Ricardo Lopez is an active practical competition shooter shooting USPSA Open division and runs the GunBot website.
Among other interesting topics, he posted a great video showcasing side-by-side comparisons of two USPSA competitors, one ranked A Class and another ranked Grand Master:
Some takeaways and lessons learned.
The jump in classification from A Class to Master if fairly significant and going up again to Grand Master is bigger jump still. When I earned my first Master card a fellow competitor quipped, “Congratulations! Now the hard work begins.” Improvements at this level are well past the point of diminishing returns and harvesting improvements comes only at great effort. The low hanging fruit has long been picked, the ladder no longer reaches high enough, and we’re now just beyond the reach of the hydraulic “cherry picker” boom lift.
Despite being two skill classifications apart, these shooters are quite close in capability. Yes, the GM is getting better shots and completing the stage quicker (obviously) but this far from a trouncing. Then again, at this level of competition, it is. In conventional competition, especially Long Range matches, events are often won and lost by X count. I once took second in a 4,500 point aggregate military match by two points.
Outside of competition, tenths of a second and X-count aggregates rarely make or break performance. Both the A and GM class shooters in this video are so far beyond the skill levels of typical military and police-trained gun carriers they are effectively a different species of shooter.
Driving skills beyond novice levels is the point of organized events such as competition. At higher levels, the differences in skill is minute, which necessitates stringent scoring. Getting personnel, especially everyone in an instructor or similar capacity, to a skill level where this even starts to matter is a huge jump in making programs better. It sure beats the current status quo of having low-skilled novices run things.
