At what point do we get to find out the reason for the inquiry?
That would be now.
A friend of mine and I were talking on the phone last week. She'd been interviewing women shooters about another topic entirely, and came across something weird: when she asked her interviewees about their shooting skills and experience with firearms,
every woman she talked to identified herself as an intermediate shooter.
We thought that was weird. How could
every single one of these folks be intermediate? No beginners, no advanced. Everyone in the middle.
Some of the theories we played around with included:
- 1) A woman thing versus a man thing.
.
- 2) Not a real thing, just an odd blip in the stats among people she was talking to.
Looking at the poll responses here, I think we can rule out the first two possibilities. Intermediate is almost certainly over-represented and the other two categories under-represented in this mixed group of respondents. (Given the nature of the membership in a discussion forum dedicated specifically to shooting, the responses
should skew toward the advanced column.)
- 3) Non-anonymous responses and social pressure. Embarrassed to claim to be advanced, embarrassed to admit beginner, voila, everyone is intermediate.
That one is still on the table, I think. In any case, I chose to make the poll public, even though I knew it would reduce the number of responses and perhaps discourage blatant honesty, because our initial results came from people whom we knew. So I wanted to compare our initial non-anonymous results that came only from women with these non-anonymous responses from a mixed group.
Other theories that crossed my mind:
- 4) Dunning Kruger Effect at work.
Named after Prof. David Dunning and his (at the time) grad student Justin Kruger, this describes a cognitive bias where people who are bad at a thing think of themselves as being better than they are.
The flip side of the same phenomena is that very experienced and knowledgeable people tend to think of themselves as worse than they are.
It brings up the old saw of “The more I learn, the more I learn how little I know.” There's a reason old cliches exist.
The people here who've been shooting for 30 years, or who have achieved a high level of skill in some particular shooting discipline, but still consider themselves as being, at best, intermediate shooters because they know how little they can do with the gun compared to all that could be done with a gun -- that's where we see the Dunning Kruger Effect at work.
- 5) When my friend asked some follow up questions of her people, the answers she got were along the lines of, "I can load and unload my gun, and I know how it works, and I can shoot it okay." Further probing revealed that none of her respondents had ever drawn from a holster, or shot moving targets, or timed their own reloads, or any of the other skills that a competitor or a defensive handgun instructor might expect.
That's why I steadfastly refused to define the terms for you. Speaking for myself, I see the shooting world through the lens of a self-defense mindset, and specifically through the mindset of someone who has had professional training in those particular skills. That sure as heck doesn't mean that's all there is to shooting.
Although it made the data gathering a little more sloppy, it also allowed me to see what factors people consider important or not-important when they think about their shooting abilities. Are you comparing yourself to everyone around you standing in a booth at a bench on an indoor range? Are you comparing yourself to USPSA shooters in your local club, or to the ones you see on television? What skills are you looking at as important and which ones do you disregard?
And finally, several people noticed that as the OP, I myself hadn't participated in the poll. That brings up my last theory, which I think may fill in one more piece of the puzzle of why everyone seems to be intermediate:
- 6) If you were to ask me, I too am an intermediate shooter -- because I shoot near the middle of the pack among the people I shoot with. Never mind which skill sets we value or how we measure "intermediate"; by the shooting skills that my peer group uses, I'm near the middle of the pack.
My very, very tentative theory on this last factor is that (with obvious outliers at the very top of the game), anyone who is improving as a shooter will always consider themselves -- at best! -- as being either below average or near the middle of the pack when compared with their peers.
As far as I can tell, as soon as we decide to improve, we either find better shooters to learn from and shoot with, or we bring our current group of friends up in skill along with us as we all push each other to get better. In either case, it's rarely long before we stop comparing our skills against absolutely everyone standing in a booth on a Saturday morning, and use a different scale that's specifically matched to the people we shoot with.
There are probably more potential explanations for this, and I'd love to hear your theories. What do you think is going on here?
pax
The most exciting phrase to hear in science, the one that heralds new discoveries, is not “Eureka!” but, “That's funny...” —Isaac Asimov