Jim Higginbotham on Shooting Center Mass...

[HCountyGuy]

Topic reminds me of another thread some years back regarding where to shoot folks that need shooting. This post from DB seemed to lay things out pretty well to me:

I ll make this fairly simple as we do for our students. Make a fist.....put it high in the chest with the base around the arm pit line on top of the sternum....that is where bullets need to go at any angle or orientation. Take the same fist with the base of the hand where it joins the wrist at the bottom of the nose....this is where bullets need to go. You need the ability to hit those fists. You need ammunition that will penetrate enouh to get deep into those areas.
I have seen enough, takes to enough people and been to enough autopsy's and witnessed enough shootings to to highly confident with this solution. Most of the folks I have talked to have confirmed exactly what I have seen...modern high performance ammunition in those two fist sized areas stop fights "right now" in the first case and "instantly" in in the second. Doctors can't fix these. You will not be okay, and your body knows that. Are there anomaly's.....of course. They are very few and far between contrary to rumor and mythology. The stories of crooks with their heart blown apart fighting for several minutes with no effect often turn out to be a lung shot only or a gut shot with the accuracy enhanced by the third retelling of the story. There are crooks out there with pistol bullet scars all over their body's (often with stab wounds). What you don't see is them pointing at a sternum where a high performance bullet entered.

We emphasize heavily on accuracy and heavily try to get people to re-think "acceptable" targeting that is often the entire upper torso. The entire torso will soak up a ton of pistol bullets. It also does not account for movement that is often extreme and blindingly fast to move those two sweet spots. That movement is often amplified in close range at how fast you have to be to track and why so many miss in close because they are using "acceptable" targeting and the speeds associated with that for a problem that actually requires a shot we would associate with a greater distance, yet tracked at high speed.

This is an opinion based on experience. Take it as that. Training to this has resulted in high levels of success in fights for those who have trained to this type of standard. Want to do something else...awesome, but we will continue on this path.

[Ed L]

“As many here know, Pat Rogers shot a subject 14 times with a .223 (Knowing Pat, I figure most of those were within the Gunsite 8" circle). Some here also know that Pat was charged with murder for that (but the prosecutor died before an indictment was handed down and the replacement prosecutor declined to pursue it). “

Can you quote a source for this. It is news to both Steve Fisher and I who talked to Pat on a far more regular basis than most.

When I read this, I can't help but thinking of this:

[Sixgun_Symphony]

Maybe the 14 times with a .223 on a suspect is being confused with the recounting of the NVA incident? I'd had never heard anything ever once about Pat being charge with murder?

Tell me the reference with the above Pat photo??

[Ed L]

Tell me the reference with the above Pat photo??

Pat would get annoyed when people would repeatedly misspell his name online and refer to him as Pat Rogers; and he would probably get at least as annoyed by someone telling an incorrect story about him.

RIP Pat

[Randy Harris]

Like MVS stated earlier I'm not aware of anyone that we take seriously who still advocates "old school center of mass B-27 x ring shot placement" . In fact things have been steadily moving in a more precise and vital organ damaging direction at least among trainers who are result oriented. Tom Givens has been a "nipples to neck triangle" advocate as long as I have known him (15 years) Craig Douglas mentioned to me one time prior to his retirement from his PD about how he was shifting their guys toward essentially an index card sized "full value" target based on an incident where some of his people shot a suspect numerous times in the "torso" and the suspect still ran off. Bolke and Dobbs advocate the heck out of B8 centers. Dave Spaulding uses an 8.5x11 sheet of paper with spine and heart and lungs printed on it. And as John Hearne and I have been talking about for 15 years....the better you can shoot the better results you tend to get so we need to be teaching people to shoot well not just to shoot a lot.

I personally have been using a 3" Birchwood Casey shoot'n'see target centered on a 8.5x11" piece of copy paper which is then centered in the high chest (bottom of paper is even with bottom of the diaphragm and top of paper is even with top of sternum or suprasternal notch) of full size picture targets or on a "tacman" plastic shell as the "teaching combative marksmanship target" for probably the last 10 years. The 3" (essentially racquetball size) circle is the goal we are striving for but the 81/2 x 11 paper is "acceptable". A hit outside the paper is a "miss" because fortunate accidents (missing what you aimed at but missing badly enough to hit them in the head or the femoral artery) are not intentional and cannot be counted on. Once you can put 90% of your rounds in the circle at 4 yards we work on making it happen faster. I could use a 5" circle but the 3" forces you to smooth out the trigger press faster than the 5" does.

As the distance increases obviously the 3" target becomes a lot harder to hit and that is where the 8.5x11" page becomes our "pass/fail" arbiter of shot placement. At 25 yards a hit in the 8.5x11 is still "probably adequate" so we can use a steel 1/3 size ipsc/idpa for distance. In fact that is the biggest target I allow. That 1/3 size ipsc actually covers from my chin to my diaphragm and is just inside the nipples. Sometimes I staple up a cardboard IPSC or Idpa behind the plate (top edge of plate at bottom edge of head box) to give a full size torso for the students to be able to see where the "near misses" are actually going that would not have been visible if you just shot at the plate with nothing behind it. It also makes it easier to see the plate depending on the background. This way instead of just "hit or miss " feedback from the plate we can look at the cardboard and see if any of those misses were still hitting torso and then work solve that and get more hits in the plate.

Now we can argue that as a target for pistol bullets the 8.5x11 is probably STILL too big. Rifle bullets in the 8.5x11 will probably do everything you need them to do but pistols might require more precision simply due to significantly less power. We can argue that folding it in half and orienting it up and down so it is 8.5" tall and 5.5" wide is a better pistol target (or just fold and cut to get 2 targets out of it). But the full size 8.5x11 makes it easy to just "replace the whole chest" and cover over all the holes quickly and efficiently between drills and besides , the 3" circle in the center of the paper is what we are really shooting at not the paper as a whole.

[HCM]

Maybe the 14 times with a .223 on a suspect is being confused with the recounting of the NVA incident? I'd had never heard anything ever once about Pat being charge with murder?

Tell me the reference with the above Pat photo??

I made a few inquiries with people who were close to Pat about the .223 shooting incident and legal issues Mr. Higinbotham related and which was subsequently posted by Tokarev.

None of the people I inquired with knew of Pat being involved in any incident matching the one related. I also suspect Mr Higginbotham confused Pat’s Vietnam M14 shooting with something else or Mr. Highsbotham accepted an inaccurate story from someone else without checking the facts.

Back on topic, Pat was an advocate of targeting the brain box as opposed to “the head” and an 8” circle, high chest vs B-27 style “center mass.”

PS- “Negative taping!”

[BigD]

Like MVS stated earlier I'm not aware of anyone that we take seriously who still advocates "old school center of mass B-27 x ring shot placement" . In fact things have been steadily moving in a more precise and vital organ damaging direction at least among trainers who are result oriented. Tom Givens has been a "nipples to neck triangle" advocate as long as I have known him (15 years) Craig Douglas mentioned to me one time prior to his retirement from his PD about how he was shifting their guys toward essentially an index card sized "full value" target based on an incident where some of his people shot a suspect numerous times in the "torso" and the suspect still ran off. Bolke and Dobbs advocate the heck out ...<snip>.

It’s not the forward-thinking outside trainers. They get it. It’s the thousands of PDs and state police and fed agencies (that have mostly different qual courses and used a wide variety of targets.)

I’m not an expert on qual targets, but as far as I know most reward hits that would be too low for maximum effect, according to Higginbotham. I know my agency’s qual target does.

[BigD]

Edit to my post above:

looking at this link, I was surprised that quite a few qual targets do reward the “upper A” Zone and seemingly give fewer points for the “lower A zone”.

https://shop.actiontarget.com/prodca...lification.asp

Still, the majority of targets seem to be more “center mass” oriented. But it’s not as bad as I thought.

[UNM1136]

Pat would get annoyed when people would repeatedly misspell his name online and refer to him as Pat Rogers; and he would probably get at least as annoyed by someone telling an incorrect story about him.

RIP Pat

Or call him Mr. Rogers...

pat

[Ed L]

Or call him Mr. Rogers...

pat

In reading my last post I realize that I screwed it and it made no sense.

It should have read: "Pat would get annoyed when people would repeatedly misspell his name online and refer to him as Pat Rodgers; and he would probably get at least as annoyed by someone telling an incorrect story about him."

From now on before I mention Pat in a post I will hear Pat's voice say to me, "Don't Fuck up," as he would before I would fire a relay.