"My Schwartz is bigger than yours?"
NOW, we're getting serious! LOL! This is truly the thread that won't die, and I'm sorry to be so long in checking in.
I assume most of you guys know my credentials...I was at the first meeting to create USPSA and draft the bylaws; I worked in the creation of the National Range Officer Institute and was in the first "crash test dummy" class for hammering out what we would teach; I founded FRONT SIGHT Magazine, was its first editor and worked for years promoting USPSA. My IDPA membership number is A00009; I co-founded one of the first big IDPA clubs...I also co-taught the first safety officer class for that sport. More recently, I am one of the founders of the Ruger Rimfire Challenge, am an active cowboy action shooter (just chalked up my highest finish in a major national match last weekend) and am certified RO1 and RO2 in cowboy. Like Steven Cline, I fire tens of thousands of rounds in competition every year.
And Tyler D., I've been to most of those high-speed low-drag shooting academies you mentioned in your EXCELLENT post! Done force-on-force with many of the top guys around; worked as a "guest terrorist" with the Rangers at Ft. Benning "killing" some of the top SWAT cops in the country...and I've been privileged to work directly with people like Walt Rauch, Jim Cirillo, Command Master Chief (ret) Denny Chalker, the top competitors in the world, blah blah.
A few years back I spent some time with an Israeli spook and trainer was was an active, an excellent, IPSC shooter. I asked him that, given his profession involved shooting people who were shooting at him, if any of his competition licks had gotten him in trouble. "Michael Michael Michael!" he chided. "The very first thing we all must do as adults is separate reality from fantasy. Having down that, we live in reality."
I strongly promote competition of any kind, because I believe it:
1) Teaches and internalizes high-level gun-handling skills
2) Teaches the shooter (to cop a concept from Brian Enos) to "see what he has to see" to make the shot
3) Teaches and internalizes safety
4) Provides excellent stress inoculation
5) Teaches basic skills (trigger, verify with sights, movement, "broken" position shooting, etc.)
6) Most important, teaches focus!
In self-defense I teach that there are two critical paths:
1) Shoot/no-shoot
2) Deliver the shot
Obviously, in a chaos situation there's more going on than that. But those 2 critical paths are central. If you can't work those critical paths, you will fail, and the consequences to yourself will not be hunky-dory.
Shoot/no-shoot is built on our strategic thinking, the strategies, the knowledge base, we put in place long before we walk into the fan. Tactics are the tools we use to help us deliver the shot. I believe (stealing this time from Bruce Lee) that complexity is a disease and "style" of any kind is an impediment to accomplishing what we need to accomplish in a self-defense situation.
I also do understand at a cellular level that if my focus fails, regardless of whether it is in a match, in a self-defense situation, or doing pretty much anything in life, I will not be able to succeed at what I'm attempting to do. In a self-defense situation, that may cost me or mine our lives.
Training, as separate from competition (as it always is), helps us understand what's necessary to deliver the shot in any situation. Force-on-force teaches us that a live opponent will ALWAYS act in a way that totally screws what we may have been planning. Force-on-force teaches us, therefore, to, as my Israeli friend said so eloquently, be in the real world.
So Mr. Cline, welcome! And be assured that I think everyone on this forum are as crazy as outhouse rats! But that's not necessarily a bad thing...
Michael B