Hit or Myth
The popular myth in tactical training.
Hit or Myth is a thoughtful text on approaching range exercises to learn tactical scenarios. This book is an ideal place to go once a reasonably high level of shooting skill has been obtained, but not before.
It is true that scored square range exercises and drills will only take you so far, and polishing them to ever-higher levels will show diminishing returns. That point is well illustrated in Hit or Myth.
The problem is that too many people in the tactical world use this fact as an excuse to dismiss range exercises and never learn solid marksmanship and gun handling in the first place.
Consider this crucial point made early in the book. In discussing scored range drills, Awerbuck notes, “A polished performer can consistently execute El Presidente in 7-8 seconds with a ‘near perfect’ score.” Taking earned points divided by time, this would indicate a score of seven points per second or more. Jeff Cooper’s original recommendation as a par score for a well-trained pistolero was six, and Gunsite continues to recommend around five as a minimum baseline for their students to this day.
If you or your charges are routinely shooting a range exercise like El Presidente at around six points per second or higher, or some other similar mark of decent marksmanship and gun handling prowess, then you likely are better served spending most of your time on tactical scenarios in training. Square range live fire drills should be reduced to the minimum necessary to retain the good skills already developed, and Hit or Myth will help you to that end. Force-on-Force training will also be helpful.
Here’s the rub: I challenge you to find police, military, or CCW civilians who aren’t at least occasionally shooting matches or taking classes on their own, who can shoot a range drill close to this level. They exist, but are rare. You’d be surprised (or maybe you wouldn’t) at the number failing to consistently keep all their hits somewhere on the damn target, much less in the center, regardless of elapsed time. I’ve tested both Military Police and civilian law enforcement and found this to often be the case.
Yet, some of these same low-level shooters will be the first to complain that “competition will getcha killed” and want to get a bunch of Simunitions to rush headlong into tactical scenarios.
Hit or Myth points out a number of real-world issues that standard range drills fail to address, but that doesn’t remove the need to use them. Good skills provide a solid base to establish tactics from. Crappy shooting on the range means you’ll suck everywhere else as well, which will forever hold you back in every context.