Teaching people how to shoot well has been how I’ve made much of my living for many years. Shooting lessons, I remind the students, include the lessons about life that shooting teaches us. I just realized that I’d lost sight of that a bit myself of late.

One point I make is that an Unconscious Competence level of skill, the ability to do something well on auto pilot, is a wonderful thing but not attainable on demand. When performance on demand is of the essence, I recommend ratcheting down to Conscious Competence and taking an instant to think about what you’re doing.

I change guns often. Partly because testing different ones is another thing I do for a living, partly because my students all have different guns and I have to be familiar with all of them, and partly because I simply like to do so.  A few months ago I decided to forsake my ballistic promiscuity and stick for a while with one particular style, a polymer-framed pistol I’ll call Brand A. For the most part, that plan has worked, fulfilling the advice most of us give that if you stay with one “platform” you’ll become better and more reflexive with it.

There’s another side, though, that I’ve been reminded of in the last ten days. Testing polymer-framed pistol Brand B for a gun magazine on Saturday the 3rd at an IDPA match in Jacksonville, FL, I managed to take First Master and top score overall in the Enhanced Service Pistol division with Brand B. On the weekend of the 10th and 11th, I took Brand A to Clearwater for the Florida State Championships…and absolutely tanked.

I’ll tell you right now, it wasn’t a “brand versus brand” thing. I consider the two guns equal in quality and inherent accuracy and “shootability,” model for equivalent model. The first match was smaller, 122 shooters compared to roughly 300 for the second, a deeper pool with bigger sharks in it, but as the guy behind the sights and the trigger both times, I have a pretty good idea why I shot quantitatively worse with the more familiar pistol.

With the less recently familiar Brand B gun, I was focusing on its subtleties. Its grip to barrel angle was slightly different than what I’d been lately habituated to, as was its trigger reach and length of trigger reset. I was running Conscious Competence pretty much every shot. With Brand A, the old familiar extension of the hand, I found myself going auto pilot and taking overconfident liberties.  There were stages where I KNOW I relaxed my grip, where I pointed rather than aimed, where I rushed instead of pressed the trigger.

Where I took my familiar gun, and my supposed skills with it, for granted.

We do that with people, paying more attention to the new folks we want to impress than we pay with our familiar loved ones.  It hurts us in the end.  Life lesson.  We drive our friend’s new Corvette Sting Ray with more care than our own casually-handled Impala, and it does us no good at the end of the day.  Same, same.

That’s why I say that shooting – like some other sports, and other seemingly casual undertakings – can reinforce for us the more important lessons of Life.

1 COMMENT

  1. Mas,
    Your story reminds me of something I experience from time to time shooting IDPA. In the excitement of trying to be fast at matches, sometimes I shoot very accurately; while others not.

    first some background: What I’ve come to realize is that for my grip and firearm, a Weaver stance works well. By that I mean I can close my eyes, draw from holster, and find when I open my eyes, the sight picture is right.

    I don’t want to turn this column of yours into a which stance is right type of thing. But What i discovered is that sometimes I forget to do the push/pull between the two arms. For me that’ makes a huge difference. It has occasionally worried me that in a stress fire situation, I will come up aiming “loose”. My best solution for this problem has been to take a sight picture every morning when I gun-up. If it’s not right, I do it again and usually remembering to push/pull, and it’s right on.

    So my point to all this is that if i take the time to think about getting this aspect of the stance right, I will do better than a quicker draw, depending solely on muscle memory..

  4. Man, this anecdote rings painfully true for me, especially in very very recent history…although my story’s not quite the same- and I will include brand names. :->

    I have invariably used a Glock- models 17 or 21, factory with no modifications- at the last several pistol shooting competitions I’ve attended. This month my shooting facility had a “single stack championship” instead of the regular “shoot-with-anyting-you-want” match, so that night I brought my Kimber 1911 instead (though single-stacks WEREN’T mandatory, contrary to the description). It was a no-brainer for me; it’s my most accurate handgun, with the best trigger, speed, and handling (for reloads). Now I’m not saying that I’m in any way a “great” competition shooter, but either way- that night I particularly sucked dirt.

    Bottom line, I was too comfortable and/or overconfident. I didn’t walk in there expecting to win anything, but I “knew” I’d have a decent showing because with a Kimber, how could I go wrong? Well, I found a way to go wrong, I do declare. I went from ranking monthly in the “upper middle third” of 40-70 competitors to that night earning “bottom lower third,” and that really was a wake-up call. It was a shocking, but necessary, learning experience.

  5. I feel your pain Mas. I had a similar scenario on 4 of the stages on Friday, at the same match. Lesson learned: stay consciously competent.

  6. Years ago, I was at the local IPSC match when I suddenly realized every time I shot weak hand, not only did I not miss, but all my hits were A-zone. It occurred to me this was because I took more time to set up the shots, while with strong hand I just tried to go fast. Epiphany!

  7. Mas:

    One of the reasons folks lsten to you is that you are not only a trainer, Patriot and teacher, you are a Philosopher.

    I , for one ( and I expect many others agree ) really value the philosophical insights you uncover and then share.

    Thank you.

    Regards

    GKT

  8. Are we back to the old saw of “familiarity breeds contempt”? Sounds like in safety and accuracy alike, complacency is the enemy. Great article, Mas.

  9. Great piece – good shooting advice – good Life lesson. Every now and then, remember who you are and who is important in your life – letting them know that isn’t a bad idea, either.

  10. Apropos of possibly nothing:

    My first car was a stick-shift Chevy. I drove it for 4 years. After that, nothing but automatic transmissions. Yet, some several decades later, my left foot still goes for the “clutch” occasionally. More recently, for the past 10+ years, I have been driving a vehicle with the windshield wiper controls on the left side of the steering column. Last week, I made a (rainy) 2-day test drive of a new vehicle – one with the wiper controls on the right side of the column. In going back to driving my car, my hand kept going to the RIGHT SIDE of the column for the wiper controls. Ten years of experience wiped out by 2 days of newness.

    Philosophically, Mas’ and all the other comments are over my head.

    All I know is that now I am driving down the road with my left foot searching eternally for the clutch and that I can’t see the road through the windshield because I can’t find the wiper control.

    Well, if life (i.e shooting) were easy, everyone would want to do it.

  11. Mas, Very well may be the bane of many-a-shooter..but never put so simply. On another point…maybe you could do an article on this, Mas…..whenever I see an magazine or book with your moniker on it, I purchase it. I’m in the poor-house because of your publications!!!!! Could you ‘splain why most of yall writers on self-defense and weapons will leave us readers in the lurch when we ask you to expound on particular types of weapons or ammunition that you might recommend. Or as such, this above article, where you call the weapons…A or B. I believe we read an article and hope for some gleaning from your (or their) expertise and we are left with……”you must find out what weapon is right for you or the ammo of your choosing”. I buy the book or magazine hoping to get some info. as to what a man who has much, much more intel as to a particular weapon or ammo might recommend. I know what might be good for Mas may not be the perfect ticket for Mike, but how about letting us decide. Your recommendations carry a lot of weight with your followers. How about it. Thanks for listening to my rants. All respectfully submitted. MIke H.

  13. Mike, I hear ya. In my articles, I actually do try to be brand- and model-specific about each gun’s idiosyncrasies, and ditto on the podcast. For this particular blog entry, I went “brand A and B” to underscore my certainty that the error (and therefore the lesson) lay in me and not the hardware.

    FWIW, the old familiar Brand A was a Glock 17, and the Brand B gun I was testing for On Target magazine in the earlier match was a Springfield Armory XD(m) 5.25. Both 9mm with the same lot of ammo, both with Dawson fiber optic sights.

    best,
    Mas

  17. Mas,

    You might also want to remind your readers about the Gun Rights Radio Network, and our Pro Arms Podcast Forum in particular. I think it is fair to say that we don’t pull any punches when questions are posed there. Readers do have to register, but there is a lot of great info there, if I do say so myself…

    Don’t know how to make these a link here, but here are the URLs:

    http://gunrightsradio.com/forums2/

    And:

    http://gunrightsradio.com/forums2/index.php?PHPSESSID=cc68bc160e828f884dc34ff665ede9a8&board=58.0

  18. Mas,
    Maybe you or some of the people here can help a friend of mine with another training issue.
    She is a new shooter and is working with a 4 inch ruger sp101 at about 25 feet.
    As she tries to focus on the front sight and index the x, she keeps having double vission.
    Any ideas what’s going on and what can be done to help?
    I’ve already suggested a trip to the doctor, but was hoping someone here might have a fix in mind.
    Regards.

  19. Short fix: close one eye. Not a good thing tactically nor even in terms of pure marksmanship. Long term fix: find a gun-friendly eye doc, who can USUALLY correct the problem.

    best,
    Mas

  20. Thanks Mas.
    I’ll pass that along.
    I’m legally blind myself and use a spotter for most of my range work, so I really had no good answer for her.
    Much obliged.

  21. Out of curiosity, just how bad was bad with Brand A? What I’m getting at is whether “bad” would have done the job in a real-world self-defense situation and whether the familiarity with Brand A would have given you an advantage in that.

  22. Greg, it wasn’t all that bad. I don’t recall any “failures to neutralize” or any no-shoot targets hit. However, when you’re shooting against the big dogs in master class, you gotta be on top of your game. To continue the big dogs analogy, if that match had been an Iditarod, my furry old butt would have been dragging somewhere under the dogsled.