cont.
"Pointing shooting stance and grip-
First thing to establish is a good stance and grip to be successful. Address the target by standing at roughly 45 degrees angle to your target. Your weak side will be forward, with your strong side to the back. In the old days, the FBI liked this kind of stance to reduce your body’s silhouette to your adversary. I like it because it focuses and compacts your body into a tight shooting platform. Now thrust your strong hand forward pointing toward the target….bringing your hand eye level. Point at the target with your index finger of your strong hand. Notice that your arm crosses your body ( upper chest) but remains inside your original silhouette. By keeping the shooting arm and weapon in front of your body, you make it more difficult for an adversary to pick up movement. Your shooting arm should be locked out in front of you as you point at the target.
I want you to practice bringing your weak arm ( support ) to the weapon as soon as possible…..so when you reach this strong arm lock out position , the support arm is already in place. You will notice that standing at this angle, the support arm will wind up slightly bent…..this is proper. Do not try to lock out your support arm, as this will make you too stiff. Practice over and over addressing the target in this manner……I want you to pay particular attention to bringing the pointing index finger of your shooting hand up to eye level, while using the support arm to “cup” the shooting hand. Pistol grip will be covered a little later. But you will notice, that your hands and finger are going to be in the same position as if holding a semi-auto handgun in the “safe” position ( with finger outside the trigger guard ) and laying along side the gun’s slide.
This pointing position will become your shooting platform and ALL adjustments of sight alignment to the target will be done by pivoting at the shoulders. At no time will you bend your elbow or wrist to make sight adjustments to the target. This is extremely important in order to maintain the proper pointing alignment we will establish with the proper grip-- described later.
There has been a lot of discussed theories on whether it is faster to bring the weapon up to eye level or to bring your eyes ( by crouching ) down to the gun. For the purpose of learning the basics……we will keep it simple and remain standing….and will bring the weapon from its holstered position up to eye level. I believe that presentation is important…. So the more aggressive you look engaging the target…..the better. So I like to see shooters thrusting their weapons forward aggressively into the locked out pointing position. It might feel or look a little “Hollywood” but trust me it is impressive to watch when combined with that person hitting target after target with blinding speed.
Grip: Most shooters know what to do with their strong hand, but their support hand becomes the problem. Your grip is all important to your accuracy and a consistent grip is paramount. Take your support hand and place all fingers (except the thumb) on top of the 3 fingers of your shooting hand now gripping the weapon. Don’t be tempted to cup the bottom of the weapon with your support hand. Now take your thumb of the support hand and lock it on top of the thumb of the shooting hand. The thumb on this support hand is most important in adjusting the tightness of your grip on the weapon. By pressing downward with this support hand thumb you will notice your grip on the weapon will get firmer. This tighter grip will not come at the cost of squeezing harder with the shooting hand that may cause muscle fatigue and tremors that will effect the trigger finger. If you have a laser attached to your gun, try this method and you will see that you can increase the grip on your weapon without causing an increase in movement of the laser down range.
Next post I will cover establishing the proper sight alignment using the grip and pointing position we just covered. After that, it will just be a matter of placing the front sight on your target and pulling the trigger. With a little practice…….from now on all your shots at 10 meters will be head shots….and you will have no problems hitting those targets."