From another thread:
The above reflects conventional wisdom and, in context, there is a lot of truth to that statement.
However, I'd like to challenge the underlying concept. How does one assess whether a fast split or fast draw or fast reload made a difference in a fight? There is no way to replay the same individual combat over and over again seeing if the victor could have got away with slower followup shots, or if the vanquished might have turned the tables by being on the gun and on target half a second faster. Imagine a simple and common scenario of an officer presented with a BG who has a deadly weapon in hand. Is a 2s draw going to be fast enough? There is no way to know. Maybe, maybe not. Will three shots incapacitate the criminal in time, or might it take five? What might that BG do in the space of time those extra two shots take? Or put another way, how much safer might the officer be if he could have delivered five accurate hits instead of three in the same amount of time?
What we do know is that in repeatable tests like man-vs-man plate rack or dueling tree challenges, little differences in speed and accuracy can in fact make a difference. We can evaluate how shooters, under stress, dealing with a live opponent dictating speed, succeed and fail.
Certainly it's not a 1:1 comparison to an actual fight and no square range shooting challenge can hope to encompass all the variables and complexities of a shootout.
But the reality is we have absolutely no idea how many lives may have been lost because someone didn't have a couple extra hundredths of a second to fire one more round, or how many lives have been saved because he did.