The Gun Counter

Editor's Notebook: Holding Short
by Rich Grassi


Over the years, in my own personal training and when training others, I've made an effort to drive up speed without seriously compromising accuracy. I think most people in the game are on the same page in that regard. A mentor of mine is Clive Shepherd. Formerly of the Royal Marines Commando, he had his own ideas about speed.

"We need to get the fight over quickly so we get shot less," he said in a class I attended. Based on the looks he got from his audience, he went on to explain.

"In a fistfight, think you'll get hit? Yeah? A knife gets involved, think you'll get cut?" There were nods all around. "What makes you think you won't get shot in a gunfight?"

A sobering thought that helps drive the need for (accurate) speed. Shoot him quicker and more so you get shot less. It's an important concept.

In trying to get that passed on to my people, we tried turning targets and all kinds of drills. Mark Fricke, retired Arizona peace officer and firearms instructor-trainer for NRA Law Enforcement, showed me a little drill once during a class. Two shooters, one is the "bad guy," the other is the cop. A pair of targets is to your front, one for the bad guy to shoot, the other for you. Watch the bad guy as he stands next to you facing his target, your body squared to your target. When you see him go for his gun, you go for yours.

Who do you think gets the hit first? Right, the bad guy. He knows when the attack will come, how the attack will be initiated and of what the attack consists. You just know he might go for his gun. Surprisingly, after several trials, the cop's speed gets closer and closer. In nearly all cases, the shot goes at the same time for each with the "cop" beating the drop a few times.

That said, if both participants hit their respective marks, they're both shot. Little comfort is taken there, but we go on to deal with that. The point is, you can get your speed up and still make the hit.

The hits are critical. The drill is a fail if either participant misses the scoring area of his or her target.

When I started out to drive up draw speed for our people, I'd noted that during qualification, that our people were taking three to five seconds to make their first hit at three to seven yards, from the holster.

Three to five seconds; most fights are over in that time with less than half a dozen rounds fired by all participants. Before our people got their first round into the backstop, they were ventilated by their paper-and-cardboard adversaries. That was a bad thing and the reason I went the way I did.

That said, can someone working on speed related to a stimulus stop if the target turns out to be a no-shoot? I was asked that by a student doing our little "behind the curve" drawing exercise described above.

I was new to the job, carrying my first S&W revolver, a pre-1961 blue 4" Combat Magnum. Off-duty, I had it in a Ray Baker Pancake holster. Worn on the strong side under a jacket, the holster had a thumb-break snap. It was enough different than the Hume Jordan holster I wore on duty that I worked with the rig religiously. If I needed it, I reasoned, I'd need it quickly.

Came the day when two of us went to check on a relative. We arrived to find an apparent burglary in progress. We made our way into the garage, headed to the inside door.

Suddenly the door was thrown open and I found myself looking through my sights at a distinctly no-shoot target - one who thought she would "scare" me!

Why didn't I shoot? I didn't remember sweeping the jacket aside, breaking the snap, bringing the Combat Magnum into line - I just knew I was looking through the sights at someone who was now in shock.

I quickly put the gun away and we had a chat about startling someone who thought they'd stumbled into a residential burglary scene!

Can you stop short of firing? Sure. Here's how:

First, you'll draw to gunpoint - a topic for another day - about a thousand times for every time you draw to one or more shots fired. You just don't know when the real time arrives. So set up your practice that way. Draw about a thousand times to gunpoint, then finger off trigger, down to guard, look for potential threats, then holster.

That means if you're going to the range and you'll be drawing a dozen times to one or more shots fired, you owe yourself 12,000 draws to gunpoint.

Frankly, I'd lose count, but you get the idea.

During the draw, you're looking in the direction of the threat. If you're online in around or a little less than a second, you've had that time to determine if shots will be fired. That's time you take to make a decision to, in the words of former gun-writer Jan Stevenson, "stop the stroke."

The draw to point is auto-pilot. The shooting decision isn't. People who have to think how to draw are more likely to make the judgment error.

To learn more about firearms skills, learning how to teach firearms skills, or to learn how to conduct firearms training on a budget, check out Rich's book, POLICE FIREARMS INSTRUCTION: PROBLEMS AND PRACTICES, available from Amazon and other fine book sellers.