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Gunfighting- a Few Simple Thoughts.

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ColtDSR1

Rule #1 concerning gunfights is this- be somewhere else when they happen. OK, now that we’ve established that, what do you do if  you are forced to violate Rule #1?

There are a lot of people with a lot of theories about gunfighting. I’m not one of them; I understand that as an armed civilian there is no set-piece rule-book. Circumstances are highly individual and things happen very, very fast. You can learn all kinds of things and discover the fight is over before you remember even one of them.  You are better off learning very few things, but learning them bone-deep.

We know a few things about gunfighting these days. One if them is that you will fight as you train. If you train bad habits when the excrement hits the rotary impeller you will do bad things. People make much of the whole stress/adrenaline thing, and to a point they are correct to. But if you have trained actions to second nature when the stress and adrenaline hit you will do those things, and you will do them exactly as you have trained to do them.

A gunfight is chaotic and unpredictable, and it’s not going to happen on your terms. Seriously, if you think there will be a gunfight leave. Rule #1, remember?  OK, it’s going to happen unexpectedly with tons of random variables. Lighting, number of attackers, presence of innocents… there are simply too many things to ever develop a set plan for how to survive and win a gunfight. So you need to control what you can- yourself.

Practice to hit what you aim at, with both hands and either hand. Do it until you can do it consistently, then do it some more. No, a target on a range is not the same as a moving, living person- but putting bullets where you want them is always the same.  Odds are in a civilian self-defense shooting you will not need to reload. Practice it anyway, until you can do it blindfolded and one-handed. Then practice it some more.

If your weapon of choice is a semi-automatic practice clearing jams. Over and over; you’re training muscle-memory, burning in new neural paths. It takes hundreds or thousands of repetitions to get this hard-wired. If your weapon of choice is a revolver think about what to do if it jams. It’s pretty unlikely, but if it happens you now have a very sophisticated rock. It’s better to have a rock and a plan than to just have a rock.

Practice your draw- and practice it from the holster you carry in wearing the clothes you conceal it under. Practice drawing the gun and getting a sight picture. Do it over and over until you are sick of it, then do it some more. Then practice drawing with your weak-hand. Then practice while standing, sitting and lying flat on your back or on your face. Always be able to draw your weapon in any reasonable position you might find yourself in- and do it over and over and over until it is an automatic thing.

Here’s the thing about all this practice- it’s more important to do it right than it is to do it fast. In training don’t hurry. As Fiore said at the dawn of the 15th C., ”Train slow. In the fight anger will give you speed.’  It was true then and it’s true now- as long as you have trained to do it right adrenaline will take care of the speed in the actual event.

You also need to practice basic firearms safety- don’t point the gun at anything you aren’t willing to shoot. Don’t touch the trigger unless you want the gun to go bang. Know what your backstop is. You know theses things, and they apply just as much in a gunfight as they do on the range.

Once you have the basics down you are ready for the ‘advanced course.’ Here it is in a nutshell-

“If you aren’t shooting, moving or hiding you are probably doing it wrong.”

Pretty simple. ‘But Tinker!’ I hear you cry, ‘What about reloading? What about situational awareness? What about…’ etc. Fine, you need to reload? Hide. Nowhere to hide? Move. Need to look around? Do it while hiding or, if you must, while moving.  Let’s make this clear- by ‘hide’ I mean behind something that will stop bullets. Don’t stand there like an idiot while people with guns are trying to kill you. Move behind cover and hide. What about shooting? Don’t worry about it- if you’ve trained properly the shooting bit will take care of itself.

Example- bad guy with gun. Do you stand there like it’s 12-noon and try to out-draw him?  No- get something that will stop bullets between you while you draw your weapon. Move-hide-shoot. Yep, you might find yourself in a situation where you have no choice- but if you have no choice maybe all that training will give you a chance.

Train the basics. Keep it simple. Trust your training. Move/hide/shoot.

So that’s my advice, and you can take it for what it’s worth. Maybe it will help keep you alive, but I hope none of us ever need to find out.

Michael Tinker Pearce, 17 December 2017

Big and Slow Does the Job…

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… unless it doesn’t.
I recently watched ‘Godless’ on Netflix, and in some ways it was quite realistic. Some people were shot and dropped immediately. Others that were shot ran and hid. Some were shot and shot back.
 
Thinking about this it squares with a lot of accounts I have read of ‘western’ gunfights. One of the Daltons took twelve hits from .44 and .45 caliber guns and assorted buckshot. He rescued his brother and rode away- and survived. There are all sorts of accounts of people surviving serious wounds from these weapons. Shots hitting within the pelvic girdle (gut-shots) were nearly always fatal eventually, but other torso hits? Maybe, maybe not.
 
It is common knowledge in gun circles that in the Philippines the US Army went back to the .45 because their .38s weren’t working well at stopping fanatic warriors on drugs. The new .45s did not arrive in numbers before the end of the conflict so it’s difficult to assess their effect- but of those that did make it there are no reports that they were more effective.
Evan Marshall recounts a tale of an off-duty police officer out for an evening with his wife and they were accosted by a knife-wielding thug. The officer drew his .45 and put five 230-grain ball rounds into the man. The mugger promptly stabbed his wife and ran. He was arrested 3 hours later when he walked into an emergency room under his own power.
 
A British officer summed things up nicely, speaking in defense of the .38/200 when he said, “The .38 is an excellent man-stopper; shoot them through the skull and they drop in their tracks!” Yes, it’s kind of darkly humorous, but it touches on a fundamental truth. If a bullet doesn’t hit something important it probably won’t stop someone who is sufficiently determined. 
Big and slow is not automatically a recipe for handgun stopping power. Neither is small and fast. For that matter big and fast isn’t either. Your best chance with a handgun- any handgun- is to hit something they can’t live without. Even a heart-shot is not a guaranteed stop. Yes, they are going to die- but they may not die fast enough to keep them from killing you. No matter what sort of handgun you use the only guaranteed instant stop is a bullet that hits the brain or cervical spine- very difficult targets in the heat of a gun fight..
“But a bigger bullet makes a bigger hole, right?” It may- but human tissue is remarkably elastic. Coroners have said that, in most cases, with a torso hit they cannot tell the caliber until they recover the bullet. Modern hollow-points do tend to leave larger permanent wound cavities regardless of caliber, and are highly recommended for self-defense. Mind you, you still need a good hit or hits to stop an attacker. The tried and true method- regardless of caliber- is to rapidly put multiple hits center-mass. There’s a lot of important stuff there, so you’re likely to hit something that matters.
This is not to say that big, slow bullets don’t work- just don’t rely on the bullet to do your job for you. As long as you can put your shots where they need to go carry whatever works for you.
By the way- I recommend ‘Godless’ on Netflix; it’s a good show. Not only is the story good, but the attention to period details is above average. Among other things it’s not All Peacemakers all the Time; I spotted a number of Remingtons, Colt cartridge conversions, S&W top-breaks and even a Melwin & Hulbert. Rifles are mostly scattered between various Winchesters and Henry’s, but there are a few interesting pieces thrown into the mix as well.
Michael Tinker Pearce  14 December 17

Let’s Talk About Spree Shootings

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Violent crime rates per capita in the US have been dropping steadily for many years, and continue to drop annually. This includes homicides using firearms, despite the fact that numbers of firearms in private hands and numbers of firearms owners has increased dramatically in the same period. Despite the AR15 being the most common rifle in the US only a tiny percentage of crimes involving firearms use this or similar weapons.
I am not suggesting that there is a causative relationship between firearms ownership and reductions in crime, and I honestly don’t believe that there is. But the statistics do tend to prove that there is no correlation between increasing firearms ownership or sheer numbers of firearms in private hands and increases in violent crime.
The problem is that while high-capacity semi-auto rifles are used in only a tiny percentage of violent crimes these crimes tend to be unusually horrific, even though they barely constitute a blip on the radar of numbers of violent deaths. The ones that most often come to the public’s attention are spree shooters- people who set out to create the maximum number of casualties in the minimum amount of time in a single area.
Note that I call these people ‘Spree-Killers’ and not ‘Mass Shooters.’  The way people count ‘mass shootings’ badly distorts the actual numbers. For example if a criminal shoots a police officer and in response two criminals are shot this is counted as a ‘mass shooting.’  Typically any incident where bullets hit three or more people, whether lethally or not, is counted as a ‘Mass Shooting.’ This does not address Spree Shooters like the Las Vegas concert shooter or the Texas church shooting, which are the major problem we are facing.
It’s easy to blame the availability of military-style rifles, but let’s get real here- if they were really the problem we would have vastly more spree shooters.  No one knows the actual numbers of these weapons out there, but it’s somewhere between 3.5-10 million. They are very, very common.  Yes, this makes them easier for killers to get their hands on. In fact it makes them the weapon-of-choice for spree-shooters. But horrific as they are spree-shootings are a tiny, microscopic percentage of the use of these firearms. We need to stop spree-shooters and spree-killers in general, but is it morally supportable to penalize millions of law-abiding gun owners to do so when it isn’t likely to be effective in stopping the killers? I’m not making an argument here, I am asking a question.
OK, let’s address this right now- if military-style semi-automatic rifles are the weapon-of-choice for spree-killers why wouldn’t banning them be effective? Because they are the weapon-of-choice, not the only option. Recently a fellow drove a truck into a crowd and killed 83 people. The Oklahoma City bombing killed hundreds. Terrorist bombings in the Middle-east kill countless numbers of people each year. Might Joe Psycho skip the whole spree-killing thing if it was hard to get a military-style semi-auto? Maybe, but the evidence seems to suggest not.
Suppose for a minute that banning, confiscating and outlawing these weapons would not deter spree-killers. This is a real problem and real people are dying. The fact that they  represent a very small number of deaths per capita is not a comfort to the wives, husbands and parents of the victims. So what can we do about it?
People are fond of pointing out that when high-capacity military-style rifles were banned in Scotland and Australia there were no more spree-shootings, and they are correct. If the United States were either of these nations it might work here, too.  Despite our (theoretically) shared language we are very, very different cultures from these two countries. Hell, we Americans are very different cultures from each other.  There likely is no single solution that will work nationwide- and there is absolutely no simple solution.
We need to address the fact that we have become a society and a culture that produces spree-killers. We need to identify the reasons that this is so, and take active steps to fix these conditions. We can glibly blame this on the poor availability of mental-health care, but while that may contribute to the problem there is a lot more to it. Poverty, lack of economic opportunity, lack of education,  hopelessness and despair, extremism- not coincidentally the same factors that cause people to join terrorist groups.
You will never stop all the bad apples- but we can stop a lot of them if we address the reasons why they are happening. Until or unless we do the weapon-of-choice may change- but the end result won’t.