Self-defense situations trigger your natural fight, flight or freeze response. As your bloodstream fills with adrenalin you start thinking and moving a lot faster than normal. But your perception of time may remain the same. In other words, you have more time than you think you have. I’ve pointed this out before, and counseled self-defense shooters to force themselves to react slowly. Because you won’t be reacting slowly. You’ll be reacting just as quickly as you would in a less stressful environment, but doing so with more control . . .
When you’re trying to avoid or counter a violent attack, the more mental and physical self-control you can muster, the better. You’ll make better defensive choices and, if necessary, shoot more accurately. You may even use your ammunition judiciously rather than, say, emptying your gun and wondering “OK, now what?”
Bottom line: to survive a violent assault, you need to quit the cult of The Fastest Gun in the West. Which is everywhere you look: TV, movies and down at your local gun range. Doing no one any favors.
To wit: Top Shot competitor Sara Ahrens’ performance during last night’s episode. Ahrens choked under pressure. Which is a less than kind way of saying she didn’t give herself the time and mental space she needed to shoot the lightbulbs in front of her with a Smith & Wesson M&P.
For a SWAT team member, that’s a lawsuit of not good. But it’s perfectly understandable. All police firearms training is timed. Shoot X rounds in X seconds at a target at X distance. Ready? BEEP! If you hit center mass but do so outside of allotted time, you fail. Timing is everything.
Civilians are equally susceptible to this focus on frenetic firearms firing. I see it down at the American Firearms School all the time: shooters practicing unholstering their concealed handgun who rush their draw stroke. Time and time again, they push themselves beyond their skill level. There’s no consistency. It’s a herky jerky affair without the slightest hint of grace.
That’s because they’re forcing their gun on target. While they’re hitting the paper as planned, they’re mentally disengaged. They’re not thinking. There’s no time for that. Must. Shoot. Faster. Throw in pop-up shoot / don’t shoot targets and a bit of stress (e.g. yelling commands) and see what happens. Their accuracy—and judgement—goes to hell.
Here’s a piercing glimpse into the obvious: when the SHTF, thinking’s good. Do I really need to shoot that person? Should I stop shooting or shoot some more? Who else needs shooting? All of these thoughts can save your house, your liberty, your sanity and your life. But they require mental bandwidth. You need time to think. You need to slow down.
The shooters in the video above are whippet quick. They’re also professional shooters on a closed course. Whatever planning needs doing is done before they begin. There aren’t a whole lot of variables involved. No friends and family in the field of fire. No hidden bad guys. No cops or passersby. Equally important, they’re wearing hearing protection. And they get a heads-up when it’s time to start.
Professional shooters have to be quick to win. You? Not so much. They’re trying to keep their job and/or earn brownie points. You’re trying to survive.
If you’re under attack, take your time, bring your firearm to bear (where appropriate) and sort it out. Quickly. If you know what I mean. If you don’t, have a firearms instructor demo the concept. Ask him or her to draw and shoot three times: slow, medium and fast. Notice the difference in technique. There isn’t any.
When that’s true for you, too, you’ll have both the speed and the presence of mind needed to use a gun to survive a life-or-death self-defense situation. Or not.
The shooting sports to an important thing, they teach us to pull the trigger and to hit the target. Too many folks still think of a shootin’ iron as a magic wand, point a firearm at someone and they will do anything you tell them. Hummph!
Silver, there are a lot of folks in Cowboy action shooting who do not blaze away with powder puff loads. Many, perhaps most, of us no longer have the wheels to fly through a set of four guns at all different targets. Some of us still use light loads, in spite of age, there is a subset, though, called Warthogs, who delight in calibers that begin with four and full charge loads. Others are called Soot Lords, we like the old cartridges and the original powder. There is a special joy in shooting a .45 Colt with a full charge of The Holy Black and a 250 grain soft lead boolt.
There is an old adage from a Texas Ranger Captain, quoted in Bill Jordan’s little gem of a book “No Second Place Winner”. IIRC, it goes like this: “In a gunfight, take your time, quickly !”
That has a lot of wisdom in it.
The same thing is true in surgery. I look slow, but no movement is wasted, and decisions about what to do if this-or-that happens were made during the last step of the procedure, not the one being done at the moment. The result is faster, cleaner operations that look like they were done by an old man.
I think I’m in agreement. Don’t attempt to execute skills in a combat situation faster than you are capable of doing adequately. However, if you’re serious about self-defense you should have an awareness that adequately does involve the element of time. It’s different for confronting an intruder who’s hands are full of your stuff, and an intruder whose hands are down around his waistband at night in your darkened home. (Taclight anyone?). The joker in the deck is you don’t know who you’re up against and what they are willing to do.
Ok. Here’s a website with draw and shoot times for college kids inexperienced with firearms. It also has reaction times for LEO, these were experienced LEO simply firing in response to a light coming on. So, actual reaction times would expected to be longer, for the reasons mentioned above (think OODA loop) uncertainty as to what perps motion meant, disbelief, reluctance to kill, assessment of background etc.
http://www.forcescience.org
Anyhow, if you take the time to peruse the website and read their papers you find that a perp deciding to shoot will probably get off two rounds (possibly 3) prior to a LEO getting his first round out.
Police have used these studies to defend LEOs to boards by explaining (I personally know of 1 case) how a criminal can be shot in the back in a perfectly justified shoot. By the time the LEO observes and starts to fire the perp has already got a round off and turned– human reaction time is insufficient to stop the trigger pull in the time this happens.
The brits have a term I heard when flying with them ‘Spare capacity’. When you are unfamiliar with something or new you have very little ‘spare capacity’ for judgement, assessment etc. because most of your mental abilities are still taken up exectuing the basics. The goal of training is to get the basics down- the monkey skills- sufficiently so they can be performed perfectly, reliably and to the level required for the circumstances one is training for. It is why training also involves planning through scenarios and having pre-planned responses- certain judgements have already been determined, if X happens I’ll do y shortens decision time. For example, noise at night get family members and barricade if possible. To free up ‘spare capacity’ for the judgement required in these situations. And the requirements should include the reality of how fast things can occur.