Panic Stop!!

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Edward429451

Moderator
Remember practicing for your Motorcycle license, and they wanted you to demonstrate a panic stop? Do you ever practice panic stop with guns? I think it is a good practice to be able to put on the brakes if needed.

Something could always happen in any live fire situation, someone appearing downrange or so forth that would necessitate you stopping firing. I know we all practice drawing and getting off a shot fast...but if you never practice panic stops, you may not be able to react soon enough to stop?

Heat of the moment may be hard to control without practice.
 
Huh?

Not an expert on the subject, but I'd suggest that recognizing that a situation has quickly gone from shoot to don't shoot is about control---which is the opposite of panic.:cool:
 
No, really you're right on. It's good to practice shooting. Starting and stoping, moving and standing still, day and night. Anything and everything really. Atleast if what if ever does happen you'll be better prepared yourself than to just stand there and say wait a minute you're suppose to stand still. Good question really. Thanks for throwing it out there.
 
It takes the average person 1/4 second to react to something !
So at 60 mph [88' per second ] you go 22' before you react !
For shooting there's another problem normally you are concentrating hard at the BG and your defense mechanism is to exclude some things so you may get audio exclusion ,tunnel vision ,inability to remember details [but other details may be very clear !]
I remember as an RO a bullet hit a target frame ,went almost straight up and clipped a small branch. I was the only one who saw it !!:eek: Some knew something had happened but had no idea what and others weren't aware anything happened ! That's concentration but in a gunfight you better do things like immediately do a 180* search for other BGs.
 
I suppose shoot/ No shoot would have been a better term. Do you practice shoot/no shoot. I've tried staying the shot before and it's not as easy as you might think.
 
Yes, I do sometime draw and not shoot -- to avoid getting into a habit of always shooting when drawing. I've also had the experience of "no shoots" in USPSA competition. But I'm not sure that's really what you're looking for or what's needed.

What's really needed is split-second situation assessment and decision making practice. The real goal is to be able to identify a situation changing from a "shoot" situation, which is why you drew your gun in the first place, to a "no shoot" situation and to be able to respond appropriately. That will need something actually happening, that you see happen and that you respond to by deciding not to fire.

We did a little of that in a Massad Ayoob class. It's also a component of some force-on-force exercises, but in general it's tough to do effectively.
 
A Catch-22 here. If you practice no shoot and don't shoot when you should shoot because you hesitated, you might wind up dead.
 
Itd be best to practice for everything because you really never know what you could get dealt with In a real life scenario. Prepare for everything but hope for nothing.
 
Right, just a a facet of training. I've tried it at the range and it is not easy. It is very easy to shoot someone, and harder to not! I was thinking that it will not be there for me to even try to use if I never practice it.

I believe that the dynamic of the situation will always allow for shooting the perp should it be necessary and there is little to no chance of hesitating. But could you stop yourself mid-mag if it became necessary to do so. There's more to it than like was said, just stop shooting. That's like saying it's easy to play the piano just hit all the keys in the right order, sounds easy! Try it once.

How did they do it Ayoobs class? Did a 2nd party say stop or something? What was the drill?
 
Edward429451 said:
How did they do it Ayoobs class? Did a 2nd party say stop or something? What was the drill?
Click to expand...
We used a police training video that presented various shoot/no-shoot scenarios. The student used a dummy gun and needed to respond appropriately to the problem presented on the video. The student was evaluated based on the whether he made the correct shoot/no-shoot decision, when he acted and his general response (use of cover, movement to avoid a possible shoot-through, etc.)
 
To the last post, I've also seen in some indoor ranges where you use your gun and no bullets but a laser thing in your barrel. You're watching different scenarios of different situations where you either draw or not and shoot or not on the screen at different individuals and later you watch it again and see if you made the right choice or not and it shows I'f you hit or not. It is most real like thing out there. It's harder to do than you think. Like being a Leo, every call or traffic stop is different and they can go great or explode in an instant. Trust me but it is great training!!!
 
I had one with an 870, not a panic on my end. I was LE with the Ft Worth, Tx PD. About summer of 1986, I had responded to a call of someone shooting at passing cars. Upon arrival I came under fire, took cover and assessed the situation. It was friday night, the only backup was the helo and he was 10 minutes away. It was on the dark side of dusk and the BG's were on a wooded hill overlooking the road with apartments directly behind them. One subject came down with a 12 gauge and surrendered, after securing him I went after #2, whom #1 said had a 38 and a pocket full of ammo.

I used darkness to my advantage and closed the distance, then the helo arrived with about 2.5 million candlepower. The only problem is that I was effectively deaf, and the helo was blowing branches every-which way. I soon found the subject and confronted him with my shotgun, I told him once to drop it and he said no, in an intense manner. That is when I decided I was gonna shoot, all of a sudden he drops the 38 and begs me not to shoot, I felt the trigger let off.
 
We routinely train with shoot/no-shoot targets, especially in Hogan's Alley type training. It's one of the fundamentals of being a school-house cop. In the last nine years I've probably done 40 different scenarios where we first had to identify the target as hostile before engaging it. It's kind of basic, actually, stressing Rule 4 training.

A target can go from hostile to non-hostile in under a second. Once he decides to surrender I can't be pumping rounds into him.
 
Are you saying we (gunowners) become so fixated on shooting and the gun in our hand that in a high stress situation we are going to shoot when maybe we shouldn’t?

Well, you might have something there. I remember the saying ‘if the only tool you have is a hammer everything starts looking like a nail.’

An additional point for whatever it’s worth…I have shot in competition on line with other shooters when a ‘cease fire’ has been called in the middle of shooting. I’d say ALMOST all the time everyone quits shooting but maybe that ALMOST is what you were talking about when you started this thread.
 
I'm going to put this down as an issue of experience.
The reaction to a changing scenario may depend on past experiences or just previous stressful situations. When a gun is involved, the overall amount of gun handling experience combined with past history of hunting, target shooting, or maybe neither.
I'm older, have handled guns for 50 years, hunt a lot, and carry/use/shoot literally every day. My reaction might be different than someone who only has a SD pistol and practices shooting every time they draw. When I'm hunting with others(especially inexperienced hunters) I see some indecision as to whether to shoot or wait for a better presentation or some other reason. Sometimes that indecision costs the hunter a chance to fill a tag. On the opposite side is the person who has already decided to shoot and takes a shot regardless of any other factors. That person is the one most likely to muff the shot, take a shot at the wrong animal, or a poorly timed shot. In a SD scenario, that person may be unable to react to a changing scenario.
 
Experience by itself does not reinforce proper handling unless proper handling has been practiced for a very long time. Some of the most unsafe people I have seen have been "experienced" LEO's or hunters.
 
If the situation warrants drawing from concealment, you are likely in a shoot situation. Otherwise, you would remain in threat assessment mode.

Even my strongly anti-handgun Momma always said “Don’t point a weapon at someone unless you intend to kill them.” Seems that even she understood the four basic rules of firearms.

As a side note - I like to see some IDPA stages which had no preliminary walk through. Seems like that might help develop threat assessment decision making.
 
serf 'rett said:
If the situation warrants drawing from concealment, you are likely in a shoot situation....
Click to expand...
It might start out that way, but it can change in an instant. If the assailant sees the gun and breaks-off, turns and runs, it's no longer a shoot situation. If you can't stop yourself in time, you're going to need to do some fancy explaining about why you shot someone in the back.

Those cases can be won, but it can take some very good and convincing experts talking about reaction times, and a jury that's smart enough to understand that sort of testimony.
 
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