Things more important than a sub-second draw....

[JCN]

5:23

Makes an ignorant comment about lack of retention in gaming holsters and clearly he is voicing his disdain for gaming.


—-
Retort would be (which is the whole point of wanting to discuss this) is that he is missing the point.

Low retention holsters are just a training tool. If you can’t do it with low retention you can’t do it with retention.

But personally I can do it with normal holsters, level 3 holsters… etc.

He’s missing the point. It’s not about the sub second, it’s about the rapid index.

[J0hnny]

... wrong post

[JCN]

6:24

Makes the straw man argument that somehow competitors lose their minds and all mental decision making and judgement capacity is inherent in the buzzer and gaming.



I’m overstating but I thought that kind of ignorance had been disproven years ago when military, swat and LEO started realizing they would benefit from USPSA type training.

And that skills are applicable out of the narrow context of gaming.

Race car drivers don’t suddenly go into race mode when going to the grocery store.

So far the video is going as expected with it being an echo chamber of two people agreeing with the same points

[Trooper224]

Context is like the Bakersfield PD that if you develop a high level of skill during a competition with stiff time AND accuracy standards, you can use those high level skills to succeed in police work or self defense.

Well, no shit Captain Obvious. Thanks for that pearl, but it's not quite that simple.

Since you don't seem willing to answer a pretty simple question and seem to be willingly obtuse, I guess I'll go both ways.

Competition: yes, it's a valuable skill to have. Any skill that's consistently repeatable will be of advantage in a fixed and known environment. In this case, that of a square range competition.

Defensive use: proficiency with ones weapon is always an advantage. However, the ability to execute a subsecond draw is not as great a priority as one might think. Every situation is different. The threat will never come from the same direction or even be of the same form. The environment and the stimulus it provides will be different every time. None of it will be similar to a square range with cardboard targets and there won't be a recognizable stimulus in the form of a buzzer to react to. There will be decisions to make before the draw and after the draw that will occupy your decision making process, all of which are far more important than a subsecond draw. If your purpose is self defense, you're wasting a lot of time working towards that particular goal that should be focused eleswhere.

[JCN]

There are a lot of things one could say about your posts in this thread which would be brutally honest. Few of them are kind.

Neither party to the discussion you have no actual interest in discussing discounts the merits of technical skill. Neither party to that discussion would knock somebody for putting in the reps to gain a sub-second draw. Neither party to the that discussion discounts the real-world successes of agencies and individuals who have attained a high level of technical skill. They might have some comments for a person who seeks that skill to the near-exclusion of the myriad of other things which they also deem important.

I don’t require kind. Their video was in bad faith per the introduction and meant to be inflammatory.

Still wading through it, but so far I’m not getting the impression of what you just said.

If that was the message, it would be a 3 minute video and a summary slide.

[JCN]

Well, no shit Captain Obvious. Thanks for that pearl, but it's not quite that simple.

Since you don't seem willing to answer a pretty simple question and seem to be willingly obtuse, I guess I'll go both ways.

Competition: yes, it's a valuable skill to have. Any skill that's consistently repeatable will be of advantage in a fixed and known environment. In this case, that of a square range competition.

Defensive use: proficiency with ones weapon is always an advantage. However, the ability to execute a subsecond draw is not as great a priority as one might think. Every situation is different. The threat will never come from the same direction or even be of the same form. The environment and the stimulus it provides will be different every time. None of it will be similar to a square range with cardboard targets and there won't be a recognizable stimulus in the form of a buzzer to react to. There will be decisions to make before the draw and after the draw that will occupy your decision making process, all of which are far more important than a subsecond draw. If your purpose is self defense, you're wasting a lot of time working towards that particular goal that should be focused eleswhere.

Sorry I am not being clear.

I think the ability to have the skills of a sub second draw are important.

But I do not think that one should try and execute a sub second draw every time they draw.

And anyone knowing anything about competition knows the draw is contextual.

Same thing with in self defense.

Your last part makes it seem like it’s mutually exclusive. It is not.

That’s part of the point.

It’s a non-sequitur.

Hey, people should spend more time and money on living in a better neighborhood and getting attached garages than working on their gun fighting! You could go on and on upstream.

[ssb]

I don’t require kind. Their video was in bad faith per the introduction and meant to be inflammatory.

Still wading through it, but so far I’m not getting the impression of what you just said.

If that was the message, it would be a 3 minute video and a summary slide.

Neat?

Something I’ve learned in my career of arguing about the meaning of what other people say is that people hear what they want to hear.

[JCN]

Defensive use: proficiency with ones weapon is always an advantage. However, the ability to execute a subsecond draw is not as great a priority as one might think. Every situation is different. The threat will never come from the same direction or even be of the same form. The environment and the stimulus it provides will be different every time. None of it will be similar to a square range with cardboard targets and there won't be a recognizable stimulus in the form of a buzzer to react to. There will be decisions to make before the draw and after the draw that will occupy your decision making process, all of which are far more important than a subsecond draw. If your purpose is self defense, you're wasting a lot of time working towards that particular goal that should be focused eleswhere.

This is basically what I expect the whole podcast to talk about.

And that’s why I wanted to discuss it because it’s ignorant.

The counterpoint isn’t that people who have the technical ability to do a sub second draw think that’s going to save the day. It’s a surrogate for a high level of skill on index, transitions and trigger press at speed.

That is the point. Sub second draw isn’t about the sub second draw. It’s not about the buzzer. It’s not about the competition.

The better the index and skill, the more mental processing power you have still left over to process the complex situation.

That’s why people should care about the concept of the sub second draw.

[ssb]

This summer is robbery season at work apparently. Given my job, I get to listen to folks describe what happened so I’m obviously not standing there with a shot timer. Based on the descriptions of the participants and assuming the victims had been armed and chosen to fight back, a sub second draw may have been helpful in some of those robberies. The would-be defenders probably would have had other issues to deal with in addition to cleanly presenting their gun. Armed robbers seem to come in threes.

A lesson I recently had reinforced by a Rogers Range is that you have the time to solve the problem that you have. “I can do X in number point number number seconds” is good enough right up until it isn’t. Perhaps a sub-second draw would have kept one victim I dealt with the other week in good health. To be perfectly frank, I know with near certainty that better life choices and avoiding the four S’s would have kept him from getting robbed and assaulted in the manner in which he was. But, technical shooting skill versus mindset/awareness/learning to use pepper spray/not hanging out in stupid places/taking a first aid class/fitness/etc. isn’t an either/or proposition.

Ideally the average Good Guy with a Gun would be a USPSA A class shooter who moonlights as a BJJ purple belt and works a day job as an EMT who also has sound judgment and good moral character. The sub second draw is a metric. I know people who can do it on demand and get good hits. I also know people who can get the gun out in that period of time but can barely keep their first round on a Q bottle, never mind a target more anatomically significant. If you can consistently draw from concealment and place a round into the USPSA credit card at 7 yards in zero point whatever seconds, I think that’s pretty great. More power to you. Keep doing that.

If you can do as described above, you have vastly exceeded the technical shooting skill required to solve literally every single self-defense shooting I am professionally familiar with. Most of us have finite time and finite means. Chasing that level of skill to the exclusion of other skills - particularly non-shooting skills - can be detrimental. We are seeing generation of shooters raised on Instagram celebrity gun people. The rash of sped-up video drama seen a few years ago is probably a sign that many may be overemphasizing a skill that - while important and attainable - probably will not be a deciding factor in a self-defense shooting.

To me, the real value of a consistent and rapid draw is that it frees your mind up to worry about other things which strike me as very important. Like deciding whether to draw at all, or what to do once the gun has been drawn. It’s the same concept as being able to focus on maneuvering through traffic because I’ve managed my speed and braked and turned a steering wheel fifty bajillion times. Automaticity is a thing, and in my opinion as a mediocre shooter, the closer we can get to that in our manipulation and presentation of the gun the better. Whether 0.9 seconds is enough but 1.25 seconds is too slow is probably beyond your control, but both speeds likely demonstrate some level of automaticity.

In conclusion, people should continue to seek excellence in their shooting skills. Other things are also important. And in my opinion as a mediocre shooter who does what I do for a living, while a sub-second draw may make the difference if you get into a shooting, other skills are more likely to make that difference. How much emphasis you choose to put on what is up to you.

[JCN]

@ssb your points are very well articulated.

I’ll just repeat the main statement I’m making:

Having the ability to execute a reliable sub-second draw isn’t about the sub-second draw. It’s about the index and ability to have the gun present where you’re looking without delay and conscious processing.

It’s not about the draw.
It’s not about the draw.
It’s not about the draw.


That’s why I brought up the discussion.

Because people who don’t understand it keep fixating on the draw.

It is a surrogate for technical skills and a level of competence.

Karl Rehn has one of the educated perspectives:



It’s not about the draw.

Someone with a 3 second draw also very likely has poor automaticity, poor ability to transition and poor ability to process other things while trying to shoot.

Did I mention it’s not about the draw?

There are many things more important than guns at all.

My other point is that with 10 minutes a day, people could develop these skills or at least improve on their current ones if people didn’t keep telling them it wasn’t important.

Sure there are 1 trick Instagram bozos and people who do 100 takes to achieve something, but that’s also not what we are talking about either.

I’ll say it one last time because I think people who don’t understand it miss the point:

Sub-second draw SKILL isn’t about being able to execute a draw in under a second in all conditions. It’s a SURROGATE for a level of competence in index and presentation and for most people ability to transition as well.

Are there more important things? Yes, but you can make that argument against owning any firearm at all.

It’s also not difficult to gain A/M level skill if people would spend 10 smart minutes a day. The great thing about dry fire is that it lends itself well to multi-tasking while doing other things too.