I had an interesting conversation with a friend of mine named Bryan Williams recently about what makes someone a good or great shooter from a practical point of view. My friend, a retired chief of police and USPSA Grand Master shooter since the 90’s, and I had a wide ranging discussion about this. We talked about everything from B8s to Bill Wilson’s 5x5 to the FAST coin, and many other widely recognized tests of practical / tactical skill with a firearm.

The conversation helped me solidify something I’d been thinking about for a long time. Years really, ever since I ran the training for the Chicago Police SWAT team. How should we measure our skill? How should we score our shooting drills, and for that matter how should we validate the shooting component of our tactics training?

Most “tactical” firearms training; whether law enforcement, military, or defensive; is based around par times and pass/fail accuracy. For initial training in an institutional setting, this makes complete sense from a logistical standpoint. It rapidly becomes a limiting factor in a shooter’s growth though. When you’re on a line of shooters running a par time drill, you may feel as if you were done faster than most, but feelings aren’t data. Even more importantly, once you can pass that drill within the par time, you no longer have a metric for gaging improvement. If I don’t know whether or not I ran the course of fire faster than I did before, I not only don’t know if I improved, I may not even be aware that I am regressing.

The other popular scoring mechanism I see in “tactical” shooting is some version of time-plus. For this, there are targets with different scoring zones, and your score is your time plus penalties. Penalties range anywhere from a quarter second for less than optimal hits up to five seconds or more for misses depending on which flavor of this system you’re using. This takes the time component of shooting skill into account, and is easy mathematically, but has one major weakness. The penalties aren’t proportional. In other words, a less than optimal hit will cost me the same amount of time regardless of shot difficulty or length of the course of fire.

That’s not how the real world works. The closer the threat’s proximity, the more important speed is. In practical application, getting an acceptable hit faster than the opponent matters. Speed and accuracy should be a balancing act in terms of priority, and time-plus scoring just doesn’t accomplish that very well.

What does a very good job of balancing the speed and accuracy sides of the coin in my opinion is hit factor scoring. This system originated in 1976 with the founders of IPSC competition including the famous Col Jeff Cooper, and is still used in USPSA competition today. Hit factor is simply points divided by time.

Hit factor scoring is further divided into minor power factor and major power factor scoring. Power factor is determined by bullet mass and velocity but basically boils down to 9mm and .38 caliber for minor, and, except for custom loads, .40 caliber and .45 caliber for major. This is largely an obsolete distinction now with modern ballistics, but at the time it was meant to reflect the efficacy of the ammunition against an opponent.

The idea was that regardless of major or minor, the most accurate shots are worth five points. It changes as accuracy decreases though. The next highest scoring zone is worth four points for major power factor, and three points for minor. The least valuable hits are worth two points for major, and only one for minor. This was meant to encourage competitors using major power factor ammunition, as it was considered more effective in actual application.

Their intent may have been different, but the balance between speed and accuracy required to shoot well with so-called minor power factor is in my opinion fairly well matched to the demands of a gunfight. The only way it could be a better representation of actual application is in the scoring zones of the targets themselves. The humanoid cardboard silhouette targets used in USPSA have two maximum value scoring zones, called the A zones. The upper or head A zone is four inches by two inches, and the lower or torso A zone is six inches by eleven inches. The upper A zone is a fairly accurate representation of the optimal scoring area for a human head. The lower A zone however is far too generous to properly represent the optimal scoring area of a human torso. The body C zone , the intermediate scoring area, is pretty accurate as to width; but is actually not long enough vertically. The head C zone, or what used to be the B zone is too generous as well. The D zone, the lowest scoring area of the torso, has its own issues as well, which we’ll come back to shortly.

In my conversation with Bryan, I stated the opinion I’ve given in my classes many times. That if you cut the A zone in half and made the bottom half part of the C zone, and awarded no points for a D zone hit, then the USPSA classifiers scored with minor power factor would be excellent tests of real-world shooting skill. I still stand by that opinion. If you can score B-class or higher on representative classifiers with the half size A zone and non-scoring D zone, using production or carry optics hit factors, then you have an acceptable level of applicable shooting skill. If you can score Master class or better this way then you are an excellent shooter indeed. I would even argue the same for close range carbine skill using the PCC hit factors as well. The classifier diagrams and hit factors are available for free on the uspsa website, and they are (with some exceptions) easy to set up. Run a variety of them and you get a solid idea of where you stack up against the best in the world in a well-rounded set of shooting challenges.

For those practical minded shooters who don’t compete but want to set up classifiers with the changes I’ve made to the scoring zones, I’ll be offering my own target. It’s the same overall dimensions as a USPSA silhouette, with the following modifications. The lower A zone is reduced to only the top half of the one on a USPSA target, but the C zone runs to the bottom edge of the silhouette. The D zone on the body is an unacceptable hit, so it’s not a scoring area, but you don’t get a miss penalty for hits there. For the head, the upper A zone remains the same but now the head has a smaller C zone. It’s the same width as the upper A zone and runs down from the bottom edge of the upper A zone until it meets the lower C zone. Anything else in the head is now the upper D Zone and like the lower D zone is not a scoring area, although you aren’t penalized for missing if you hit there. Once the design is finalized with the vendor, they’ll be available for purchase on my website.