Do You Train Enough?

How often we train with our firearms and how effective that training is can have a profound effect on maintaining your skill levels. Firearms skills are a perishable skill that diminishes over time. Overall, for law enforcement, the most proficient an average officer is at their firearms handling skills is probably immediately after they graduate the Academy. The recruit is receiving constant and effective training on a weekly basis, if not a few times a week. Some days the recruit may be training for 2-4 hours, while other days it may be all day on the range.

After a recruit leaves the Academy, their agency may give them additional handgun and/or rifle training to prepare them for the streets and for the agency to ensure that they have indeed trained to a sufficient level at the Academy. Unfortunately, after the initial push of decent training, most officers do not receive on-going training throughout their career.

How often does the officer come to the range? Once a year for qualification? A few times a year for qualification? Is there training built in to the time that the officer is out at the range for qualifications?

Do you consider a qualification as being training? You shouldn't. A weapons qualification is not training. It is only a test. It is a test of your proficiency to continue to carry your firearm for duty use. Do not count your time on the range during a qualification as "training" time.

How often should you train? There are a lot of variables to this question. Cost of ammunition, availability of ammunition, time of the officer being off the street, times the range is available for use, and officer motivation to train on their own are only a few.

A good friend of mine made a good point to me once. I'm not sure if he came up with it himself or if he read it in a book, but he told me; "It is better to train a little bit more often, than to train a long time less often."

The way I translate this is as follows: If you go to the range once a week and shoot only one box of ammo (handgun - 50 rounds) for one year, you will have had 52 training sessions to work on your fundamentals and to maintain, if not improve, your firearms handling skills. If you go to the range twice a year and shoot 26 boxes of ammo (1300 rounds), you would have shot the same amount of rounds down range, but how effective was that training? Sure, shooting 1300 rounds of ammunition in one training day is not realistic. Is it possible, probably, but very likely. More realistically is that you would probably at the max, shoot 200-300 rounds during a training day, if you are truly focusing on properly training. Too much training in one day will cause fatigue and will create training scars. This will cause you to move backward, not forward in improving your skills.

Take every training opportunity that you have. If your agency offers training, mandatory or not, take advantage of it. If you can find a tactical shooting course, take it. You may not agree with everything that the instructors say, but it may help you open your eyes to something that you did not previously know. Train a lot, especially if you can get the ammunition for free.

Here are two links that offer a great wealth of knowledge. The first is the 2008 FBI statistics on Officers feloniously killed and the second link is information once again from the FBI about cop attackers and their mentality.

2008 FBI – Officers Feloniously Killed Stats

Force Science News #62: New Findings from FBI About Cop Attackers & Their Weapons

Here are a few points from Force Science of information on findings from the FBI about cop attackers and their weapons. The entire article is worth the read.

From a pool of more than 800 incidents, the researchers selected 40, involving 43 offenders (13 of them admitted gangbangers-drug traffickers) and 50 officers, for in-depth exploration. They visited crime scenes and extensively interviewed surviving officers and attackers alike, most of the latter in prison.

Several of the offenders began regularly to carry weapons when they were 9 to 12 years old, although the average age was 17 when they first started packing “most of the time.” Gang members especially started young.

Nearly 40% of the offenders had some type of formal firearms training, primarily from the military. More than 80% “regularly practiced with handguns, averaging 23 practice sessions a year,” the study reports, usually in informal settings like trash dumps, rural woods, back yards and “street corners in known drug-trafficking areas.”

One spoke of being motivated to improve his gun skills by his belief that officers “go to the range two, three times a week [and] practice arms so they can hit anything.”

In reality, victim officers in the study averaged just 14 hours of sidearm training and 2.5 qualifications per year. Only 6 of the 50 officers reported practicing regularly with handguns apart from what their department required, and that was mostly in competitive shooting. Overall, the offenders practiced more often than the officers they assaulted, and this “may have helped increase [their] marksmanship skills,” the study says.

The offender quoted above about his practice motivation, for example, fired 12 rounds at an officer, striking him 3 times. The officer fired 7 rounds, all misses.

More than 40% of the offenders had been involved in actual shooting confrontations before they feloniously assaulted an officer. Ten of these “street combat veterans,” all from “inner-city, drug-trafficking environments,” had taken part in 5 or more “criminal firefight experiences” in their lifetime.

One reported that he was 14 when he was first shot on the street, “about 18 before a cop shot me.” Another said getting shot was a pivotal experience “because I made up my mind no one was gonna shoot me again.”

Again in contrast, only 8 of the 50 LEO victims had participated in a prior shooting; 1 had been involved in 2 previously, another in 3. Seven of the 8 had killed offenders.