As reported by others, “It’s now becoming clear that just about all of the injured in today’s mass shooting outside the Empire State Building were injured by the police response rather than by the shooter himself.
It turns out that months ago I signed up to provide the USPSA stages for the Lewiston Pistol Club match next weekend. Guess what I had planned?
Here are the two stages adapted (preliminary, there may be slight changes after the stages are reviewed) from the LAPD Combat Course.
LAPD Phase 1 and 4.
LAPD Phase 2 and 3.
If you compare the actual courses of fire to what I adapted to USPSA rules you will find I actually created a more difficult test. USPSA rules do not allow the shooter to touch a gun between the “Standby” command and the buzzer going off. The LAPD course of fire requires the shooters to, in some cases, have the gun pointed at the target with their finger on the trigger when the timer starts. In other cases the gun is held at the low ready position. Because the times were so long that I expect many shooters to have excess time I did not lengthen the time to accommodate the differences in start positions.
What this means is that in a little over a week we will have data on how the shooting skills of “a bunch of beer guzzling, uneducated hillbillies” stack up to the qualification course for a major metropolitan police force.
Barron and I will be there with video cameras running and will provide YouTube video of the results within a day or two.
My expectations is that nearly all the shooters will pass and most will pass with a very high score.
If things turn out as expected Mayor Bloomberg should be called upon to send NYC police officers to Idaho for training by us “uneducated hillbillies.”
I love that last sentence.
Posted.
Miss Violet
When I need something done that a hillbilly is expert at, I find me a hillbilly and get polite about asking for help.
Oh, sure, any real shooter should be able to smoke your average LE qual course without breaking a sweat. Looking at it from the standpoint of an action pistol shooter, it’s obvious that anybody who could stand flat-footed, shoot at the ground, and hit could smoke those COF’s.
Problem: A USPSA or IDPA competitor is not the average CCW carrier.
Maybe you don’t shoot at public ranges much any more, Joe, but even a last-place club-level competitor looks like a demigod amongst the Judge- and PF-9-wielding masses on the line at the local range.
Like the guy who graduates last in his class from med school yet is still called ‘doctor’, even a lousy-shooting cop has had some training in gun-handling and marksmanship.
I look around at folks at the public range and wonder how many of them are the ones going “Ha ha! Cops are sucky shooters!” on internet forums versus how many of them have EVER shot against any kind of clock or had their targets scored by the critical eye of a third party, and what that Venn diagram would look like.
NB: None of this is to say that the idiot at HuffPo was anything that even sort of rhymes with right, or that I favor any kind of mandatory anything, including permits, to carry a pistol, but the attitude on the internet that some folks have that, simply because they don’t have a badge and manage to get 90% of everything on paper during slow fire at the range every four or six months, then they are like unto a ninja.
@Tam, I have seen some shooters at the local range and I point out their targets to my new shooters. Thirty minutes of instruction and practice and the new shooters are doing better than the guys blasting away in the next stall. I have no illusion as to me being a demigod instructor. It’s just that the student has some instruction and I suspect the major of people on the range have had none.
CCW carriers on average? I don’t know. I also wonder what the Venn diagram looks like.
When/where might the results from this match be posted?
We shot the match yesterday. We haven’t gotten the results yet but I can tell you that almost everyone thought the LAPD stuff was pretty easy.
Barron and I are working on the video now. We have many hours of video to go through.