Excaliber wrote:4. A knowledgeable defensive tactician should expect his initial shots to fail to stop an attacker, and should continue his active defense until the threat is no longer a threat.
Great post, as always, but I just wanted to comment on this point relative to the discussion.
I also liked snatchel's ranking structure:
1. Shot Placement
2. Amount of rounds put into subject
3. Caliber of rounds put into subject
If there's one thing I've learned about defensive handgun shooting, it's this: everything will be moving. Whether it's at ECQ distances or 20 yards, once weapons come out, nobody stands still. Not the bad guy (or guys), or the defender, or any bystanders, or even, seemingly (stress and adrenaline dump), the rest of your environment as all the actors are moving over and through it. And it happens in 360 degrees.
Without real-world experience like Excaliber has, the only practical way to even try to simulate a portion of this is force-on-force training with Simunition or, to a lesser degree of effectiveness, Airsoft. Nothing about our typical square-range shooting options allow us to practice this sort of thing. Competition like IDPA puts you under a degree of stress and has you moving a bit, but the scenarios are predefined and predictable, and have to be performed all in one direction, toward the berm. And nobody is shooting back.
There's a reason officer-involved shooting statistics show what seems to be an abysmally low hit rate...and it isn't because the average LEO is a far worse shot than you or me. In an SOP-9 update for the years 1990 through 2000, NYPD Gunfight Statistics show these as mean values: NYPD Gunfight Hit Probability: 15%; NYPD Shots Fired per Gunfight: 10.3; NYPD Shots Fired per Officer: 5.2.
Everybody involved in a gunfight is moving. You may think you can stand and take a quality, sighted shot, but the probability is extremely high that you cannot. From the original SOP-9 study: "Good sight alignment is fundamental to target shooting, yet 70% of cases reviewed indicated that no sight alignment was employed when the [service weapon] was fired." The tendency to use sighted shooting increased some as the threat distance increased, but "aiming" was described in the study as widely as merely using the barrel as a pointing reference up to and including full alignment of front and rear sights. Even then sight alignment was reported only 20% of the time. A substantial number of officers, over 10% on average, stated that they couldn't remember whether or not they used their sights.
Add to that, as many as 77% of police shootings are believed to occur under some degree of diminished lighting. So you've got everything moving, probably in low-light conditions, and all the effects of an adrenaline dump are hitting you.
Under those realistic conditions, good shot placement will be as much--or more--about luck as skill.
There's a reason we're taught in defensive shooting to go for COM, Center of Mass. Whatever is the biggest piece of the bad guy you can see, aim in the middle of it. The only one-shot physiological stop is brain stem or top of the spinal cord...and unless everything has pretty much stopped moving
and you're at a close distance, that's just not a shot you're going to make under stress in a gunfight.
So I like snatchel's ranking. In a perfect world, perfect shot placement is all you need.
Next up (this assuming a reasonable defensive caliber; no .25 ACP), give me a tool that will allow multiple,
rapid, follow-up shots without having to reload. I'd much rather have multiple rounds of 9mm on board than a two-shot .45 ACP derringer.
Last, I'd prefer a large caliber over a smaller one. If I know I'm not going to be able to select highly accurate targets during a gunfight, I want the largest wound channel I can get.
What you choose is all a balancing act. It has to be comfortable enough to carry; you have to be able to present it quickly and effectively; you have to be able to shoot it well and be willing to practice with it; and you have to understand certain basics about what a deadly-force encounter might actually look like.
