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If you don't practice, I don't think that you should carry a sidearm especially a concealed one. This is giving you a level of confidence about your security that you don't have.

The question is, how much practice do you really need, and do you really want to give a prosecutor or plaintiff's attorney the opportunity to put you under oath and ask you how often you had practiced killing the poor innocent victim you'd nailed a month or two previously?

One of the two or three few armed professionals whose skill I was willing to take for granted was an armored car courier who lived on a rural farm. Every day as he drove to work in the morning, he'd set six tin cans on the fence posts that lined his private drive from the county road to his house. And every day after work, he'd knock the cans off the posts on his return, usually shooting one-handed while driving his car, shooting out his driver-side window. Over a sixteen-year career period, he'd been involved in four armed robbery attempts in which criminals tried to interrupt the deliveries he was making. In three of those tries, five of them died.

One other, who had been pointed out to me by a local cop of whom I thought pretty highly, while in a conversation about best the best handgun shooters and the most serious ones in our area. I figured he'd favor some old cop he'd known, or a state trooper or local sheriff; nope. The guy he named was a middle-aged heavy equipment operator, who I'd never even seen with a handgun- I figured him for a shotgun and .22 rifle kind of guy. Nope.

The story went something like this: when the fella had been an 18-year old Marine, he'd had one leg scratched up on a coral beach while under fire, which got infected. While recovering and still limping, his company's first sergeant came around and asked him if he felt recovered enough to help out with a necessary detail. He welcomed the exercise and happily accepted the break in what for him had been boring days in a sun-cooked tent. The first shirt gave him a .45 pistol, several magazines and three boxes of .45 ammo, 50 shots each, and asssigned another guy, with a BAR, to cover him. Every morning, he went out into the wire in front of their night positions and went to make sure that all of the bodies still in the wire were as dead as they looked; any trying to play any tricks on him would be dealt with by the BAR gunner.

The first day out, he took care of a couple of dozen, probably all dead or nearly so. After he was done, there was no doubt: they were all dead. Next morning, 15 or 20 more, next day, more. By the end of the first week he'd used up all 150 rounds and got 5 new boxes; ammo was not a problem, and he was getting all the target practice he needed as on-the-job training. He kept that up for something like 6 to 10 weeks, and indeed had a couple of experiences in which a couple of his customers had been playing possom.

In fact, he had gotten so good at the *ash and trash* detail that when it came time for the Marines to move on to the next Pacific island, he and his BAR partner got the same job again. In all he made six major landings, and had the *ash and trash* job on five of them; during the last one somebody found out just how good he was with the .45, and made him a bodyguard for one of the Marine generals.

So how many guys had he shot during his fairly specialized job? More than lived in our town at the time. How many live ones had he actually killed? Unknown, but by his own best estimate, at least two dozen, and it was easily possible that it was double or triple that.

So far as I knew, he'd never practiced with the .45 he had brought home from the Marines since 1945. I would not have wanted him coming my way intending to use it on me for anything in the world, and he's one of the half-dozen or so who I'd want on my side in a gunfight without ever having seen him shoot.