After exploring the issue for a year with experimental formats, The Polite Society was formed (to be a not for profit corporation) and opened its doors for membership on The 21st of February 2003. The Polite Society is not about sport shooting or competition though tests of marksmanship, gunhandling or tactical skill are part of the program. The Polite Society is about information. You do not come to a Polite Society event in order to win a trophy; you come in order to improve yourself, and others.

To be sure, there are scores involved in many of the shooting programs and they are scored under a wide variety of systems, but the thrust here is to gauge skill not to compete – basically you should be competing against yourself or against a standard of excellence. Thus it may seem strange to go to a shooting event where some (or even all) of the tests do not result in the actual firing of your weapon or where there is more emphasis on use of cover than marksmanship. You may travel a long way to an event and fire only a few rounds – but the knowledge gained will be as significant as if you fired 300 rounds in routine competition.

The Polite Society is not intended to compete with other shooting sports. We fully support those sports and heartily suggest participation in them for gaining skill at marksmanship. We exist to raise the consciousness of those who believe that mechanical skill is but one facet of one’s entire self defense package and that good tactics should not be discouraged by the scoring system and poor tactics should be penalized.

The Polite Society has already attracted many quality trainers and is in the process of developing an advisory board of the best-known weaponcraft trainers and experts extant. Already that list includes (alphabetically) Tom Givens, Marty Hayes, Jim Higginbotham, Keith Pridgen, Karl Rehn, Andy Stanford, Gabe Suarez, and we are currently adding many more!