Racing simulators don't prepare you for your first race very well.
Gunfight training is the same. The saving grace for police is that their first gunfight is typically against another first timer, and usually a first timer with less training. It takes a few firefights in combat to gain the ability to function at your best, according to the combat vets I have spoken with.
I suspect the predictive factor isn't training at gunfighting but prior exposure to dangerous, stressful situations. I would be willing to bet a veteran smokejumper (wildland firefighter) with moderate firearms experience outperforms a trained officer in a gunfight because they have experience functioning under a dangerous, stressful situation with lives, including their own, on the line.
A note on the statistics. How many of the "untrained" New Orleans police were civil war veterans with more experience being shot at than today's "well trained" police.
My training suggestion is to try to find ways to give officers experience functioning under fear. I don't know how you can schedule that. Real fear requires real risk.
Thanks for the comment! There is definitely a difference between training and the real thing. I think the trainer's job is to get it as close to the real thing as (safely) possible so that the gap is as small as possible. I also think that a racing simulator is probably not the best analogy. Not only does it not have the risk associated with a real race (or any risk at all), it also doesn't give you the feeling of actually driving (acceleration, turning, ect.) so the perceptual cues are very different. Maybe a small scale race (fewer, less powerful, and maybe more protective cars) is a better training task?
Same thing goes for sparring to prepare for a real fight. You can't get all the way there, but you can get much closer than punching bags and hitting pads will get you. What seems to be lacking in most firearms training is the equivalent of sparring for gun fighting. Some will say that is what force-on-force does, but even force-on-force tends to be very scripted. If you are training to fight a lively opponent (someone who is uncooperative and unscripted), you need to do lively training. In the fighting world, some people have taken this to the point of not doing any bag, pad, or technique work. They train people by sparring from day one - and they are having success doing it. Check out Greg Souders in BJJ and Scott Seivewright in MMA. Now firearms bring a whole other level of safety concerns, but they are not insurmountable.
A qualification Score each year helps to set the ground work for trainers who identify officers that need more training in the basics. Those may be identified by testing the officer on a bullseye target at 7 and 10 yards. Just using 10 rounds, anything outside of the black circle needs to be addressed until the problem is fixed. You firearms instructors know what Im talking about.
once that's addressed start the tactical movement, cover, tactical reloading, night fire exercises, etc.
Testing with the bullseye target during each qualification for seasoned and new officers is a must.
seasoned officers have a tendency only be concerned about their marksmanship during a qualification. When actually the range should be available. I go to the range several times a month, even though retired, to shoot several the Schreck McPhee drills.
Agree with all you said. Would add: gunfight opponents often move. Stationary targets of course do not. Until somebody develops an affordable way to make a target jump up and down and to the side , range training will continue to be only mildly helpful
Great article! The biggest failure of qualifications is that they're passable at very low skill levels and rarely demand skill progression: 20 year vets share the same standard as academy recruits. The assumption that an officer who shoots above the cutoff on a qualification course is competent to use a handgun in an armed confrontation is deeply flawed at best.
Your excellent article "You Call That 'Expert' Shooting?" citing Lewinski et al. demonstrates this.
Thanks for the thoughtful article — I'll grant most of it, and I appreciate the links. I do want to emphasize one point, though, because I don't think representative design alone gets you there.
My argument is that officers are trained incorrectly in a fairly specific way: they are never required to fire quickly during qualifications. Because of that, they hyper-focus on trigger prep and press, and they under-develop grip. Slow prep-and-press builds marksmanship for bullseye shooting, and that's essentially what most LE qualification courses are. But real gunfights are fast, and most officers have never fired that fast in their careers. Specifically, you need to learn to manipulate the trigger aggressively without moving the sights.
This isn't theoretical. Practical shooting competitors shoot with enviable speed and real accuracy, and they achieve that ability by shooting fast. That's how the grip gets built. It's a physical adaptation that requires repeated aggressive trigger manipulation and repeated exposure to managing recoil at speed, and I'm skeptical it comes along for free just because the scenario now has better perceptual cues. You can put an officer in a representative environment and, if he's never built that grip, he'll still be moving the sights as he pulls the trigger or over-driving the gun in recoil.
So I'd put it this way: representative training tells you what to practice, but it doesn't substitute for the volume of fast live fire that builds the underlying capability. Officers should emulate the practical shooting world on this, not practices originally developed for slow, aimed fire.
Agreed on your safety point, and on the recoil limitations of simulators — which I think actually cuts in favor of protecting some live-fire time specifically for speed work.
On your scale point — this may be cheaper than it looks. Top competitive shooters are routinely hired to train elite LE and military units, and most of them advocate spending half to three-quarters of an ammunition budget on three drills: Trigger Control at Speed, Doubles, and One Shot Return. All three are run static, on a flat range. No new facilities, no added safety burden, no scenario development — just a reallocation of rounds officers are already firing. Thank you for the excellent discussion on a meaningful topic.
100% agree. So while i do think the basics of shooting should be mastered, thats really as far as any dept goes in terms of training the typical beat cop. Special units like swat for example will get more advanced training, and get it on a more frequent basis. As an instructor myself, the bottom line comes down to, most cops just aren’t gun guys. The yearly qual is the only time they ever shoot their weapons. As we all know shooting is a perishable skill. And the constant excuse i always hear from guys is, budget. There is never enough money in the budget to provide these guys with higher level training. The ones who are truly serious about it spend time and money on their own to advance their firearm skills. Then there are those who try to justify their low level of ability. As a 2 division master class shooter in uspsa shooting, i have cops show up to a class thinking they are pretty competent. Then they get smoked in drills by a “C” class shooter. Or when i will demonstrate a drill to a high level, ill sometimes hear, aint no reason to be that fast and accurate! Which just appalls me. While im not law enforcement, if i was, id want to be faster and more accurate than any adversary. And seeing where you dont know the level of training of your adversary, im going to do everything i can to be the best i possibly can.
A good force on force class is where one can get as real as possible without actually using real bullets. However the class needs to be properly run as if its not it can turn into a game. But the ability to isolate and develop specific concepts of gunfighting, in my opinion, nothing currently better exists. Even simulators, there is no consequences for failure. I get it, yes you’re bot gonna die in a force on force class either. But that pain stimulus definitely ramps up the motivation to succeed.
Completely agree, in 1998. So much has changed on straight ranges since the white papers started landing during the decades at war in the Middle East. Look, qualification on a straight range is one metric in a constellation. If you focus on it as a standalone measuring tool, sure, it doesn’t look like a valid metric. However, within the spectrum of modern drills, scenario-based training, and hard-learned tactics from overseas and other sources, it’s a decent measuring stick of basic ability that allows FA instructors to diagnose and fix fundamentals. I love you, Doc, but this one is a little bit of a stretch.
Hey Scott - Thanks for the comment, and believe me, I know that when I talk about firearms, I am going to get some pushback! I am going to put military training aside, because I don't know that much about what they are doing. I understand that a lot of military stuff creeps into LE, but I only know about the stuff that appears in LE. There have been changes in LE training since 1998.
Unfortunately, The data just don't support that these things have done much to improve police performance - This is a forthcoming book chapter that briefly covers a lot of the published data - https://www.crimrxiv.com/pub/lx805j63/release/1 - you'll see that there is not much, if any, improvement in per round hit rate. The incident hit rate (any bullet fired by any officer hits any suspect) has increased some, but I am working on a paper that argues that this is a selectivity effect - police are involved in fewer shootings, but the shootings are more serious so more bullets are fired and more hits occur.
In addition to the links above, these links talk about fundamentals-
My general argument is that if you want to get good at something you have to practice that thing. No one I have talked to has objected to that. Then I ask, so why are you trying to get good at the thing by practicing something else? (I think I stole this from Scott Sievewright's substack, but I can find exactly where for the life of me.)
I completely agree with your point about the transfer gap. Straight-range qualifications have value, but they aren’t really designed to teach gunfighting skills. A straight range is controlled, well-lit, and governed by clearly defined rules and limits. It’s an excellent environment for grinding fundamentals. But on an Awareness/Proficiency/Mastery spectrum, an officer can master the straight range and still have very little awareness of some of the prerequisite skills needed in an actual gunfight.
Patrol-oriented police shootings tend to happen under very different circumstances: ambiguous, rapidly evolving situations, often in low light and at close range. They also occur against a backdrop where nearly every SOP, policy, and law directs officers toward alternatives to drawing and firing their weapon. That can create a significant transition problem when an officer suddenly encounters the rare situation where deadly force is necessary. If straight-range qualification is their primary training context, they find themselves operating in an environment for which they have very little practical preparation.
That’s important because these dynamic encounters make up a significant portion of officer-involved shootings. Ambush-type attacks present a different problem, where the officer may have little or no opportunity to react, while barricade-type incidents generally provide at least some additional time to assess, think, and prepare.
So I think you’re exactly right that, at some point, you have to practice the actual thing, or at least get as close to it as training safely allows.
The challenge is scale. Most large police agencies simply don’t have the time, staffing, facilities, or resources to train thousands of officers to that level with any meaningful frequency. There’s also the uncomfortable reality that, even when more advanced training is available, not every officer will choose to take advantage of it.
And there’s another institutional challenge: if departments decided tomorrow that straight-range qualification was no longer the primary measure of firearms proficiency for continued employment, and replaced it with a more demanding standard that better reflected the actual task, a meaningful number of officers would likely fail. At that point, departments would have to make a difficult choice: invest the time and resources necessary to bring those officers up to the new standard, or determine that they can no longer meet the requirements of the job.
None of that takes away from your larger point. If we expect a skill to transfer under stress, ambiguity, low light, time pressure, and uncertainty, then at some point the training has to include those conditions.
You make a lot of good points! Where I think you and I differ is on the "at some point" issue. The EcoD literature has been showing two related things that show up in a variety of environments -
First, you can develop the fundamentals by practicing more complex tasks - Olma's firearms studies show this and there are studies in sports showing the same thing. If you think about it, this is the where fundamentals had to come from in the first place- I'm trying to get good a something and I experiment until I discover what works. The fundamentals are fundamental because they are things that work They were discovered in the situation. A coach can certainly nudge students toward these solutions, but ...
Perception an action are so tightly linked that if you change the perceptual cues, you automatically change the action (This is the second issue). There are some firearms studies in the links above that show when officers shoot on the range, they will use the actions they have drilled on the range, such as a 4 point draw that they have done thousands of times, but when you put them in a scenario they don't use the same draw. This is because the perceptual cues have changed. If you want training to transfer, the training needs to have perceptual cues that are close to the thing you are training for. This is the point of the Listen up PAL link above.
Now all that being said - firearms are dangerous and I do think that you need to make sure people can do basic firearms actions safely before you put them in more complex environments. There are serious limitations to what you can do with live ammunition and there are also limitations to how realistic simulated firearms are (none that I have seen can produce recoil that is anywhere close to live ammo).
On the scale and already in the field officers not passing, These changes are not something that will happen overnight. There are ways to create small scenarios that contain the relevant cues without requiring all the effort of full blown scenarios. I think we might also be surprised how many officers quickly adapt to a more representative training environment because it is the more like the world they have been working in their entire careers.
Racing simulators don't prepare you for your first race very well.
Gunfight training is the same. The saving grace for police is that their first gunfight is typically against another first timer, and usually a first timer with less training. It takes a few firefights in combat to gain the ability to function at your best, according to the combat vets I have spoken with.
I suspect the predictive factor isn't training at gunfighting but prior exposure to dangerous, stressful situations. I would be willing to bet a veteran smokejumper (wildland firefighter) with moderate firearms experience outperforms a trained officer in a gunfight because they have experience functioning under a dangerous, stressful situation with lives, including their own, on the line.
A note on the statistics. How many of the "untrained" New Orleans police were civil war veterans with more experience being shot at than today's "well trained" police.
My training suggestion is to try to find ways to give officers experience functioning under fear. I don't know how you can schedule that. Real fear requires real risk.
Thanks for the comment! There is definitely a difference between training and the real thing. I think the trainer's job is to get it as close to the real thing as (safely) possible so that the gap is as small as possible. I also think that a racing simulator is probably not the best analogy. Not only does it not have the risk associated with a real race (or any risk at all), it also doesn't give you the feeling of actually driving (acceleration, turning, ect.) so the perceptual cues are very different. Maybe a small scale race (fewer, less powerful, and maybe more protective cars) is a better training task?
Same thing goes for sparring to prepare for a real fight. You can't get all the way there, but you can get much closer than punching bags and hitting pads will get you. What seems to be lacking in most firearms training is the equivalent of sparring for gun fighting. Some will say that is what force-on-force does, but even force-on-force tends to be very scripted. If you are training to fight a lively opponent (someone who is uncooperative and unscripted), you need to do lively training. In the fighting world, some people have taken this to the point of not doing any bag, pad, or technique work. They train people by sparring from day one - and they are having success doing it. Check out Greg Souders in BJJ and Scott Seivewright in MMA. Now firearms bring a whole other level of safety concerns, but they are not insurmountable.
A qualification Score each year helps to set the ground work for trainers who identify officers that need more training in the basics. Those may be identified by testing the officer on a bullseye target at 7 and 10 yards. Just using 10 rounds, anything outside of the black circle needs to be addressed until the problem is fixed. You firearms instructors know what Im talking about.
once that's addressed start the tactical movement, cover, tactical reloading, night fire exercises, etc.
Testing with the bullseye target during each qualification for seasoned and new officers is a must.
seasoned officers have a tendency only be concerned about their marksmanship during a qualification. When actually the range should be available. I go to the range several times a month, even though retired, to shoot several the Schreck McPhee drills.
Stay Safe Out There!
Hey Greg - thanks for the comment! See my response to Scott below because your comments are related.
Agree with all you said. Would add: gunfight opponents often move. Stationary targets of course do not. Until somebody develops an affordable way to make a target jump up and down and to the side , range training will continue to be only mildly helpful
Swingers in USPSA simulate this to a degree
Great article! The biggest failure of qualifications is that they're passable at very low skill levels and rarely demand skill progression: 20 year vets share the same standard as academy recruits. The assumption that an officer who shoots above the cutoff on a qualification course is competent to use a handgun in an armed confrontation is deeply flawed at best.
Your excellent article "You Call That 'Expert' Shooting?" citing Lewinski et al. demonstrates this.
Thanks for the thoughtful article — I'll grant most of it, and I appreciate the links. I do want to emphasize one point, though, because I don't think representative design alone gets you there.
My argument is that officers are trained incorrectly in a fairly specific way: they are never required to fire quickly during qualifications. Because of that, they hyper-focus on trigger prep and press, and they under-develop grip. Slow prep-and-press builds marksmanship for bullseye shooting, and that's essentially what most LE qualification courses are. But real gunfights are fast, and most officers have never fired that fast in their careers. Specifically, you need to learn to manipulate the trigger aggressively without moving the sights.
This isn't theoretical. Practical shooting competitors shoot with enviable speed and real accuracy, and they achieve that ability by shooting fast. That's how the grip gets built. It's a physical adaptation that requires repeated aggressive trigger manipulation and repeated exposure to managing recoil at speed, and I'm skeptical it comes along for free just because the scenario now has better perceptual cues. You can put an officer in a representative environment and, if he's never built that grip, he'll still be moving the sights as he pulls the trigger or over-driving the gun in recoil.
So I'd put it this way: representative training tells you what to practice, but it doesn't substitute for the volume of fast live fire that builds the underlying capability. Officers should emulate the practical shooting world on this, not practices originally developed for slow, aimed fire.
Agreed on your safety point, and on the recoil limitations of simulators — which I think actually cuts in favor of protecting some live-fire time specifically for speed work.
On your scale point — this may be cheaper than it looks. Top competitive shooters are routinely hired to train elite LE and military units, and most of them advocate spending half to three-quarters of an ammunition budget on three drills: Trigger Control at Speed, Doubles, and One Shot Return. All three are run static, on a flat range. No new facilities, no added safety burden, no scenario development — just a reallocation of rounds officers are already firing. Thank you for the excellent discussion on a meaningful topic.
100% agree. So while i do think the basics of shooting should be mastered, thats really as far as any dept goes in terms of training the typical beat cop. Special units like swat for example will get more advanced training, and get it on a more frequent basis. As an instructor myself, the bottom line comes down to, most cops just aren’t gun guys. The yearly qual is the only time they ever shoot their weapons. As we all know shooting is a perishable skill. And the constant excuse i always hear from guys is, budget. There is never enough money in the budget to provide these guys with higher level training. The ones who are truly serious about it spend time and money on their own to advance their firearm skills. Then there are those who try to justify their low level of ability. As a 2 division master class shooter in uspsa shooting, i have cops show up to a class thinking they are pretty competent. Then they get smoked in drills by a “C” class shooter. Or when i will demonstrate a drill to a high level, ill sometimes hear, aint no reason to be that fast and accurate! Which just appalls me. While im not law enforcement, if i was, id want to be faster and more accurate than any adversary. And seeing where you dont know the level of training of your adversary, im going to do everything i can to be the best i possibly can.
A good force on force class is where one can get as real as possible without actually using real bullets. However the class needs to be properly run as if its not it can turn into a game. But the ability to isolate and develop specific concepts of gunfighting, in my opinion, nothing currently better exists. Even simulators, there is no consequences for failure. I get it, yes you’re bot gonna die in a force on force class either. But that pain stimulus definitely ramps up the motivation to succeed.
Completely agree, in 1998. So much has changed on straight ranges since the white papers started landing during the decades at war in the Middle East. Look, qualification on a straight range is one metric in a constellation. If you focus on it as a standalone measuring tool, sure, it doesn’t look like a valid metric. However, within the spectrum of modern drills, scenario-based training, and hard-learned tactics from overseas and other sources, it’s a decent measuring stick of basic ability that allows FA instructors to diagnose and fix fundamentals. I love you, Doc, but this one is a little bit of a stretch.
Hey Scott - Thanks for the comment, and believe me, I know that when I talk about firearms, I am going to get some pushback! I am going to put military training aside, because I don't know that much about what they are doing. I understand that a lot of military stuff creeps into LE, but I only know about the stuff that appears in LE. There have been changes in LE training since 1998.
Unfortunately, The data just don't support that these things have done much to improve police performance - This is a forthcoming book chapter that briefly covers a lot of the published data - https://www.crimrxiv.com/pub/lx805j63/release/1 - you'll see that there is not much, if any, improvement in per round hit rate. The incident hit rate (any bullet fired by any officer hits any suspect) has increased some, but I am working on a paper that argues that this is a selectivity effect - police are involved in fewer shootings, but the shootings are more serious so more bullets are fired and more hits occur.
In addition to the links above, these links talk about fundamentals-
https://tacticalscience.substack.com/p/but-what-about-the-fundamentals
https://tacticalscience.substack.com/p/rethinking-fundamentals
TLDR:
My general argument is that if you want to get good at something you have to practice that thing. No one I have talked to has objected to that. Then I ask, so why are you trying to get good at the thing by practicing something else? (I think I stole this from Scott Sievewright's substack, but I can find exactly where for the life of me.)
I completely agree with your point about the transfer gap. Straight-range qualifications have value, but they aren’t really designed to teach gunfighting skills. A straight range is controlled, well-lit, and governed by clearly defined rules and limits. It’s an excellent environment for grinding fundamentals. But on an Awareness/Proficiency/Mastery spectrum, an officer can master the straight range and still have very little awareness of some of the prerequisite skills needed in an actual gunfight.
Patrol-oriented police shootings tend to happen under very different circumstances: ambiguous, rapidly evolving situations, often in low light and at close range. They also occur against a backdrop where nearly every SOP, policy, and law directs officers toward alternatives to drawing and firing their weapon. That can create a significant transition problem when an officer suddenly encounters the rare situation where deadly force is necessary. If straight-range qualification is their primary training context, they find themselves operating in an environment for which they have very little practical preparation.
That’s important because these dynamic encounters make up a significant portion of officer-involved shootings. Ambush-type attacks present a different problem, where the officer may have little or no opportunity to react, while barricade-type incidents generally provide at least some additional time to assess, think, and prepare.
So I think you’re exactly right that, at some point, you have to practice the actual thing, or at least get as close to it as training safely allows.
The challenge is scale. Most large police agencies simply don’t have the time, staffing, facilities, or resources to train thousands of officers to that level with any meaningful frequency. There’s also the uncomfortable reality that, even when more advanced training is available, not every officer will choose to take advantage of it.
And there’s another institutional challenge: if departments decided tomorrow that straight-range qualification was no longer the primary measure of firearms proficiency for continued employment, and replaced it with a more demanding standard that better reflected the actual task, a meaningful number of officers would likely fail. At that point, departments would have to make a difficult choice: invest the time and resources necessary to bring those officers up to the new standard, or determine that they can no longer meet the requirements of the job.
None of that takes away from your larger point. If we expect a skill to transfer under stress, ambiguity, low light, time pressure, and uncertainty, then at some point the training has to include those conditions.
You make a lot of good points! Where I think you and I differ is on the "at some point" issue. The EcoD literature has been showing two related things that show up in a variety of environments -
First, you can develop the fundamentals by practicing more complex tasks - Olma's firearms studies show this and there are studies in sports showing the same thing. If you think about it, this is the where fundamentals had to come from in the first place- I'm trying to get good a something and I experiment until I discover what works. The fundamentals are fundamental because they are things that work They were discovered in the situation. A coach can certainly nudge students toward these solutions, but ...
Perception an action are so tightly linked that if you change the perceptual cues, you automatically change the action (This is the second issue). There are some firearms studies in the links above that show when officers shoot on the range, they will use the actions they have drilled on the range, such as a 4 point draw that they have done thousands of times, but when you put them in a scenario they don't use the same draw. This is because the perceptual cues have changed. If you want training to transfer, the training needs to have perceptual cues that are close to the thing you are training for. This is the point of the Listen up PAL link above.
Now all that being said - firearms are dangerous and I do think that you need to make sure people can do basic firearms actions safely before you put them in more complex environments. There are serious limitations to what you can do with live ammunition and there are also limitations to how realistic simulated firearms are (none that I have seen can produce recoil that is anywhere close to live ammo).
On the scale and already in the field officers not passing, These changes are not something that will happen overnight. There are ways to create small scenarios that contain the relevant cues without requiring all the effort of full blown scenarios. I think we might also be surprised how many officers quickly adapt to a more representative training environment because it is the more like the world they have been working in their entire careers.