Charles L. Cotton wrote:If I have to room to extend the gun without essentially handing it to my attacker, I'm going to use the sights. I know the theory is that I don't have time to do so, but I respectfully disagree. It takes a split second to take a flash sight picture and I cannot think of a realistic scenario where fully extending the gun does not pose a threat, but there is insufficient time to take a flash sight picture.
I had an interesting experience relevant here. I had an opportunity to use a video-based firearms training simulator where the threats did what they did until you fired an adequate shot to stop them. The scenario of relevance had a near threat at about 4 yards with a gun that I shot to the ground with about 5 shots. After he's down, his accomplice appears about 25-30 distant and starts shooting. Being in a two-handed hold already on the downed suspect, I brough the firearm up to roughly eye level and began firing immediately as I detected the threat. I was not using the sights as I was clearly focused on the threat and not my pistol and I was not hitting my target. Seeing that the unsighted fire was not working, I focused on the sights and made the shots to neutralize the threat.
This was a surprise to me.
I'm an avid IDPA shooter and this is NOT how I would shoot an IDPA stage. In IDPA, I would have taken the extra split second to align the sights as necessary to make the first shot(s) scoring hits as it is a waste of time to do otherwise.
But this wasn't IDPA. Mentally, I was being shot at and my body reacted differently. (Different even from all of my training for those of you that think you'll react like you've trained.) My basic instincts kicked in and I decided that I needed to get lead flying ASAP. Only after I had lead flying in the response did could I focus now on hitting the threat. I didn't have a timer going, but I suspect I had at least two or three unsighted shots before I got on my sights for the two or three more that scored. At my speed, that was probably 0.5 sec of unsighted fire.
I learned a few really imprtant things from the 5 minutes I spent with this simulator.
1. Force on Force cannot be over emphasized in your training. You will likely react differently when your threat doesn't just sit there paitiently waiting to be neutralized.
2. Having a firearm with significant initial ammunition capacity is of vital importance to me. If I'd had one of those georgeous 1911's (even with spare mags), I'd have been in a world of hurt, and this was just two threats.
As for unsighted fire, while the distance here was inappropriate for unsighted fire, if that threat had appeared closer, I suspect the results would have been the same--immmediate return fire regardless of sight picture with a graduation to more sight refinement if I wasn't being effective. Now I just wonder if I practice this unsighted fire if I would have a more effective range for these initial shots.