You can buy skill

You can buy skill

via Gun Nuts Media by Caleb on 6/1/12

I like to watch my old shooting videos from time to time, under the pretense of learning new things about my shooting. The real reason is because I’m incredibly vain and self-absorbed, of course. In all seriousness though, it’s interesting to see how my shooting has changed. What’s even more interesting to me is that differences which are readily apparent to me now are not apparent to the casual viewer.

Caleb at Bianchi Cup 2009

I actually did a little experiment recently to test this theory. I showed a couple of casual shooters this video of me from the Indiana State Championships in 2010. Then I showed them this video of me from a couple of weeks ago shooting Paul Bunyan’s USPSA. To my eye, it looks like two different shooters. My movement is better, my splits are faster, everything in the second video is just better (including the editing). The thing though is that I didn’t just wake up one morning and go from C-class to A-class. Which would be nice, because it’d be a lot cheaper than actually practicing shooting…which leads me to the title of this post, that you can in fact “buy” skill.

That’s actually a trap, because you can’t buy skill. A lot of people go out and buy the hottest gun/scope/accessory because they believe incorrectly that they’ll get better at shooting just because they have some item X. While there are cases of gear holding you back, for the most part if you already have good gear, just upgrading isn’t going to make you better. So how then do you buy skill? You spend money on training and ammo. I’ve talked about this on the Power Factor Show in the past, but I’ve been tremendously fortunate in having access to ammo and good trainers that have helped me refine my shooting. 2011 saw a quantum leap in my shooting performance, largely in part to shooting 35,000 rounds of ammo and taking some really excellent classes. All of those things cost money and time, which is why I jokingly say that you can buy skill. Time and money…invested into practice and training is buying skill.

One of the other interesting side effects of all of this is the aforementioned evolution of your shooting. As an example, my draw has changed considerably since 2010.

• 2009: Just sort of throwing the gun out at the target, with occasionally bowling.
• 2010: Started to play around with the press-out so I could get on the sights earlier.
• 2011: Exclusively used the press-out until Steel Challenge, when BJ Norris showed me a way to build a positive index that would get me on target faster.
• 2012: Through a lot of practice and reps, I’ve built up a pretty solid index now, and I’m working with dry fire and live fire to refine that 10 yard index draw.

The point here is that as my goals have progressed and changed, the way I do things has changed as well…and that’s because I practice. Buying skill isn’t about upgrading to the latest whizz-bang gear, it’s about getting to the range and burning ammo, doing dry fire practice, and taking classes.