Marksmanship!

08 Feb 10

Follow-up comments on genuine shooting skill, from friends at the NTI:

"During the first decade of the NTI, we rarely saw participants with marginal shooting skills. We all, including you and me, considered ourselves Professional Gunmen, and, as a point of honor, we would shun excessive dramatics, and all else that distracted us from the honest and humble pursuit of the Art.

That all began to change during the second decade, and 'excessive dramatics ' (mostly engendered by too much television-watching) is presently epidemic!

We now regularly see aspiring participants engaging surprise targets, at a range three meters, with at least half dozen rounds from their high-capacity pistols, of what can only be described as 'panic-fire.' Bullets that actually strike the Critical Zone (cardiac area) rarely account for more than ten-percent of rounds expended. Many embarrassingly notice the target still calmly standing after such 'engagements,' having failed to hit the critical zone even once. Only a few competent marksmen are able to consistently hit similar targets at a range of fifty meters, even fifteen meters!

At the dawn of your and my LE careers, we learned to routinely make accurate hits at fifty meters, using double-action revolvers in trigger-cocking mode. It can be done! Today, all of us dare not forget founding principles of disciplined, controlled, accurate fire. It is fundamental!

Continue to be bold, my friend and colleague, in your assertion of that these critical skills are primary to our Craft."

Comment: When training as an Infantry Officer in the 1960s, I was told that new and wonderful technology had reduced the roll of Infantry to little more than mop-up duties. "All you'll ever have to do is step over bodies, " I was told, more than once!

Young Infantrymen at the beginning of WWII, and even WWI, were told the same comfortable lie. And, all of us subsequently discovered, the hard way, that it is indeed a lie! For now, and the foreseeable future, heroic Infantryman will be required to shoot and kill the enemy, employing precise fire from their rifles and pistols, at ALL ranges he can be effectively engaged.

Today, critical, practical marksmanship skills, with rifles and pistols, are suddenly being "remembered."

We never "forgot!"

Teaching "fundamental marksmanship," I am told, is "coming back"

We never "left!"

And, as long as I am able, never will!

/John