MarathonAg12 said:
TarponChaser said:
Daddy-O5 said:
She thinks an LTC class = gun training.
And the CNN piece mentions LEO getting firearms training but, anecdotally from a buddy who was a Ranger and then a shooting instructor for Blackwater, the ranking of the best shooters was generally:
- Special operations military (ie- SEALS, Special Forces, Rangers, etc)
- specialized civilian units (FBI Hostage Rescue Team)
- civilian hobbyists (people who shoot competitively for fun)
- regular military
- LEO
- everybody else
Basically, members of Special Forces (used generically to cover all of the branches) shoot thousands of rounds per week and are the best of the best when it comes to shooting. The specialized civilian outfits are next.
Then, civilians who shoot a lot. Because it's their passion so they can generally spend lots of time and money on training and range time.
Regular military actually has minimal range time once they're out of basic. I was surprised by this.
LEO, once out of training hardly shoots at all except for annual proficiency exams.
I would hope our LEOs shoot more than an Active Duty line company.
We had to do so much other training that there was hardly time to pew pew
By way of illustration (and these illustrations are from circa 2000, and so might have changed some) but back then, a single Ranger battalion (of which the Army has 3, part of USASOC/SOCOM) was allocated as much ammo for training as the entire 82nd Airborne Division (which, at the time, had 9 infantry battalions, a light tank battalion, a cavalry/recon squadron, plus artillery, engineers, and service support troops.)
At the PD I currently work for, annual qualification is 50 rounds each for pistols and rifles, day time and night/low light (total 100 rounds of each) and 10 rounds each day/night for shotguns. Training ammo allocation is 50 rounds per officer per year for rifles and pistols and 10 for shotguns. Sometimes we get lucky and they get a bunch of birdshot on clearance or something and we get a whole box of 25 rounds of shotgun each.
Now, before ammo prices got stupid back in the summer of 2020 (Thanks BLM!), I could shoot up a couple hundred rounds of rifle and/or pistol ammo every time I went to the range, depending on what I was shooting and how long I could spend at the range. My current favorite shooting sport is Run-n-Gun (think tactical biathlon, running instead of cross country skiing), and I'll shoot roughly 40-60 rounds of pistol and 120-150 rounds of rifle ammo on a 5 km, 5 stage course. For a typical local 3-gun match (rifle, pistol, and shotgun), I'd shoot 100-125 rounds each rifle and pistol, and maybe 40-50 rounds of shotgun.
People who are really into their shooting sports will shoot 10,000 rounds or more a year, especially pistol shooters. Full time professional competitive shooters like Taran Butler (the guy who trained Keanu Reaves for the John Wick movies) will leave those numbers in the dust.