T. O'Heir said:
CCW, or whatever it's called locally, is not about non-coppers getting into gun fights. It's about non-coppers and self-defence in extreme, unusual, conditions. If you need more than one mag of whatever capacity came with the pistol you can shoot best to get yourself out of the mess you got into, you're in waaaaay over your head.
What course of action do you recommend when you find yourself in a situation that leaves you waaaay over your head through no fault of your own? Do you suggest rolling over and playing dead? (If not, why even mention it?) Maybe you can recommend a preemptive move, like never going out without one or two armed companions known to be competent with firearms?
T. O'Heir said:
...Far too many think the shooting games are practice for those extreme, unusual, conditions. They are not practice for anything. They're shooting games and nothing more.
I agree that in most real-life situations, we're not going to shoot as many rounds as we shoot in matches, but I also realize that as we moved from one part of a course of fire to another, that could be a simulation of a real-life event where we may have missed what we were aiming at, and the
target had moved, and was still able to shoot back at us.
I used to create the scenarios that we used at our club's IDPA matches. We certainly fired more than 3-4 rounds in each course of fire, but each course of fire often included 3 different scenarios. These courses of fire were seldom examples of extreme or unusual conditions. But they were designed to cause you to find and use cover, seek the best way to shoot from cover (sometimes from awkward positions), reloading when empty, and not doing anything really stupid -- like NOT using cover! But the gun games are also entertainment and meant to be fun, too, so you've got to throw in some things so that they aren't the same all the time.
Gun games are not training. Training requires training objectives, some understanding on the part of the trainee about what is be accomplished (i.e., skills to be developed), and critiques of the trainee's performance done by an observer or instructor after the training session is complete, and some ability for the trainee to practice the new skills being taught (and hopefully learned) after they've gotten feedback on their performance.
While you do get feedback in the gun games, it's not always positive and you don't always learn from it, or get tips on how to improve. But, you also don't get that a LOT of that at many TRAINING classes, nor do you get a lot of chances to practice newly learned skills or practices with someone watching to see if you're doing it right!
Over time in the gun games you can begin to assess your gun handling habits (good or bad) and that lets you decide which things may need attention. That, in turn, can lead you to seek training/guidance to work on the things that need improvement. A lot of us have done that.
I know that thanks to my gun game participation, I'm now much more safety conscious than I once was and I'm far more comfortable with and adept in the use of my weapons. That wasn't directly training, but it was indirectly, and valuable in its own right.
Whether these learned skills and behavior will make themselves known or disappear when the STUFF hits the fan remains to be seen.
