Lots of people have standards they steadfastly defend, even when those standards have no integrity. What does that mean?

I was recently told of a defensive shooting “standard” for draw-to-first-shot time, one  a lot of instructors apparently use in their classes: 1.5 seconds if the gun is carried openly, or 2 seconds from concealment.

That seems quite odd to me. Not the times themselves, mind you — the fact there are two of them.

If you have a draw-to-first-shot standard for a defensive shooting class, it stands to reason that the standard should have been empirically determined by the need to shoot. The bad guy dictates how fast you need to get your gun out of your holster.

If that’s the case, then the attacker’s pressure on you and your need to shoot isn’t modified by whether you have your gun concealed. In other words, the time in which you must react, draw, and fire the first round doesn’t change based on what you’re wearing, because the attack is still the attack.

So why the double standard? If the standard reflects the need to shoot, and the need to shoot is the same regardless of wardrobe, why are there two different standards for concealed and unconcealed?

Simple, really: the standards aren’t based on the job that’s actually being done. It doesn’t matter exactly what the standards are; it matters that they’re different, which reveals they exist only to meet a merely bureaucratic objective. They’re arbitrary, and therefore wholly irrelevant.

Which is exactly what a lack of integrity looks like.

– Grant

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