Pulpsmack
Posts: 394
Joined: 4/15/2004
From: Louisiana
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quote:
ORIGINAL: Sinergy
quote:
ORIGINAL: CrappyDom
I routinely practice 100 yards with a handgun figuring if I can do that, the rest will take care of itself.
Hello A/all,
I have never been shooting (I love killing paper) on a target range where the target shot back. Accuracy with a firearm is a fine motor movement which uses cognitive ability. Adrenaline (such as one experiences in a combat situation) turns off the ability to do fine motor movements and cognitive processing, which is why 12 policemen can shoot a guy in a car on the streets of New York with handguns using 72 bullets from distances up to 10 feet away and hit him twice. And these are people who work under adrenal stress conditions professionally.
Our resident gun expert pointed out that 1 in 36 was a low percentage (albeit successful) gunfight for those 12 policemen, whereas a high success was more like 1 in 12. Make sure your weapon of home defense has 13 bullets in it to guarantee your own personal safety.
I teach self defense under the adrenalin state. I dont own a gun. I have some swords, and lots of knives, but there really is not time in a fight to get one out, except in Hollywood. Grab the perpetrator, knee kick (large motor movement) to the testicles and/or head, fight is over.
I have been in a knife fight (I was attacked by a drunken lunatic who decided I had eaten his peanuts in a bar) and walked away leaking from an injury I did not care much about and not having to explain why the other person was dead. He spent the night in jail with a huge knee shaped bruise on his groin. I got patched up with tie wraps and bailing wire and the doctor sent me in for the second half.
I really have an aversion to both violence and killing, and I did not want to have to try to sleep knowing I had killed somebody. I have a love / hate relationship with knives built over years of training with them. Then learning the poignant intimacy they represent in a life or death struggle really gave me pause.
Im always a trifle amused by people who post their weapons proficiency. The average number of people who fired their gun in World War 2 in combat was something ridiculous like 2%. With extensive psychological conditioning in our military training we are now approaching something in the 90% who fire their weapon in combat. Although our actual hit percentage might be in the tweens, which is why there is such a preference for semi and fully automatic weapons in combat zones. Why shoot one bullet and hope for a hit when you can shoot dozens or hundreds of bullets per minute at your target?
The most dangerous weapon is your brain. The most effective deterrant to combat situations are your verbal skills and ability to interrupt patterns.
Want to be safe in your house, buy a dog. Not an attack dog, something that will hear somebody breaking in and make an enormous amount of noise. The perpetrator will think "gee, dog, I dunno" and go somewhere else most of the time. Then if you are so inclined you can go unlock your gun safe (which you own because you dont want your kids to blow their own heads off), get out the gun, load it, get into position, etc., and then try to hit a moving target in the dark while under the effects of adrenaline.
Good luck!
On the other hand, I learned to never point a gun at something I was not willing to destroy. And people need to understand that pulling a gun on somebody ups the ante in the confrontation; somebody is going to end up dead at the end of your contact with that person. I hope for your sake that you are better at it then they are, or you will find yourself carried by six.
Not me, but go for it if thats what gets you through the day.
Sinergy
You raise some interesting points, some of which I agree with and some I wonder about.
I agree to an extent about the stress, but most cops do not train, or at least not very well. It seems as though there are the "Dirty Harry" types who would be getting down and dirty whether a cop or not, and on the other end of the extreme there are cops who don't seem alarmed their weapon is literally rusting in their holster. I have seen my share of both, No matter what happens, it all comes down to one's commitment ot training and the quality there of (and outside of those top dollar training seminars, there are few options). Nevertheless, I certainly concede stress serves as a damper, but how significant the damper varies with the individual.
Your wartime speculation is a bit dubious, however. The danger of statistics is that they can be tweaked to mean anything. If I concede to your 2% statistic, I must give pause and wonder about what 2% actually means. I vividly recall a History channel excerpt on logistics and the statistic that in WWII it took 18 service men to support a single US combat troop in the field, so by that number alone, you have only 6% who have had regular occasion to NEED to fire a weapon, and 2% or 1/3 is a pretty significant number after all. The higher percentage of troops today who fire would more likely come from improved logistics which require fewer support personnel as well as a (dangerously) streamlined military, thanks to the Clinton administration. I am not sure what to make of your semi-full auto assessment, however. We favor(ed) semis & fullys because our hit percentage "might" be in the tweens? The mainstay of the German army was the K98 mauser, which was bolt action, and ours was the M-1 Garand which was an 8-shot semi. You would think the solution would be to arm every troop with a M-3 Grease gun (a dirt cheap submachine gun) but that was not the case, nor was it in Korea. The rifle Ruled/s supreme and with good reason, and the US didn't take an automatic rifle seriously until after the Korean conflict when they issued M-14s (unwieldy to most in automatic mode) and later M-16A1s in Vietnam. Top brass was disappointed with troop fire dicipline which necessitated a 3 round trigger burst with the advent of th A2s (and then a switch back to full with the A3s accompanied by training NOT to spray and pray). Today our better-trained troops have understood the dynamics of offensive fire and as often (or more so) fire semi automatic volleys in with controlled aim. Nowadays, auto fire is essentially rellegated to CQB, where precise aim is not required. This last point seems to agree with your statement about stress and less precision. The point about semiautomatics and automatics however, is that they have as much to do with engaging multiple targets as they have to do with engaging a single target multiple times.
Your brain assessment is dead-on, but your home defense advice MIGHT be completely half-baked with respect to certain points. Manstopping dog always trumps lil yipper (especially when the perp knows you aren't home as more break-ins are occuring in suburbs at daylight when everybody's out of the house except for "Buttons" the wonder mutt). If "killer" is too much a liability for small children then "Buttons" certainly makes for a good alarm provided it occurs when you are home. As far as the way you have set up the "get your gun" setup, the person might as well not have one at all.
Safes: having kids means locking it up is a must, but they make specific lightning access safes that mount to the bed or beside it that can be accessed by fingerprints or finger touch combo (instead of 36 left, 28 right, 16 left while squinting with sleep swollen eyes under the lamplight while hell breaks loose downstairs).
Guns to save your ass: BETTER BE LOADED. The point of the safe is to keep hands that don't belong off it. You know you have a gun, you know it's loaded, and you respect and treat it according ly. you just wasted at least 2 min snapping on the lamp and twisting the combo, now you propose to waste more time fumbling around with a magazine or speed loader? I think "beep beep Boop!" of the specialized safe and a grab of the loaded weapon (all accomplished in fewer than 30 seconds) is the only way to go if you actually NEED the gun. This is moot as well because a hand gun is the "oh shit" someone's at the door or in the room already. You SHOULD be reaching for the shotgun if you hear it downstairs, and they make flashlights for both.
Your closing words definitely hit the mark in my book.
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RE: Weaponry, protecting what's yours - 
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