My friend Mark S. pointed out what shooting “tactically” means to a lot of shooters. In his words, it means “pretending that you don’t know where the targets are when you DO indeed know where the targets are.” We watched a perfect illustration of this at a recent match as a shooter would poke his head out from behind cover, locate a target and retreat behind the cover only to pop back out in the same position as before to engage ONE target, and repeat this laborious process until all threats were neutralized. If you are someone who does this, do you have any idea how silly it looks?!? This shooter took around 55 seconds to complete the stage. When Mark shot the same stage following all of the rules pertaining to cover, movement, reloads, etc, it took him under 14 seconds to shoot. Now I ask you: how was the other shooter being more “tactical” than Mark? In fact, didn’t the bad guys the other shooter was engaging have almost four times as long to kill him as those Mark dispatched? In terms of gunfight survivability (and by extension, “tactics”), isn’t that a bad thing?
I will concede that you may not know where your threat is if you get in a gunfight on the street. That’s why we have blind stages. In order to make it to the line on an open stage without knowing where the threat targets are you would have to be the first shooter and walk up to the line with your eyes closed having missed the stage explanation somehow (or have been shirking your duties as a competitor, namely taping and pickup up brass). Even in this far-fetched scenario, most targets are visually locatable since most barricades don’t extend all the way to the ground, and many of them are transparent anyway. So the fact of the matter is that we know where most of the targets are without trying. Purposely acting like you don’t know where something is when you do is well, rather infantile.
In fact it is more and more apparent that “tactical” is becoming the cry of the slow shooter as he bemoans getting spanked by those of us in the high speed, low drag mindset. I can’t tell you how many people have said to me recently “well, I shoot it tactically. I’m not an IPSC shooter like you.” Hey, I follow all of the rules, and solve the scenerios without exposing myself to a target until I’m ready to engage it just like the “tactical” guys. We can’t all keep up with B.E. (Lord knows I can’t) but there have been faster and slower shooters for a long time and “tactical” has become an unnecisary and rather silly excuse for not pushing yourself to shoot faster. As a sport, I think we need to expose this argument as the fallacy that it is so we can move forward and progress (even “ratchet” as IPSC is said to do) instead of de-evolving into bullseye shooting with barricades.
