The Building Shooters Podcast

Gunfight Training that Works: A Case Study

In this interview, we look at an example of a training process that worked. 
Since “what works” does not have a consistent definition—if any definition at all—in this industry, we will define what this means for the purposes of this article. The training produced real, consistent, and observable results in real gunfights—for years.
In the interview, Dustin talks to two former police officers from a mid-sized (200+) person agency located in a community that saw consistently increasing levels of violent crime over roughly a 20-year period. The agency historically was slightly above the national average in officer involved shooting (OIS) hit rates (somewhere around 20%-30%).
In 2014 there was a seminal event at the agency where multiple officers fired with long guns inside of 10 yards. The group of them achieved only two hits out of seventeen total rounds fired—occurring in a densely populated area. Fortunately, no innocent civilians were killed.
This event coincided with one of the officers featured in the interview taking over the Range Master position. He subsequently worked to implement significant ground-up changes to the firearms training program. Changes were not so much focused on the what, but rather on the how.
The results?  Two observable things happened.
Recruits who were sent to the academy from this agency’s pre-academy pipeline were acknowledged to be in a class by themselves. In fact, they were segregated right out-of-the-gate on the range from the remainder of cadets. Academy range staff were instructed to leave them alone during range training because performance from the agency’s pre-academy pipeline was so consistently exceptional.
More importantly, officer performance in real gunfights showed incredible improvement. Even with OIS events becoming more frequent due to increasing local levels of violent crime, average officer hit rates soared from just above the national average to near 80%.