How Fast You Shoot is a Matter of Confidence

What determines the speed with which you shoot? A lot of people right now might be thinking size of the target, distance to the target those types of things, the geometry problem stuff. It's your confidence in your ability under those circumstances? Think about it. If you think it's gonna be an easy shot you apply less skill, you shoot faster.

If you think it's gonna be a hard shot which is now that's all the geometry problem stuff. If you think it's gonna be a hard shot, if you perceive it, if you recognize it as a hard shot you're gonna slow down and take your time. Does that fit with your experience when you've been shooting? You think it's gonna be easy, you shoot fast. You think it's gonna be hard, you take your time.

You may be right. You may be wrong. And how do you get more right? More practice. You spend more time, effort and energy and training to understand what you are capable of.

You can't read a book that tells you how fast you should be. You need to go out to the range and figure out how fast you are. How much time, effort and energy you have to take. Now there's an asterisk that goes on this. If you buy the book, if you go read the articles online, you watch the videos, you're almost always going to see an asterisk on this.

The old version of the asterisk is unless you are shooting out of fear. Why did I change it? Why did we as an instructor group change it? We changed it because how many of you have heard that you should only shoot when you're in fear for your life or the lives of others? You heard that kind of justification.

Why are you shooting somebody? Well I was in fear for my life. I was afraid. And that's appropriate that you are afraid and that is the reason that you're drawing your gun and shooting, right? You're gonna go into court and say "I was in fear for my life." Okay, so you were in fear for your life.

But Rob Pincus said, if you're shooting out of fear then the gun is gonna be out of control and you're shooting too fast. I don't really want that. Then it was appropriately that we changed it. Now in the old book, in the old stuff it still says out of fear. We now say out of panic.

Panic is different from fear, right? So think about panic. What's panic mean? Means we're out of control. We've seen lots and lots and lots of dash camera videos and surveillance camera videos of people shooting a lot faster than they were shooting when they were shooting that qualification course or when they were shooting at IDPA match or when they were shooting any of their training or practice because they're shooting out of panic, because all of a sudden go way back to earlier slides.

The context. The context was so different from their choreographed, staled, static training that in the real fight, it all went to hell and they drove that gun out and just started pulling the trigger really fast til the bad man stopped. That usually works, but what happens? Department average. Let's go back to that scenario.

Police department qualification score average 93%. Awesome. Really proud of you guys. You're doing a great job. Sir yeah.

Street average. Street hit average is it 92%? No, it's probably more like 22% at best, right? 12% in some places. Why?

Why the huge disparity? False confidence. We were establishing a confidence in our ability to shoot in a model that had nothing to do with the way that we actually need to apply the skills and shoot when we're trying to defend ourselves or someone else. So we have a false confidence. We thought we were a lot better than we were and actually we could be a lot better on the street but we have to train in a very different way and we have to bring those two things together.

So we stopped trying to shoot three inch groups to get a 96% and we start shooting eight inch groups really really fast to get an 81% and you're gonna go from 22 to 52, right? We have to change the training model. That's the idea.