John Wills, one of my colleagues here at Officer.com, has once again hit the nail squarely on the head with his current column: Good Cops Know The Value of Training: Doing for yourself when your department can't. If you haven't seen it yet, please check it out (linked below). I've been working on this article for a while, and it seems appropriate to bring it forward now. Because he made the case so eloquently, I'm going to try to build on John's premise and suggest a specific way for you to improve your firearms skills, even if your department doesn't have the time or the resources to do as much training as you, or they, would like. Check out IDPA, the International Defensive Pistol Association.

Briefly, the IDPA grew out of an older and still very active shooting sport organization, the International Practical Shooting Confederation (IPSC). IPSC was formed back in the mid 1970s, with the goal of promoting accuracy, power, and speed in practical marksmanship. After a time, some of the founding members and participants realized that, although there was plenty of accuracy and speed, the practical side was losing out to the purely competitive side. It had become a game of speed and "race guns," which were poorly suited to real world self defense. IDPA was formed in 1996, with the specific goal of promoting the use of guns and equipment that would normally be used for personal protection. As a result, the rules of the game, and yes, it is a game, were established to promote shooter skills that would be useful if they ever had to use a handgun to defend themselves.

Now, let me get this part out of the way right here. Any time you set something up as a competition, keeping time and keeping score, there will be people who try to find the slickest way to win. Sometimes you have to compromise for the sake of the game and some of the IDPA rules and practices reflect that. Not everything at a match will be strictly "real world." However, on the whole, IDPA does a pretty good job of encouraging the skills that are useful in a gunfight which is why I think it's worth your time, money and effort.