Can you shoot too fast and accurately?

[GJM]

So the Langdon Tactical time plus thread, and TLG's current PT blog post, got me thinking about the notion of continually trying to shoot faster and more accurately.

Ever since I attended my first Gunsite class with Jeff Cooper in 1991, I have considered it a given that we should continue to try to improve our speed and accuracy. Besides Col. Cooper's early involvement in practical competition, he often told stories in person and in his writing, of great results on the hunting and battle fields that he attributed to the participant's superior skill at arms. I have attended classes and participated in competitions with legendary members of LAPD SWAT and well know LE snipers, like at the Keneyathalon, who were doing their best to continue to improve their speed and accuracy.

Recently, some trainers have staked out the position that shooting very fast and accurately can be out running your headlights, and turn an otherwise good shooting into a bad one. Leaving aside the issues of whether there is a return on investment of continuing to improve, and whether skills beyond a certain level are realistically necessary for defensive use of the handgun, is there anyone who believes continuing to shooter faster and more accurately will make you LESS capable of using a pistol defensively, and if so, can you point to some actual cases that support that.

[BLR]

Recently, some trainers have staked out the position that shooting very fast and accurately can be out running your headlights, and turn an otherwise good shooting into a bad one.

I must have totally missed a key bit of discourse. Can you restate that?

[orionz06]

Not sure you can shoot too fast. I think you can make the decision to shoot too soon by way of being trigger happy. That seems to be a stressed point lately.

[TR675]

Recently, some trainers have staked out the position that shooting very fast and accurately can be out running your headlights, and turn an otherwise good shooting into a bad one.

I must have missed this too but assume they are talking about something like shooting so fast that the shooter stitches a bad guy up the back as he turns to run, or something like that?

I don't know, man. The "training" community has a whole lot of folks with a lot of extra time on their hands who sit around earnestly pondering hypotheticals they've pulled out of their navel.

The real truth of the matter is that whether or not you get into legal trouble in a self-defense shoot depends on a whole lot of variables that you as an individual have zero control over. All you can do is focus on the things you can control - like not hanging out in low-rent strip clubs at 3 a.m., paying attention to your surroundings, not actively looking for trouble, actually carrying an effective means of self-defense, and, oh yeah, if you absolutely have to, shooting your firearm accurately and quickly to end what you reasonably believe to be a threat to your life.

[Jay Cunningham]

I must have missed this too but assume they are talking about something like shooting so fast that the shooter stitches a bad guy up the back as he turns to run, or something like that?

I've seen both John Farnam and Massad Ayoob address this. Pretty interesting stuff; they have both served as experts in criminal trials.

[TR675]

Not sure you can shoot too fast. I think you can make the decision to shoot too soon by way of being trigger happy. That seems to be a stressed point lately.

By way of counterpoint to this - when I took ECQC* the biggest mistake I saw people make, over and over again, was not going for their weapon quickly enough...in a consequence free zone. It usually ended up with two dudes chasing another one around and around in a circle for like 10 seconds while he stuck his hands out in front of him and screamed at them to "BACK THE EFF UP!" 10 seconds was an eternity in that situation.

The second thing I noticed was that many of the defenders - all sharp guys - had serious trouble during the debrief articulating to SN why they shot the guys attacking them, even thought it was absolutely clear to an onlooker they were completely justified. One guy - who was obviously a competent professional - went into vapor lock at that point.

To me this reinforces the need for folks who don't get in confrontations for a living to give a lot more thought to when and in what circumstance they are likely to need to draw their weapon and how they would justify it to a responding officer...and this, I think, is where navel-gazing hypotheticals actually have some real value.

*As if taking it once made me an expert...take this with a grain of salt.

[DocGKR]

I think it is a hugely problematic for LE personnel to be routinely prepping the trigger during the drawstroke/pressout so that the gun always fires on reaching full extension. LE officers frequently draw pistols to cover individuals before a decision to shoot has been made; it is not good to program always having the gun fire upon reaching extension. I am aware of several inadvertent shootings of innocent citizens, including a fatal one, as a result of this issue.

[GJM]

I think it is a hugely problematic for LE personnel to be routinely prepping the trigger during the drawstroke/pressout so that the gun always fires on reaching full extension. LE officers frequently draw pistols to cover individuals before a decision to shoot has been made; it is not good to program always having the gun fire upon reaching extension. I am aware of several inadvertent shootings of innocent citizens, including a fatal one, as a result of this issue.

I don't believe we are talking about bad judgment or shots that should not have been fired. I mean, once the shooting is justified, and the shooting starts, can you shoot too fast and accurately, so as to "out run your headlights," and thus turn a good shooting into a bad one?

[TR675]

I've seen both John Farnam and Massad Ayoob address this. Pretty interesting stuff; they have both served as experts in criminal trials.

It can happen, for sure. I recall one of Ayoob's case files where an H&K employee had a T&A Ruger AC556 in his car and used it to light up some homicidal bikers who had been shooting at him and one of which was charging him with a knife...IIRC he shot the guy on full auto and hit him in the back a few times as he spun around. That was used as evidence against him.

My larger point is that an over-zealous officer and prosecutor team can and will MMQB a shooting they don't care for and will use any facts they have to try to persuade a jury that the shoot was bad, even if gun cognoscenti recognize those facts are irrelevant.

Ex. A: I give you the Zimmerman trial.

Ex. B: I personally witnessed a murder/self-defense trial in rural Texas where the prosecutor argued that the defendant's rifle - chambered in .22lr with some tactical accessories - was a "high powered rifle", that the defendant was therefore outgunning the "victim" - who had a handgun - and ultimately therefore that the defendant was not in reasonable fear for his life.

I mean, you just can't control for things like that.

On a related note, I was part of a videotape study that Marty Hayes did at the Tac Con a few years ago. He was testing to see how many shots on target the average shooter can get off in the time it takes for someone to fall down, as well as the number of shots fired after receiving a cue to stop. I'm a club-match-midscoring kind of a guy but for me in both cases the answer was "a lot"...

[Chuck Haggard]

I assume you mean something like this;

I can recall several instances where officers looked for the gun first, saw it and then
went to center mass, pulled the trigger, all while their mind is saying “what is wrong
with this picture.” They generally get one round off, their brain catches up and they
realize they are engaging a friendly officer. Some commanders will attribute this as
an inherent danger of multi-breach point or window “Break and Rake” operations.
Nothing could be further from the truth. The problem is a weak or non-existent
discrimination process.
I changed my discrimination process years ago from what I was originally taught in
special operations. There they taught us to look at the hands first. This caused
problems down the road when operators were shooting faster than they could think.
They would look at a gun, go to center mass and launch rounds only to find the
target was a good guy. Their mind was not moving fast enough to process the
information, that the weapon their target was carrying was the same as theirs. They
simply responded to how they were taught and this generally cost them their job.
Now, my first step is to look at the whole person and then I collapse to the hands.
How do

From Paul Howe's site;
http://www.combatshootingandtactics.com/published.htm
http://www.combatshootingandtactics....g_thoughts.pdf

I have seen exactly what Paul speaks of in training a number of times. It is so prevalent that we actually set up our recruits with simple scenarios where almost everyone "outruns their headlights" and shoots a cop or bystander. I can predict rather accurately who is going to shoot the wrong person and in what scenario they are going to do it.
We do not hit them with a "set up" scenario, they do things like shoot fully uniformed cops, we do not need to set them up, they do it to themselves.

Taking our lessons learned over the years, and adding to those I learned from Uncle Rich at DARC, we don't try to avoid it at first, we let it happen. Then, when they are emotionally tied to what in the real world is a massive fuck up (not an USPSA/IDPA level of "no shoot" penalty"), we talk about what happened and why, and how to not do it again. The rate of repeats afterwards is exceedingly low.

I don't think you can shoot too fast or accurately, but you can decided to shoot before you should.