Thanks for posting this - great article, and food for thought.
BTW, with a good training approach using dry fire exercise extensively, the need to expend endless costly live rounds is greatly curtailed. Fundamentals like stance, grip, draw and presentation, sight picture, focus on front sight, trigger control and reset, malfunction clearance, basic tactics - all these can all be fruitfully honed for free in dry fire training at home. And yes, it can certainly be done safely.
Time at range can consist, then, of only a modest number of rounds each time, merely to judge the progress of the previous dry fire training, and to plot out areas to work on further in subsequent dry fire training.
Even a bit of private or class coaching to augment this and fine-tune our skills will prove much cheaper in most calibers than endless live fire without an understanding how to improve. Mostly those thousands of rounds will be wasted reinforcing bad habits if the habits are not properly understood and corrected.
Have you heard of the guy down in GA, probably dead of old age now, who could throw an aspirin in the air and shoot it every single time...never missed.
He shot clays with a .22.
Never looked at the sights. Took the sights off his own guns.
Rifle, pistol, your gun, his gun...made no difference. He could shoot them all.
Taught cops that if you went for the stance, sight picture, etc., you were shot dead while you are getting ready to aim and shoot.
Started all of his students off with a Daisy air rifle. Would not let them shoot a target until they could see the BB in flight.
I forgot...he could throw a BB up and hit it.
Interesting.
True, but practicing without live fire would also take a lot of the fun out of those practice sessions.
But seriously, you make a very good point. The more practice the better is my motto from here on, and the cost of ammo is definitely a major factor regarding how often and how much I can practice. Reloading your own ammo as I do significantly reduces the expense, but not everyone has a suitable place and/or the time for that time consuming procedure.
This is the guy.