Yes, You Have To Carry A Gun With That Shiny Badge - Brief Article

The interesting fact is that even shooters who can demonstrate that they are "good" on a standard of course of fire sometimes do very poorly in real life self-defense shooting scenarios. I have heard all kinds of excuses why people fare so poorly when bullets are flying around them.

The truth is that a number of factors come into play. Note that in American law enforcement, we now proudly state that while police shootings of a couple of decades ago usually produced a 10 to 15 percent hit rate, today's hits on target in real life gunfights have risen to 25 to 30 percent. This increase is to be celebrated, until you consider the fact that about 75 percent of the shots fired by police officers are total misses.

I am often asked why police officers take skill-at-arms to be a limited priority. Most non-police types assume that all cops want to be expert gunmen. Well, the cold, hard facts are that most don't care, some would not even carry a gun if given a choice and only a handful of agencies take shooting skills seriously.

The "good" police shooters are good because they are "gun guys." As in every other profession, a small number of police like guns, enjoy shooting and pursue the skills to become "good."

Across the board, law enforcement shooting standards have improved over the past 20 years. This is due partly to the increased danger of the job. Additionally, I firmly believe that the advances made in civilian combat shooting circles, such as IPSC, have carried over into law enforcement firearms shooting.

For the most part, handgun-shooting skills in American police agencies are limited to qualification courses. In-service training, where officers are required to train with their sidearms in addition to firing departmentally required qualification courses, occurs within some very exceptional police agencies. However, these are the exception rather than the rule.

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