Blog : Standards

Defensive Shooting “Standards”

What is the context?
Nice group, mediocre group, or Heroic group? What is the context?

What is Good Enough?

Quite often in the learning curve of any new endeavor, and especially after the newness wears off, the new student will begin to inquire as to what level of competence will suffice for their needs; what is “good enough”.  Usually the answer entails entails something along the lines of, “well, what is your goal…right now?”  Then, the rest of the evaluation and answers develop from there.

What is the skill level of the shooter in reference to the featured picture?  What were the marksmanship, mechanical, and mindset problems for the shooter to manage?  Time, distance, distractions, the “goal”, shooter and/or target movement all matter to provide context.  This shot group, all be itself, tells very little.  What is the rest of the story?

I ran across this post, Minimum Competency for Defensive Pistol from “Stuff from Hsoi” and wanted to summarize and share the high points with you.  There is quite a bit of detail about some of the evolutions of defensive shooting standards from some very well known trainers, some of their variants, along with the reasoning and pros/cons of developing “standards” in the first place.  This is certainly one of the many areas where I absolutely acknowledge that I am benefitting from the expertise, wisdom, and experience of others so that I might improve myself, and by extension, improve my students.

Read the whole article.

Read More