Recently, I have been evaluating some stuff and thinkOmg about technique. One of the things I have been thinking about and discussing is speed and accuracy. How fast an individual can support the pistol, align the sighting system and pull the trigger to score acceptable hits. “Acceptable” being governed by the arbitrary standards of a given drill.

If I take 100 Marines, all the same physical size, the same grip strength, the same hand/eye coordination, in other words, perfect physical clones. With the exception that not everyone will have the same neurological pathways, which I believe to be impossible. If I give them the same handgun, with the exact same trigger pull, recoil characteristics and same sighting systems. And then I expose them to the exact same training program that is heavy into in-depth trigger control, and they live, eat and breath speed work for months, and they fire tens of thousands of rounds....

Will they all achieve the same speed of pulling the trigger at an arbitrary standard? Or will some be slower, some be faster?

If we take out all the physical factors out by making all the physical standards out of the equation, will the results be the same? Or is there still enough neurological differences that some will be slower?

Question:
Would the results be the same?

Choices:
Yes?
No?

 

Some people will never be any good at it, others will excel.

Most will be somewhere in between. The results will be a bell shaped curve.

modern day marines no.

old corps id say yes.

quote:

Originally posted by taguin:
modern day marines no.

old corps id day yes.

Well, at least we got that out of the way within a few posts....

quote:

not everyone will have the same neurological pathways

Ipso facto.

I voted yes. The key would be in the selection of the group with emphasis on a basic level of prior skills, intelligence and motivation.
How do you get to Carnegie Hall?
Practice, practice, practice.
I think I may have observed a thumbnail version of what Jones is referring to. It involved F.A.T.S training. Like most police gun instructors, I had a small core group within my department that were very proficient with handguns. In studying their reaction times and accuracy, I felt with time, the proper training program and increased practice, that each member of the group would perform at nearly identical high levels of shooting proficiency.
But of course, undertaking such a training program would have been out of the question.

quote:

Originally posted by YooperSigs:
I voted yes. The key would be in the selection of the group with emphasis on a basic level of prior skills, intelligence and motivation.
How do you get to Carnegie Hall?
Practice, practice, practice.

I'm going to say no.
"Skills can be taught, attitude can't."

Re- Carnegie Hall:
If one isn't giving it 100%, 100% of the time, they ain't t getting close to The Hall.

Some people's are "naturals" at it, whatever "it" is... Shooting, hockey, violin.
Some have to put in actual work. Some will work harder because they WANT to get better.
Some just suck. May be a math wiz, musically talented, but horrible at other stuff.

Take 100 All-Stars at whatever sport, some are going to throw the ball quicker, some may throw it faster, some may be more accurate than others.

quote:

The results will be a bell shaped curve

Any statisticians in the house? The above will always be true, with a large percentage in the "normal" range, a smaller percentage beating the norm, and an equal percentage under the norm!

To answer your question, "no", they would not all be the same!

Big no.

So much of shooting is visual and cognitive. The meat puppet works FOR the visual and cognitive system.

It's an interesting question, and something I've actually been pondering myself for a while now. I don't have an answer.

Personally, I'm not fast. My reaction time isn't great, and visually and mechanically it just takes me a while to present, recover, and re-acquire a sufficiently acceptable sight picture to confidently send my follow-up shot. I've spent a lot of time working dry on draw drills, and range time on resetting under recoil...anything that I can think of to shave time. I've improved, but I'm still not where I'd like to be, and I'm to the point that I'm not even sure if my limitation is due to my eyesight, lack of upper-body strength, or poor reflexes...or even something else entirely.

I’d say it’s pretty clear there would be differences. Muscles don’t move by themselves. They require input originating from the brain. In a training scenario, you have to have the perception, analyzation, and reaction to a stimulus (presumably a shot timer). That’s just on the range (was that noise the shot timer or a crow?). Take it to a shooter at a Walmart parking lot. “Lock the car, remember where I parked, what was the fifth thing the wife wanted me to get?, I wonder if they have ammo in stock, gotta look for oncoming traffic as I cross, wow that lady shouldn’t be wearing that, why is that guy getting out of his car in the middle of the drive? Is that an umbrella, it’s not raining, no that’s not an umbrella, he’s shooting!”

But I’m not telling you anything you don’t already know. I’m curious what you’re getting at. The “muscle memory” concept? To me that’s just a slightly misnamed concept. I don’t think people really think muscles remember on their own. It’s just an easy way to convey the idea that the brain recognizes what it feels like when the body is positioned properly to achieve a desired result. Maybe some visual aspect as well. Something else?

Men have been taught to march in step by the thousands and they can. A drill team, givin enough training perform as one with fixed bayonets on a M1 Garand. Whether marching or spinning a 10 pound Garand, if one observes closely, the variations are evident. Add that 100 Marines will probably never be equally proficient with the same pistols. Close but not equal.

The more accurate answer is really "it depends" but in the binary frame like you posed it and specifically how you phrased it, the answer is a pretty resounding "yes".
"It depends" is because your arbitrary standard is not defined. If it is set at a really high level where those neuro pathways start playing a role, the less favorably wired may never pass it. However, if the standard is historically attainable through a training program, then all these 100 similar specimens should clear that barrier.
The resounding "yes" is because of how you framed your question (will they all achieve the same speed of pulling the trigger at the arbitrary standard). All you need to do is to look at competitive shooters. Starting about mid A class and up, everyone call pull trigger very fast and hit at isolated standards. What separates As from Ms from paper GMs from real GMs is consistency / fumble rate, effortlessness in executing the fundamentals, vision and processing, multitasking and other stuff determined by neural wiring, but not the trigger speed.

I don't think you'd see as much uniformity in the results as you'd have uniformity in your "Candidates"--While some people have lightning-fast Reaction Time(s), others, thru no fault of their own, are S-L-O-W as Christmas while most people would fall in the middle somewhere--A Bell Curve-type distribution would probably be pretty close, I'm guessing...

The guys with the lightning-fast reflexes are likely to be able to " Run" whatever Course of Fire you put them on FASTER than the guys with average or slower-than-average Reaction Times will be able to run the course, I would think...

An interesting question. I would contend, though, that if the neurological pathways aren’t all identical, then things like eye/hand coordination, reflex and reaction speeds, motor skills, and possibly even things like ability/speed to perceive and identify targets will not be the same either.

Neurological differences aren’t why one man can bench press 300 pounds and I can’t, but I suspect it’s why a friend can operate the trigger of his P320 faster than I can when we’re shooting as fast as we can, even allowing for the differences in our ages. I’m pretty sure it’s why another friend can go for months between handgun practice sessions and still shoot faster and more accurately than I despite my sessions being once a month or more on average. Our age differences are even greater, but if that’s why he’s a better shot than I, then why does age matter? Because of its effect on our neural pathways.

Another demonstration of how neural differences affect performance and abilities are the instances of identical twins being raised apart (and sometimes even when raised together). Our life experiences affect how our brains develop, and no two life experiences will be exactly the same.

I voted yes because you said months and 10s of thousands of rounds. Yes some will be faster than others but I think it would be negligible in real world terms.

Nope. You can get 100 guys who look identical but those pesky neurological pathways are the difference between winning and losing. Biology has proven this over and over in the animal world it won’t change by using us as the species. Now I will say your program would produce the highest average performance, minimizing differences would be a benefit to my mind, but there still would be a spread between top and bottom.