than survival-level competence, but it also recognizes that sustainable standards must be attainable by ordinary officers who receive competent instruction and put in reasonable effort. It gives instructors a legitimate target beyond mere qualification. It gives officers a professional goal that is demanding without being unrealistic. It gives administrators a way to raise expectations without building a failure factory.

This distinction between the defensible minimum and the median-inclusive standard is also useful because it allows agencies to stop treating qualification as purely binary. Yes, an officer either qualifies or does not qualify for duty purposes. That administrative decision matters. But performance itself is not binary. Competence exists across a spectrum. Two officers may both pass, while demonstrating very different levels of capability. One may barely clear the minimum. Another may demonstrate the kind of performance the agency should be working to make normal. A mature system should be able to recognize that difference.

Passing scores often generate intense debate because they are easy to see, easy to compare, and easy to politicize. A 70 percent standard sounds different than an 80 percent standard. A 90 percent standard sounds more serious. A 100 percent standard sounds uncompromising. But numbers alone do not tell the whole story. A 100 percent standard on a course that is slow, static, and forgiving may be less meaningful than an 85 percent standard on a course that demands time management, accountability, and realistic performance. A high pass rate may indicate excellent training. It may also indicate a weak test. A high failure rate may indicate rigor. It may also indicate poor instruction or an unrealistic standard.

The numbers themselves reveal very little without context. What matters is whether the course of fire, scoring method, time limits, target zones, and passing threshold combine to distinguish competent performance from incompetent performance. What matters is whether the standard can be explained to a chief, defended to a city attorney, understood by line officers, and justified in front of a jury. What matters is whether the agency can say, without embarrassment, that this is the level of performance it was willing to certify as adequate.

This is where the two-guardrail framework becomes useful. The defensible minimum standard answers one question: What is the lowest level of performance we can certify as competent without compromising professional responsibility? The median-inclusive performance standard answers another: What level of performance should we be developing across the majority of the agency? Those questions are related, but they are not identical. Confusing them is where many qualification programs go wrong.

If an agency only has a minimum, everyone eventually trains to the minimum. That is human nature. If the qualification is the only measurable expectation, and the passing score is comfortably attainable with little preparation, the system should not be surprised when officers give it little preparation. On the other hand, if the agency only has an aspirational standard and treats every failure to meet that standard as a duty-disqualifying event, the system may become unsustainable. The two guardrails allow the agency to separate certification from development while keeping both connected.

This also changes the role of the firearms instructor. The instructor's job is not to protect pass rates. It is not to preserve tradition. It is not to make weak standards look respectable or to make strong standards politically palatable. The instructor's job is to help the agency define, teach, measure, document, and defend competence. That requires more than running relays. It requires understanding what the qualification is supposed to prove. It requires recognizing the difference between training and testing. It requires the courage to say when a standard is too low, too vague, too generous, too artificial, or too disconnected from reality.

It also requires humility. Firearms instructors can be tempted to define competence through the lens of their own ability, interests, and professional identity. That temptation is understandable, but it is dangerous. The goal is not to turn every patrol officer into a firearms instructor, competitive shooter, or tactical team member. The goal is to ensure that every armed officer meets a defensible standard of adequacy, and that the agency has a structure for moving the median toward better performance over time.

That is where training must do what qualification cannot. Qualification can measure. It can document. It can certify. It cannot, by itself, develop skill. Agencies that want better qualification performance and better operational performance must invest in training that occurs before the test, not during it. They must provide meaningful repetitions, relevant feedback, realistic constraints, and opportunities for officers to correct deficiencies before those deficiencies become failures. The qualification should be the audit, not the curriculum.

References 

Donner, C. M., & Popovich, N. (2019). Hitting or missing the mark: An examination of police shooting accuracy in officer-involved shooting incidents. Policing: An International Journal, 42(3), 474-489. https://doi.org/10.1108/PIJPSM-05-2018-0060 

Ericsson, K. A., Krampe, R. T., & Tesch-Römer, C. (1993). The role of deliberate practice in the acquisition of expert performance. Psychological Review, 100(3), 363-406. https://doi.org/10.1037/0033-295X.100.3.363 

Force Science Institute. (2006). Officer-involved shootings: What we didn't know has hurt us. Force Science News. 

Hanson, K. A. (2026). Unlocking the brain code: Exposing the limits of traditional firearms instruction and high-liability training through neuroscience, psychology, and human performance research. Applied Threat Science Publications. 

New York City Police Department. (2023). Annual firearms discharge report 2023. New York City Police Department. 

Rostker, B. D., Hanser, L. M., Hix, W. M., Jensen, C., Morral, A. R., Ridgeway, G., & Schell, T. L. (2008). Evaluation of the New York City Police Department firearm training and firearm-discharge review process. RAND Corporation. 

Salas, E., Tannenbaum, S. I., Kraiger, K., & Smith-Jentsch, K. A. (2012). The science of training and development in organizations: What matters in practice. Psychological Science in the Public Interest, 13(2), 74-101. https://doi.org/10.1177/1529100612436661