if quals were 50% harder
would officers train more ,in order to be better at qualifying.


would adding more stress to the qual's , make them train for stress conditions?

^^^

Yes, they would practice harder for the qual...but that is part of the problem and why quals aren't training. If you are training only to qual, you are missing out on much more vital stuff. Quals will only ever "test" one aspect of a deadly force incident, namely marksmanship and gun handling under no or very mild stress.

It can't ever evaluate other vital aspects; decision making, tactics, other use of force options, working with partners, communication, hands on skills....perhaps at the same time under stress!

I hate "training to a test." The worst example of this is the old legacy Army fitness test. 2 mins of push ups, 2 minutes sit ups with someone holding your feet and a 2mi run.

Bad enough that it is not a good test of the overall fitness needed for combat, the worst part is it had the whole Army for the most part just doing push ups, sit ups, and running for fitness. Ugh.

Same thing with quals, a well-designed one would be sure to only include the most vital skills so that any practice for it is actually useful...but better yet is a minimal qual and more actual training time.

I worked as a jail guard for the county lock up .

We fired our old duty ammo for our quarterly requal.

Only required 29 hits on paper out of a total of 36 rnds.

We then fired 5 slugs out of mossberg 590s. Reloaded our weapons and took off back to work.

The jail guards still working there that I knew tell me it’s watered down more so.

quote:

Originally posted by gearhounds:
Firearms quals are not about skill, tactics, or training for gunfights. They are simply about meeting a requirement so that the department in question can check off a box saying you meet a standard, mainly for liability purposes.

I’m retired now, but the above can’t be repeated enough. I was an instructor in the service and I understood the hidden training in the qualification. Like forcing a shooter to use the off hand unsupported, or the requirement for reloading under stress of the clock. But I have never seen a qual that is about more than the above mentioned uses.

Real smart cops go out and train on the one tool that may very well save their life, regardless of who pays for it, or if it is required by the dept. you c an tell them by their scores when it comes to qual day. Me and a friend routinely trained on our days off and could finish a course of fire with perfect scores and still have time on the clock before some cops had even fired their first round....

quote:

Originally posted by SIGWolf:
I'm sure different departments have different standards. I read about LEs "qualifying" periodically with their firearms.

What, in general, does it involve? How thorough is it?

It depends. Most states have a minimum state standard but allow departments to use a higher standard. Some so, some don’t. Most state and local agencies shoot once or twice a year. Some more often.

Most federal agencies shoot /qualify quarterly. Most agencies have their own qualification course but some use the FLETC PPC course.

YouTuber hrfunk is currently doing a serires on state level LE courses.

https://youtu.be/MARJWpSoJLI

Working as a dispatcher for the sheriff's department, I occasionally get to play at the range.
I went out and shot qualifications with our shift a couple years ago and easily out-shot the majority of them. I shot an 89 on my first try, and only three of twelve beat that. One deputy took 3 rounds to make minimum score. It left me very uneasy if they ever have to draw their guns.

It comes down to the individual officer. Except for the "gun guys", many won't train because they have no interest in it. A neighboring Dept. opens the range up every month with free ammo for it's officers and many don't take advantage of it.

required? Damned little. Departments may add to the state qual, and many do. Sadly, many do not.

As usual, many people express firmly-entrenched ideas about the subject and are unlikely to change them because of an Internet discussion, but another observation or two about law enforcement firearms qualifications:

The “intent” of something like a shooting session is what the individual or agency conducting it chooses it to be. Long ago Irving M. Klotz observed that “Science has no vicar on the earth to reveal doctrine and no central committee to proclaim dogma.” The same is true of firearms training. There may be local requirements, but there are no overarching rules or intents that apply to everyone that dictate how we become proficient with our guns.

That means that even though many, or perhaps even most, law enforcement firearms qualification sessions are intended as nothing more than ticket punches to satisfy the lawyers, that doesn’t have to be true of all of them—nor is it. When I qualify with a weapon I get as much out of the session as I would from a session that’s only called “training,” and often more because of factors that don’t exist when I’m not performing under the challenges and stress—however minor—of being tested rather than just practicing. When I am conducting a qualification session there is nothing to prevent me from reminding the shooters of safety rules, providing gun-handling tips, or providing guidance during the course, and that’s what I do. The training value isn’t the same as attending a 40-hour Gunsite course, but it’s not nonexistent.

I will agree, though, that the intent of what we do is extremely important.
And if we intend for a qualification session to be nothing more than to satisfy a check the block requirement or we personally treat it as a joke to demonstrate how easy it is and how cool we are, that’s all it will be.

This message has been edited. Last edited by: sigfreund,

thanks for answering my question, I get it now

It’s sort of like having a job that requires you to lift 100 pounds unassisted on a daily basis, but the test for it is to carry a pizza up seven stairs.

The “everybody gets a trophy crowd” will crow on how you can make the best of carrying the pizza, and you can be the best dog gone pizza carrier out there but it in no way shows that you can do the job of lifting 100 pounds. And when you can’t lift the 100 pounds when required, you get to point and blame others on why you can’t perform but are “qualified”.

Qualification courses have to be at least challenging to replicate the job expected of you. If you want to watch how bad it is nation wide, watch any of the LivePD type stuff.

Thus endeth the lesson.

In the ideal world one would work for a department that allowed for monthly firearms practice, had a budget that provided for the ammo to do so, had a properly equipped range on which to shoot, and had a range master/instructor to oversee things. Unfortunately, this is not the case for most departments and any training or practice an officer wants to do he will most likely have to do on his own, at his own expense.

The department I worked for had 10 officers and we were the 10th largest department in the state! The city commissioners would collectively border on apoplexy at having to budget anything above the bare minimum for the department. Money for ammo and training?? Gasp! Get the defibrillator!

So, it is easy to see why a lot of the LEO's don't put a lot of effort into firearms training. It's expensive and properly set up ranges are hard to come by and trained instructors, almost non-existent.

This message has been edited. Last edited by: ggile,

My department provides a bit of training outside of quals.

Our quals are 50 rounds day, 50 rounds night. We split the two up currently, so we’re doing one in late winter and the other in late spring. We also do a “combat course” during both that is pass/fail, and usually consists of 6 rounds each. Maybe 10. It’s not difficult at all to get the 70%/pass.

People fail to qualify every time. Their gun and badge are taken. Can’t drive a police car either. Usually they get coached and requal the next day or so.

We have classes sporadically through the year. Basic/advanced pistol, shotgun, etc. but it’s not frequent enough.

Special teams get much more training. When I was on a street crimes team (we served our own search warrants) we did as much pistol work as SWAT.

Rifle officers with us get an intense week-long school, then a refresher class during the year, plus quals. Our rifle program is damn fine. Except sergeant and above can’t participate. Hurt giving that up...

There are no open range days. That’s unfortunate. In order for us to practice outside of the above we have to find time/ammo/location to do it on our own. Between work/court/training/family it can be difficult.

quote:

Originally posted by ggile:
In the ideal world one would work for a department that allowed for monthly firearms practice, had a budget that provided for the ammo to do so, had a properly equipped range on which to shoot, and had a range master/instructor to oversee things.

Your points are obviously and completely valid, but something that most people who are interested in the subject don’t recognize is that no matter how good the training and facilities are, they could always be improved:

“You train only once a month with 200 rounds each time, why not once a week with 500?”
“You train only with silhouettes? Why not with photo realistic targets every time?” Or “Flat paper targets are unrealistic no matter what; you should be using completely life-like mannequins otherwise your officers might hesitate to fire when necessary.” (Something Dave Grossman might say.)
“Your handgun course goes only to 75 yards; why not 150?”
“When was the last time you trained hostage rescues with team members standing next to your live fire targets?”
“Simunitions? Ha! You need to train with projectiles that really hurt to properly motivate people.”
“You need more realistic simulated incidents. Stop all the regular activities at the high school for a week or two so you can do some meaningful drills involving everyone, including fire and EMS.”

Ridiculous? Of course, but someone can always think of something to criticize about whatever’s being done now.

And something else that few people recognize is to paraphrase what General of the Army Eisenhower said about planning. Training is essential, but training will not guarantee a desired result. There have been LEOs with scant training who performed admirably, and that was very common in bygone eras. What’s the likelihood that the officers who neutralized the Texas Tower murderer had anything like the training in shooting and tactical skills that modern LEOs receive in any basic academy? On the other hand some well-trained individuals have failed miserably. There have been US military special operators, members of the best trained large groups of warriors in the world, who did not perform well in actual combat. To reiterate: training is essential, but does not guarantee anything. The best we can reasonably hope for is that training kept things from being as bad as they might have been.

To restate something else that has become even more obvious than when I first mentioned it, one of the most common failures to understand why things are the way they are is the common tendency for people to view things like law enforcement firearms programs through the filter of their own experiences. Some people literally cannot imagine what it might be like to be an LEO in an agency that has only 10 officers, and therefore they will expect that they can be run like an agency having several hundred, or thousand.

In Florida its 40 rounds. They used to require shooting at the 25 yard line, but they did away with that and went 15 yards and in, if I remember correctly. Super ridiculously easy, I shot a 40 out of 40 every year.

I was asked to provide some "skill enhancement training" to a young officer who was having some problems qualifying with the patrol rifle. In preparation for providing this training, I surveyed the various state and local standards for patrol rifle qual. As stated by others, the standards vary greatly from state to state or dept to dept.

The most cringe worthy thing to me, however, was noting that the bulk of the qual courses had zero accountability for rounds that completely missed the target. As long as one had the requisite score/number of hits, they were good to go.

I can only remember seeing one qual that explicitly stated that any rounds missing the target would result in a DQ.

quote:

Originally posted by mo4040:
The most cringe worthy thing to me, however, was noting that the bulk of the qual courses had zero accountability for rounds that completely missed the target. As long as one had the requisite score/number of hits, they were good to go.

Why do you believe all shots must hit the targets in qualifications?
Do you believe that all shots will hit the target in gunfights?
Do you believe that because a shot “hits” a target that the bullet always stops immediately and never continues on after the hit?

“No miss” qualifications are hardly unheard of; the Colorado P.O.S.T. course permits no misses of 25 shots fired. One thing that such courses foster is shooters’ gaming the requirement by taking every bit of allowed time to fire a stage. As a consequence it’s difficult to get some shooters to push themselves to go faster lest they have a miss. As I tell them, “You can’t miss fast enough to win, but you can shoot slowly enough to lose.”

Self-defense shooting encounters usually involve everyone’s shooting as fast as they can operate the trigger. When officers have never tried to shoot fast for fear of a miss resulting in an automatic failure, they are at a disadvantage in such situations because they won’t have had experience with trying to control their shots in a high speed mode.

The answer to the lawyer’s question of, “So you don’t care where 30 percent of your bullets go?” is, “Yes, we care. Because we care we train to be aware of what’s between us and the target and what’s beyond to ensure to the extent possible that bystanders aren’t endangered. If anything, a no-miss qualification course also conditions officers to believe that they won’t miss when they’re shooting to defend themselves and that the bullets will magically stop at that point, and therefore they don’t need to worry about what’s beyond the target.”

A local club recently held an event where you could shoot four different qualification courses.

20 shooters qualified on both the Ohio Peace Officer and the U.S. Army courses of fire.
16 shooters met the FBI standard.
Only 6 made the cut for Federal Air Marshals.

This thread has taken a bizarre turn of excuse making.