FBI 1945 Course
A few weeks ago, we talked about how the FBI was responsible for the nationwide hip shooting trend in pistol training from the 1940s through the 80s. The FBI has always had a major influence on the fireams world in general. Sometimes that’s been a good thing. Sometimes not so good. The hip shooting thing was a bit misguided, for example, but they also pushed things like more realism in firearms training. So it’s a mixed bag.
Over the years, the FBI has used a bunch of different shooting courses for training and qualifying agents. Each of those courses acts as a kind of window into the trends in handgun training from various eras. So this is going to be a three part series. Today, we’re going to look at the first official FBI pistol course from 1945. Next time we’ll look at one from the 80s. And then we’ll check out the most recent one from 2019.
The FBI Practical Pistol Course
Our course for today is the 1940’s FBI Practical Pistol Course. Different variations of this course were used by law enforcement agencies for decades. Eventually, it even evolved into its own sport called Police Pistol Combat or PPC. I’m going to use the version of the course that was published in the FBI Law Enforcement Bulletin in 1946. The FBI has PDFs of the back issues on their website and this was published in installments over three issues. If you want to check this out for yourself, we’ve consolidated those into one PDF you can download here.
