Handgun Self defense Stance

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Seeker

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I am wondering about 'best' stance for self defense with a handgun.

In the handgun classes I've taken (taught by the State Police pistol instructo) they teach the Weaver and Isosceles stance, incorporating the 'low ready" position.

I believe self defense distances to be very short, within 15 feet, probably less as inter-personal violence is often face to face, or grappling distance. With that in mind, Weaver and Isosceles puts your weapon two feet from your body and right in the bad guys chest. Now that your pistol is within inches of your attacker and your arms extended in front of you it gives the bad guy the opprotunity to slap your pistol/hands turning you off line or to disarm you. You are effectively handing your pistol to the attacker and giving the bad guy a long 'rudder' (your outstretched arms) to steer you with.

It seems to me that a better stance would be the old gun-slinger style. Pistol held at waist and close in to your body. Now you can protect your pistol / self with off hand and or body or even obscure your weapon. With a little practice you'll some find that the bullets go where you are looking or close to it without looking at your sights.

Why isn't this taught?
 
i agree with you if the guy is bad breath close, i think most people will agree if there is any space between you step back as you draw your gun at least thats what i was taught. but yeah there will be some cases when you cant extend your weapon. we should probably all train for this as well as shoot while moving.
 
Those who say one should take the Weaver Stance or the isosceles stance seem to be thinking a self defense situation is going to be like a firing range.

By the time you Weaver you’ll have been stanced.

I have no intention of trying to shoot a pistol at something 50 yards away. If one gets his jollies by doing that at the range then it’s fine by me, but don’t run your mouth about any stances against some dude coming out of a dark alley or from between parked cars and only a few feet from me.

I practice shooting from the hip and putting it on a piece of typing paper at 20 feet. I can do that consistently.

Anything else in regard to self defense is Forum Ninja BS.
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My preferred stance is whatever I am able to do in the instant that I need to do it in.
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Indeed. Note with both weaver and iso stance you can pull that pistol close, which is especially effective for in house. Banging around Miami Vice style is probably not the best way to go.

OT but I started one hand shooting the .22 for "in case of" in the last month and I must say, I've started to really get into into it. All of a sudden it feels natural to shoot cowboy one hand style.
 
Personally, I like the SUL stance (if you can actually call it a "stance") for just about everything, but especially when moving in close quarters. Its very versatile and allows you to protect the gun and shoot quickly from pretty much any position.
 
'best' stance for self defense with a handgun

What ever stance you are in at the time.

Laying on your back after getting knocked down at the ATM

Inside your car during "carjacking"

Setting at a table in a resturant

Setting on you recliner during a home envasion

Standing up with a bunch of goodies while in line a a convience store

Laying in bed

The list is unlimited, but as you can see from the partical list the need to practice one handed.

I believe a min. of 90% of your shooting should be one handed, 60% weak hand, 30% strong hand.
 
I might even take it one step further and suggest that any stance, in the sense of planting one's feet and standing still in a proscribed position, is most often inferior to moving. Moving to cover, or to increase distance from your attacker, or just to make yourself a more difficult target by your own motion, is likely to enhance your risk of survival.
 
Seeker said:
....It seems to me that a better stance would be the old gun-slinger style. Pistol held at waist and close in to your body. Now you can protect your pistol / self with off hand and or body or even obscure your weapon. With a little practice you'll some find that the bullets go where you are looking or close to it without looking at your sights.

Why isn't this taught?
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It is -- actually not exactly that way. Current thinking is to engage near targets from what's called the retention position. This is an intermediate step in the standard draw stroke and has the gun held up at about the level of the pectoral muscle and fairly close into the body.

But this is something covered "down the road" in a normal training progression.

The thing is that one needs to start somewhere. Generally a training program begins with the Weaver and/or Isosceles and the two hand grip. The first goal is to lay a solid foundation of the fundamentals -- trigger control and sight alignment.

Then a training program normally progresses to one handed shooting, both dominant hand only and non-dominant hand only, then various forms of point shooting. And throw in some moving targets, moving and shooting, shooting while moving, multiple targets, etc., and you'll be beginning to get some well rounded training.
 
Also, OP was taught by a police instructor. Police are very different from civilians. One of those differences is that police wear armor. Isosceles is a great stance for police officers because it "presents your armor" to your opponent. You square off with them to make sure your armor is catching the rounds to your chest. This is a great reason for police officers to use Isosceles, but a terrible reason for civilians :p

Weaver presents a smaller overall target and allows for easier movement.

But as other posters have said, a bad guy isn't gonna give you time to get into a perfect Weaver stance. You're gonna have to shoot him in whatever position you have to be in at the time. So I just walk around in a Weaver Stance all the time.
 
The gunslinger stance you describe is called shooting from retention, and it is taught (in the good classes, anyway).

In addition to that, I teach a "crouched isosceles" because that is probably the position you'll find yourself in when an attack occurs.
 
Personally, I don't care for any of the positions where the pistol is too close to the body. For one it's a lot easier to have your arm held against you and be pushed over. Secondly, engaging multiple attackers requires evasion and tactics, firing from a weakened position isn't going to help matters. Third, people have a tendency, regardless of training, to put there strong hand between them and their opponent. Last, defending against an edged weapon from that position means you are actively standing your ground and weakening your defense by leaving only one hand open.

I'm a firm believer that drawing a gun at such distances is going to turn into a fight over the weapon, and open hand skills have more use until you can gain a higher ground, so to speak.
 
Its impossible to know what stance to take because its impossible to know what situation you will be in. Whatever stance you can get the gun on the target. I think the perfect stance is for the target range.

If someone shooting in my direction i will be to busy diving for cover to worry about what stance to take.
 
Thanks for the comments!

SUL?

Sounds like a matter of basic v. advanced training.

I am able to safely shoot it the yard and usually practice from the holster (open and concealed) at about 15 feet shooting from the hip, so that my wrist is near my hip and the end of the barrel is just barely in my lower peripheral vision, while stepping back. I often use the traditional tin can for a target.

Greater distances in a self defense situation may be hard to explain to The Man. To be no billed in Oregon requires the bad guy to have motive, opprotunity and ability to cause harm.
 
ClayInTx said:
I practice shooting from the hip and putting it on a piece of typing paper at 20 feet. I can do that consistently.

Anything else in regard to self defense is Forum Ninja BS.
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Oh really? I have no idea what you can do IRL, other than what you write. However, there are realistic, timed competitions, where accuracy and speed are measured. No one who shoots IDPA, USPSA, ISPC, etc uses your methods, at least no one who wins.

Now, regardless of whether you can make hits using your method. If it were faster and more accurate than the method top combat pistol champions use, they would be using it.

I'm in no way saying that Threat Focused techniques aren't useful and worthy of practicing. What I am saying however, is that your writing off, of the tried and true combat pistol techniques as 'Forum Ninja BS' is to be nice, absurd and ridiculous.
 
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It's probably a good thing targets don't shoot back in competitive pistol shooting, don't you think? If nothing else, it might result in slightly modified positions.

If one reads the available literature from over the years, it is remarkable the differences there are, as well as the similarities. Different writers also certainly had different ideas about the standards for proficiency should be, too. One school thought you needed to be a high-scoring formal target shot before you should even considered anything else handgun-wise. Yet a different school thought that formal target shooting, while fun, was detrimental to combat shooting, meaning where the target could shoot back.

The remarkable thing was that on the combat shooting side of things, the stances were relatively the same. But that was then. Since then, combat shooting games have developed, for which you could thank Jeff Cooper, and an entirely new thinking developed around combat handgun shooting. Little of it seems to resemble the old-styles of handgunnery. About the only thing in common is that handguns do remain in use. The thinking with the new technique seems quite rigid to me, though there are some progressive elements. But since it is all based on what are essentially games, I still wonder if it would hold up under real-life combat situations.
 
formal target shooting, while fun, was detrimental to combat shooting,
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I'm not buying that one little smidgen, not a bit.

formal target shooting stresses fundamentals, the more you stress these fundamentals, the more they are ingrained, or "muscle memory" if you will.

Then when you are rolling around on the ground, firing your pistol/revolver, whether you know it or not, those fundamentals kick in.

When my "combat" style shooting starts going south, (because I get sloppy) I go back to "bullseye shooting" which always improves my combat or action style shooting.
 
BlueTrain said:
But since it is all based on what are essentially games, I still wonder if it would hold up under real-life combat situations.
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People have successfully utilized the techniques of Jeff Cooper, et al in real lethal encounters on countless occasions.

I've met quite a few people IRL who dismissed it as 'games', after a trip to the range and being put under the clock, they realized how slow they were. That in a real life 'fight', they had no prayer of prevailing.

Its kind of like saying UFC is a game because you can't gouge peoples eyes out, crush and twist their testicles, etc. Do you really want to fight them with no rules, do you think that will let you win? Being under the clock and competing lets you see how your speed and accuracy measures up to others, without getting killed.

I think of combat hand gunnery as a martial art, because it is. Buying a handgun and ammo, and reading a book, no more prepare you to fight with a handgun, than buying a sword and reading a book would prepare one to fight with a sword.
 
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