Point Shooting

[Good Ol' Boy]

No harm no foul.

I appreciate your input on this and many of the other threads in this sub forum. From what little I know of you, you seem to be a pretty knowledgeable and stand up guy.

If you EVER happen to make it over to the east coast with one of your classes please let me know.

 

[brownie0486]

OP, keep at it. Here's a no sights 1911 from 5,10 and 25 yrds at just below eye level using Pistol Quick Kill

 

[brownie0486]

Here's a channel that has a LOT of various threat focused skills being demonstrated.

https://www.youtube.com/user/azqkr

 

[Rick McC.]

Here's a channel that has a LOT of various threat focused skills being demonstrated.

https://www.youtube.com/user/azqkr

Glad you came across this discussion, Sir!

 

[Rick McC.]

I miss-understood your OP, I'm tracking now. Not splitting hairs with the 3ft if you actually were shooting from the hip, but you weren't. With practice, you'll get those groups down shooting shoulder point at 5yds.

Practice shifting your focus as you shoot. Go from belly button, to sternum, to nose, shooting from hip through extension to shoulder point. Your bullets should follow your focus. This is a "zipper," for extra-credit do it from the draw while moving.

"The Zipper," huh?

I believe that you've spent some time with my mentor...

 

[Rick McC.]

No harm no foul.

I appreciate your input on this and many of the other threads in this sub forum. From what little I know of you, you seem to be a pretty knowledgeable and stand up guy.

If you EVER happen to make it over to the east coast with one of your classes please let me know.

I believe Brownie's planning to do h2h and blade training in Lake Mary, Fl. summer 2017, and Threat Focused Pistol in Daytona at the Volusia Hunt and Gun Club in the fall of 2017. I plan on participating in both.

Those may be the last courses he does down here.

 

[harrygunner]

I'm amazed at how well the mind knows where limbs are and how they are oriented.

I take advantage of how the body knows where fingers are pointed. I index my trigger finger on the slide while drawing. Pretty much leads to sights lined up. But, if not, within seven yards, they will be close enough if I don't have time for proper alignment.

One thing that must be practiced to get right, is hitting truly close targets (within a yard) while your gun is at waist level. Without practice, hits will be low.

 

[strambo]

The low hit is fine IMO, get it fast while coming out of the holster and moving, then in whatever your split time is (.2, .3, .4?), the 2nd can be in the center-chest. If you trigger the shot while extending the gun, the first shot is "free" as compared to waiting until full extension.

Also, within a yard, they will likely have their hands on you (and one of yours on them...maybe?), you should be using a retention technique, not a hip-shot IMO.

 

[harrygunner]

I understand.

When we trained for CQC when shooting, it helped to know how to orient the gun to make more effective hits.

 

[Kendal Black]

I'm amazed at how well the mind knows where limbs are and how they are oriented.

I am astonished how much this ability varies with individuals. Some are blessed with it, others have less of this, which wears the long glorious title of proprioceptive awareness. People with lots of it become wonderful dancers or great martial artists, stick and rudder pilots totally at home in the air, or the sort of swimmer who could teach the fish a thing or two. They can also learn to shoot from the hip.

Hip shooting, below the line of sight, demands that you orient the artillery's elevation and azimuth by the awareness in your forearm. Good for you, that you can do it.

There is another sort of person. I refuse to say we are inferior, but proprioception is unevenly handed out. There are compensations to not having much. I never quite managed to learn touch typing, or hip shooting, and my aviation abilities are more pelican- than swallow-like. I have generally done better with ladies who care little for dancing.

What is the compensating virtue you get for being, essentially, a klutz? "OFMG! HJC! JMAJ! Kenny! Somebody get a medic!"

So I says, says I, looking around, "Wait, what? Who got hurt?" Klutzes have, typically, high pain thresholds and focused mental concentration (because we are less aware in our bodies), and a tendency to bring our pistols to eye level to shoot.

I rather suspect I could be coached endlessly on hip shooting and still be mediocre. That does not bother me near as much as the verdict of a senorita who told me I tango like a robot.

 

[brownie0486]

I am astonished how much this ability varies with individuals.

Yet I don't see much of any variance once the student has been guided/trained in the courses of fire. WW2 1/2 hip [ shooting from the hip ] is a body indexing skill. Students don't all learn at the same pace, but all students have been able to be brought to a level of skill with 1/2 from 6 and 10 feet within an hours time.

I don't think you give yourself enough credit for your ability to learn an indexing skill from someone who's known to produce results in others.

Have you ever been professionally trained in 1/2 hip? And if so, by whom?

 

[Rick McC.]

Until you acquire real training; "you don't know what you don't know."

Once you know what you're really capable of; it's a life changing experience. Really...

 

[Kendal Black]

Have you ever been professionally trained in 1/2 hip? And if so, by whom?

Nope. I have worked my way through the Fairbairn and Sykes book, with live fire, and suppose I absorbed what the authors intended. (And, yes, I can exceed the rather generous qual standard the book sets forth.) The authors say that half hip is good for three yards or so. Personally I feel that is an over-estimate. I would use it rather nearer to contact distance.

The trouble is that the firing azimuth is set by squaring up to the target, and by accurately positioning your arm so that the gun faces forward. It is quite possible to make errors in both. That leads to tolerance stacking and a rather vague and sloppy feeling about the whole business.

Elevation is not as critical if your goal is merely a torso hit, just anywhere, for torsos are higher than they are wide, but still dependent on muscle memory to point the gun.

A great many variables drop out of the equation if you can manage to get the gun up into your visual cone. Doing that is my preference if it can at all be arranged.

Some people are born hip shots. Bill Jordan could hit aspirin tablets, firing from just above the holster. That, I would say, indicates giftedness in the particular proprioceptive skills required to hip shoot well. Not everyone can do that--which is why people turned out to watch Jordan do it.

 

[brownie0486]

Nope. I have worked my way through the Fairbairn and Sykes book, with live fire, and suppose I absorbed what the authors intended. (And, yes, I can exceed the rather generous qual standard the book sets forth.) The authors say that half hip is good for three yards or so. Personally I feel that is an over-estimate. I would use it rather nearer to contact distance.

The trouble is that the firing azimuth is set by squaring up to the target, and by accurately positioning your arm so that the gun faces forward. It is quite possible to make errors in both. That leads to tolerance stacking and a rather vague and sloppy feeling about the whole business.

Elevation is not as critical if your goal is merely a torso hit, just anywhere, for torsos are higher than they are wide, but still dependent on muscle memory to point the gun.

A great many variables drop out of the equation if you can manage to get the gun up into your visual cone. Doing that is my preference if it can at all be arranged.

Some people are born hip shots. Bill Jordan could hit aspirin tablets, firing from just above the holster. That, I would say, indicates giftedness in the particular proprioceptive skills required to hip shoot well. Not everyone can do that--which is why people turned out to watch Jordan do it.

Jordan wasn't any more gifted than another. His skills at 1/2 hip came from hours of proprioceptively training to shoot from that position. If you don't put the time in, you don't get to a level he exhibited.

The trouble is that the firing azimuth is set by squaring up to the target, and by accurately positioning your arm so that the gun faces forward

In it's initial training, correct. However, we get students moving off line a step left or right and still making COM shots in less than 1 hour. Obviously, once on an oblique to the threat and not directly in front of the threat, they have developed enough proprioception to "know" where the muzzle is facing even when not squared to the threat. It's only a matter of training

The authors say that half hip is good for three yards or so.

It is, with repeatable results. We start the student at 6 feet, move back to 9 feet within just a short time span. Their results don't change from 6-9 feet once they've got the skill ingrained. I suggest you seek professional instruction from someone who is known to be able to get people up to speed on FAS/ww2 skills. You'll expand your skills level exponentially over self exploration if you're serious about this type of shooting.

 

[Rick McC.]

Once you learn to put aside your brain telling you "I can't do that;" you'll be able to hit cans and clay birds at 10 yards from the "gunfighter stance" (3/4 hip) with boring regularity.

As Brownie says; "the mind is the limiting factor."

And once you can overcome that, you'll realize that it carries over into your life; far beyond the shooting skills....

 

[coloradokevin]

There's always a balance between speed and accuracy. Increase speed, you decrease accuracy. Increase accuracy, you decrease speed. If you're in a close range defensive engagement with a handgun, you had better have some speed behind your shots. How fast you can go depends a lot on how you're grouping on target.

Inside of 10 yards I'm typically doing instinctive shooting. At 15+ yards the sights become far more relevant.

When I qualify at work I typically try to force myself to go as fast as I can. How do I do that? On each target facing I try to make sure that I'm the first one on the shooting line to get a shot off. If I miss it still counts against my qualification, so there's some balance in the exercise (loud fast noises don't count). While this certainly isn't the only way I train, it is a method I employ to keep my skill set sharp, and my shots quick.

 

[Drail]

Repetition (lots) and a relaxed mental focus are very crucial. Just like archery.

 

[Kendal Black]

My reservation about hip shooting (by which I mean your gun not in your visual field) is that it relies on proprioceptive awareness. So does shooting in other ways, to some extent at least, but in hip shooting you are shooting without visual confirmation of where the gun is pointing. It is all down to whether you are pointing the gun where you feel you are pointing it.

Proprioception degrades with stress and fatigue. As I mentioned above (and I see no real refutation) some people are more blessed than others in their initial store of proprioceptive ability: not every pretty girl is a ballerina.

Tunnel vision is a frequently reported effect of shootout stress, so we need not think we will accomplish anything much with peripheral vision cues.

As I mentioned, I worked through the Fairbairn and Sykes booklet and can make half-hip do what the authors say it should do. I'm going to give myself a passing grade on at least understanding the material. I will grant that the qual standards in the book are easygoing. The Shanghai Police needed to train people of varying talent by using a short-course method. Very well.

Given the obvious, that some people are a bit klutzy anyway and hip shooting abilities are going to degrade under difficult conditions, I do not see half hip as more than an emergency measure for use at a few yards max. There are better, surer ways to deliver a bullet, otherwise. Hip shooting, to accuracy standards better than those I mentioned, seems to me simply a range game, gratifying no doubt, but not reliably transferable to emergency use. I would far prefer, if at all possible, to raise the gun about a foot so that I can see it and the target in the same visual field. If that is not possible, the problem is likely right up in my face anyway, making questions of aim uncritical.

Seeing gun and target together is more reliable than shooting from the hip.

 

[strambo]

Good post Kendal and I understand your reservations.

However, some things you point out as a deficit to PS in a stressful environment, I see as a benefit. Particularly tunnel vision, this tendency under stress helps with PS. Your subconscious is mobilized to hit what you are focusing on. It also works counter to trying to focus on the gun/sights instead of the scary gun or knife they are holding (not saying you can't, it's just harder).

Anecdotally; last month I had my first FoF/close quarter gunfighting course (I was the instructor) and we had a PS section. I taught retention, half-hip, shoulder point, and shooting from position 3. Of all the shots fired from 1-5yds, from all 6 students, from all positions, there was only 1 miss of the target. The rest of the shots were either within the upper chest vital zone or low of it due to short range and low hand position. I only spent an hour on the topic and nobody had any prior PS training (4 of 6 students had no training of any sort with a handgun).

Curiously, the 1 miss was from a student with a number of prior defensive handgun courses. I've noticed that beginners can often shoot better PS than with sights because they have less to think about.

That said, I don't think half-hip is necessary. All you need is a retention position, plus sighted fire practice...but you should know your accuracy w/o sights from the positions you practice with sights. 1 hand shoulder point, 2 hands extended and also 2 hands from Pos 3. If someone is charging you, you need to get the gun back out of the way of a grab, but ideally still be putting rounds in them before they get to within the accuracy range of a retention position.

 

[hso]

I've participated in several point shooting courses after having been in several "modern shooting" courses. I eventually progressed to being part of the team putting on point shooting courses, frequently serving in Force on Force exercises. I've seen and agree with almost everything strambo has said on this. Point shooting is just part of the continuum of skills from contact to greater distance.

Just because the mind focuses on the threat and the tunnel vision effect develops doesn't mean the eyes stop sending signal to the brain about what's taking place in the visual field any more than the ear stops working and "protects" itself from loud noises through auditory exclusion. That information is simply being prioritized, not excluded. As such, I think since the visual field extends about 75 degrees down from the horizontal in front of the eyes, any position that puts the hand within the visual field will be as effective as any contact/retention shooting stance and that any improvement of the position of the hand towards the central field improves the integration of the information to increase accuracy.

 

[mavracer]

That said, I don't think half-hip is necessary. All you need is a retention position, plus sighted fire practice...but you should know your accuracy w/o sights from the positions you practice with sights.

That's freaking hilarious, we're at an impasse and two months later you say damn near the same thing I've said all along.

 

[strambo]

Not at all, you and I have always been in agreement on that point.

Here is exactly what I said earlier on pg 2 of the thread:

Those saying you don't need to practice PS because you practice sighted fire...I can agree with that only for the exact positions where you shoot with sights or Pos 3 since you always hit that in the draw stroke. Retention or 1-hand not quite extended (because they can grab the gun), how are you going to hit a moving target (while also moving) under life or death stress shooting from a position you've never trained? Possible, sure. Likely, no.

The disagreement is whether a PS method is needed between a retention one and PS from a typically sighted fire position. I think ideally, yes, but shooting from POS 3 which is a position transitioned through in every draw stroke will do.

The partially extended "3/4" hip position is extremely useful though. It is a lot more accurate than the hip and much more maneuverable and easier to hit with on the move than POS 3.

 

[1911 guy]

My opinion here. Point shooting is a useful and needed skill. It is NOT a substitute for sighted fire, nor is it an excuse to accept sub-par accuracy. But it is a skill that if needed, you don't have time to learn it on the fly. Practice both.

 

[Matthew Temkin]

What should be pointed out is that half hip is not a technique per se ( neither are any of the other positions mentioned by Fairbairn) but what Fairbairn & Sykes observed their SMP officers doing naturally in actual combat.
It should also be mentioned that none of the officers had been trained in half hip until after Fairbairn took over as head Instructor.
Only then did Fairbairn begin to formalize and perfect what his men had been trying to figure out on their own.
Quite frankly you may not to get to choose which technique to use under stress since it may just choose you.
I sure hope it is something that you practiced beforehand.

 

[HB]

I'm a believer that with a gun that fits your hand and ample practice with trigger control, point shooting is very accurate.

Back when 22 was available and I had a lot of time, I fired thousands of rounds from the hip and point shooting.

However, I believe it very dependent on being able to see your misses or near hits. Ahooting a can on a dry berm is very different than hitting than shooting at a humanoid target at chest height with no backdrop.