Just What We Needed: This video clip captures a gunfight in an Ohio bar. Like the occasional gunfight in the bars of the Western frontier, many shots were fired but no one was hit. http://www.latimes.com/videobeta/watch/?watch=142c4393-2ede-4303-970f-f8b11c0452d9&src=front Meanwhile, in Arizona...: A transient who entered a bar with two assault rifles and threatened to kill everyone inside has been charged with felonies, authorities say. Apache Junction police said Samuel Garrels, 62, was indicted Thursday by a Pinal County grand jury on charges of aggravated assault with a weapon, threatening and endangerment. Police arrested Garrels on Oct. 3 after he became loud and abusive at the Jake's O Mine bar and, as he was leaving, allegedly threatened to kill the bar's security guard. Witnesses said that when Garrels returned to the bar, he was carrying two military-type assault rifles. When police later arrested Garrels without incident, authorities confiscated the rifles, a number of handguns and at least 1,000 rounds of ammunition from Garrels' vehicle. Garrels is being held in the Pinal County Jail on $500,000 bond. (Garrels did not fall under Arizona's new law that permits concealed firearms in establishments that serve alcohol if the carrier has a CWP and does not consume alcohol. He apparently was not charges with the violation of bringing a firearm into a licensed business.) http://www.azstarnet.com/news/312771 --- Rule Five Reminder: El Monte [CA] police arrested a 13-year-old boy after he took two loaded handguns to Durfee Middle School because he said he wanted to defend himself against local gang members... The boy told police that he had brought the 9-mm handgun and the 0.380 semi-automatic to defend himself from El Monte Flores gang members who had threatened and harassed him outside of school because he is black, Burlingham said. The Latino gang is among the largest gangs in El Monte, Burlingham said. "He's not in a gang or has no association of any kind," he said of the boy. "He was protecting himself. It's a believable story if you talk to the individual." El Monte Police Lt. Robert Roach said the boy brought the guns from home and that they belonged to his father. (Rule Five" Maintain control of your firearm. It is truly tragic that a 13-year-old has to go to school in fear for his life. I will assume that the father did not know that his son had taken the guns. If he did, perhaps he should have focused on moving to a different neighborhood.) http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/lanow/2009/10/el-monte-boy-13-arrested-for-bringing-two-loaded-guns-to-school-.html --- From Force Science Research Center: Major new study: How your eyes can cast your fate in a gunfight Part 1 of a 2-part series A major new study by the Force Science Research Center for the first time has identified exactly how the "gaze patterns" of officers who are likely to win gunfights differ from those who are likely to lose them. Winners, it is revealed, tend to anticipate an emerging threat sooner, shoot to stop it faster and more accurately, and make fewer errors in judgment because of the unique way in which they watch a potential attacker's body as a deadly confrontation unfolds. A key finding: Those who win lethal assaults do so, in part, because they achieve target acquisition with their firearm in a way that is directly opposite of how most officers are trained. "This unique study shows that winning a gunfight involves more than just issues of action and reaction times," FSRC's executive director Dr. Bill Lewinski told Force Science News. "Where an officer is looking during an encounter, what kind of information he is picking up, and how he is processing it are also vitally important. An effective gaze control strategy can help officers minimize or defeat the action/reaction advantage that the suspect might otherwise have. "In short, an officer's performance can be impaired or enhanced by where his eyes and attention are focused in the midst of a deadly encounter." What the new study discovered about that phenomenon, Lewinski says, could have significant repercussions on law enforcement firearms training. The study was conducted by Lewinski and Dr. Joan Vickers of Canada's University of Calgary, a renowned researcher of the relationship between eye movement and athletic performance. They recently presented the first detailed report of their findings at the prestigious International Conference on Spatial Cognition in Rome. Their full paper, "Gaze Control and Shooting Performance of Elite and Rookie Police Officers During a Force-on-Force Encounter," will be posted on the Force Science website once it has been published in an academic journal. Meanwhile, FSN's 2-part series is the first disclosure to the international law enforcement community about the study's surprising practical discoveries. FORCE-ON-FORCE SET-UP. Field work for the research was conducted a year ago in the United Kingdom with the help of 24 police volunteers. Eleven were highly experienced, male veterans of an Emergency Response Team (ERT), seasoned in fighting terrorists among other assignments, with a median age of nearly 39. The rest were younger rookies (median age just over 30), 7 of them female, who had completed their pre-service firearms and simulation training and were considered "ready for the street." Both groups predominately were right-eye shooters. The research scenario, designed by Lewinski, was based on an actual incident. One at a time the volunteers were armed with a holstered Glock pistol fitted to fire a single Simunition cartridge and told they were on duty to "provide security" at an embassy office where intelligence had indicated an armed encounter would occur that day. About 20 feet in front of the officer being tested was a receptionist at a desk. Presently an adult male, playing the role of a civilian tourist, entered the room and engaged the receptionist in conversation regarding a problem with his passport, keeping his back to the subject officer. Initially the exchange was polite but as the receptionist proved not to be helpful the man became increasingly agitated. About 3 seconds before the end of the 1-minute scenario, his voice started to rise and he began cursing and slapping the table. Suddenly, in an explosion of rage, he yanked an object from under his coat and pivoted quickly. In most instances, the object was a handgun and he fired at the officer. But randomly he spun around only with a cell phone. The volunteers were not advised in advance of this "catch" switch. They were told only that they should "handle the threat" appropriately, using their handgun. "The suspect's dynamic turning and shooting unfolded very rapidly," Lewinski says, "and presented quite a challenge for any officer. We wanted to detect the clearest demonstration of operational differences, and that's why groups of the best and the least experienced officers were chosen." Each volunteer went through the scenario 7 times. According to the researchers, no significant change was noticed in their reactions with repetition. SOPHISTICATED MONITORING. During the scenario, each officer wore a light-weight, head-mounted apparatus with 2 sophisticated and highly sensitive computer-interactive components: 1) a small video camera that filmed the scene being played out in front of the officer from the officer's perspective, and 2) a mobile monocular "eye tracker" that used reflection off of the officer's cornea to precisely document his line of sight. Just where the officer's gaze was directed at any given split-second was overlaid on the digital image the camera was recording, in the form of a small red circle. In other words, exactly where the officer was looking, when he was looking there, in what sequence, and for how long were all captured in a continuous, time-coded format that allowed every location of his gaze to be noted and analyzed later. A separate video camera was placed in the room to photograph each officer frontally from head to toe as he experienced and reacted to the role-playing. These images were later synced with those from the headgear. (The data collection system, developed by Vickers, is called the vision-in-action method. Samples of the recordings will be posted on the Force Science website when the academic paper is posted. For more information, see Vickers' book, Perception, Cognition and Decision Training: The Quiet Eye in Action.) Keeping the scenario consistent across all officers, of course, was critical for comparison purposes. So the receptionist (played by FSRC executive Patricia Thiem) and the suspect (played by Lt. Lee Edwards of the Minneapolis PD) worked extensively with an acting coach, who trained them to maintain the same timing and mannerisms across repeated performances. The field recordings took 2 full weeks to complete; the subsequent analysis took months. Here are the most significant findings: SHOOTING PERFORMANCE. The ERT officers, considered the elite shooters in the study, strongly out-performed the rookies. . First of all, the ERT spent significantly less time assessing the situation before drawing their gun. On whole, they drew "well before the assailant began his pivot," Vickers reports. Most drew early and "held [their gun] at chest level before aiming." The rookies tended to delay drawing until about a second after his turn. . The ERT shot before the assailant got his round off 92.5% of the time, beating him by an average of nearly 180 milliseconds (ms). The rookies shot first only about 42% of the time and on average lagged behind the attacker by more than 13 ms. Responding "very poorly," the study says, the rookies essentially "reacted to his attack, rather than being ahead of him as were the ERT during every phase of the encounter." . The ERT hit the assailant nearly 75% of the time, compared to about 54%--"slightly more than chance"--for the recently trained rookies. ERT hits were in the upper torso (center mass) 62% of the time, versus about 48% for the rookies. . In more than 60% of their trials, rookies fired when the assailant brandished a cell phone instead of a gun, compared to only about 18% for the ERT. GAZE PATTERNS. Anyone would expect highly experienced elites to shoot better than rank novices, but what's impressive is the relationship that gaze and focus appeared to have to performance. As part of their meticulous analysis of where the test subjects were looking during the last critical 7 seconds of the scenario, the researchers tabulated 2 important factors: fixations (when an officer's gaze was stable on an object or location within a 3-degree visual angle for 100 ms or longer) and saccades (when the eyes moved rapidly from 1 fixed location to another for at least 66.66 ms). Among their discoveries, these are considered most meaningful: . The ERT officers tended to use fixations of only short duration early in the encounter, during their initial assessment and as the suspect began to pivot toward them. Then they used longer-duration fixations as they aimed and fired. "They needed less time to 'read' critical cues" and acquire external feedback information that "allowed them to prepare their shooting movements in advance and prevail over the assailant," the researchers explain. Thus the ERT "were ahead of the assailant in terms of their motor phases and gaze control across all phases of the encounter." . "The rookies used an opposite strategy and had long-duration fixations at the outset and shorter durations as they aimed and fired." In effect, "the rookies were behind" the suspect's actions and were "caught by surprise." They "used a reactive strategy where they acquired information at the last moment, which was inadequate both in terms of its content and timing for the extreme demands of the encounter." . "The ERT had a higher frequency of fixations than the rookies in all phases [of the scenario] except the aim/fire phase, when the ERT had fewer fixations to fewer locations than the rookies, indicative of greater focus and concentration as they aimed and fired." . The ERT increasingly directed their attention to the suspect's gun hand/arm as the scenario evolved. "They increased the percent of fixations to this location from 21% in the assessment and early pivot phases to 71% during the final 2 seconds. On hits, the ERT directed 86% of their final fixations to this one location, revealing a remarkable degree of focus and concentration under fire." And, the study explains, they had time for a final, undisturbed period of super-concentration that Vicker's calls "the quiet eye," which has been linked with high performance across many different genres of athletics. In this, their eye remained settled on a defined target location through trigger pull. . "The rookies did not show the same funneling of their attention to the assailant's gun hand/arm," the study points out. Early on, similar to the ERT, they concentrated a minority of their fixations there. But at the time the suspect aimed and fired, only 33% of the rookies' fixations were directed there, a modest and inadequate increase. And whatever quiet-eye time they exhibited was significantly lower. TELL-TALE SACCADE. Perhaps most startling, the officers' last abrupt shift of gaze before firing was found to be radically different between the 2 groups. . The rookie's final saccade, especially among those who missed when they fired, "occurred at the same time they tried to fixate the target and aim," the study reveals. At that critical moment in the last 500 ms, the rookies in a staggering 82% of their tests took their eyes off the assailant and attempted to look at their own gun, trying to find or confirm sight alignment as they aimed. "This pulled them out of the gunfight for what turned out to be a significant period of time," Lewinski says. Vickers adds: "On a high percentage of their shots, the rookies did not see the assailant as they fired," contributing to inaccurate shooting and the misjudgment of the cell phone as a threat. . About 30% of the ERT also looked at their gun, but their timing was different. Most of those gaze-shifts occurred before the officers aimed, "followed by the onset of their aim and fixation on the target and firing." FLAWED TRAINING? The researchers pose the possibility that the rookies' training may have contributed to their poor performance. They were taught pistolcraft "similar to how most police officers first learn to shoot a handgun: to focus first on the rear sight, then on the front sight, and finally on the target, aligning all 3 before pulling the trigger." "This is a very time-consuming process and one that was not successful in this study," Vickers says. Somewhere across their training, practice, and experience, the successful ERT officers had learned what essentially is a reverse process: Their immediate and predominate focus is on the weapon carried by their attacker. With their gaze concentrated there, they bring their gun up to their line of sight and catch their sights only in their peripheral vision, a subtle "sight glimpse," as Lewinski terms it. "They have an unconscious kinesthetic sense to know that their gun is up and positioned properly," he says. "This is a focus strategy that Olympic shooters use," says Vickers, "and it is simpler, faster, and more effective." As the assailant's actual attack got underway, the elite officers were zeroed in on a "weapons focus." That is, the ERT officers' "fixations were not directed to the assailant's centre of mass as he pivoted and fired, but to the weapon itself, which he held away from his body until the moment he fired. The ERT tracked the weapon as soon as it was visible, using a series of fixations. Because he was moving rapidly, it was only during the last few milliseconds that his centre mass presented a viable target." "This intense attentiveness to the weapon can have memory implications later on," Lewinski explains. "Now we have an empirical study showing why an officer who survives a gunfight may be unable to identify a perpetrator's face or recall other important details proximate to the shooting, such as the body position or turning action of the subject." Now that the study has documented important ways in which expert shooters behave, how can trainers best convey these elite skills to other officers? "FSRC plans to do more work with Dr. Vickers to identify answers to that question," Lewinski says. "But already, these findings suggest some important changes that will point us in the right direction." NOTE: The gaze pattern study was funded jointly by the National Police Federation of England and Wales and the Force Science Research Center. NEXT: What will it take in terms of gaze and attention training to make police firearms skills much greater much faster? ================ (c) 2009: Force Science Research Center, www.forcescience.org. Reprints allowed by request. For reprint clearance, please e-mail: info@forcesciencenews.com. FORCE SCIENCE is a registered trademark of The Force Science Research Center, a non-profit organization based at Minnesota State University, Mankato. (While there is room to argue about what really constitutes a "flash sight picture," I see in this report one more reason to question the street-appropriateness of the "front-sight, press" dogma. Evidence has been mounting, even during my career as a firearms instructor, that most operators will focus on the threat when it is their own hide that is in on the line and the threat has appeared suddenly, at fairly close range. Now we see that Mother Nature may not have programmed us so poorly after all, if we just take this into consideration in our training. Recall that the late Jim Cirillo, when the circumstances of battle allowed raising the handgun to the line of sight, recommended using the coarser visual index of the silhouette of the gun, rather than searching for the properly aligned front sight. There is some dispute over whether Rex Applegate himself actually raised the handgun to the line of sight or kept it slightly below, in his peripheral vision.) --- From John Farnam: 5 Oct 09 Weather Factor! We just completed a Defensive Handgun/Urban Rifle Course in northern Nevada. By chance, an early snow storm rolled in upon us on Saturday evening and Sunday morning. We were shooting at a remote, unprotected site, with no shelter, nor buildings of any kind. The sun was hidden by a thick overcast. Temperatures plummeted. There was snow on the ground. We found ourselves slogging around in cold mud, and a relentless wind blew loose grit into our faces, and guns. Students were profoundly uncomfortable, as was I, and we all endured it for two, long days and nights. I had a number of students there who have been with us before, are competent Operators, and have demonstrated eminent shooting and gun-handling acumen multiple times before. They, and I, by the end of the second day, were sufficiently beat-up that our performance significantly deteriorated. Several students had to sit-out the last exercises, because they were too fatigued to continue safely. They could no longer absorb instruction. I should have recognized it sooner than I did. One of my instructors observed, "We do entirely too much of our training on bright, sunny, warm, calm days. When weather is bad, we don't come out and train. What I learned today is that what we should be doing is waiting for bad weather to train in! I had no idea how much it would affect us." He is right! I don't believe in discomfort for discomfort's sake, but, now and then, we have to get out in the cold, wind, rain, snow, and muck, so we can see for ourselves what our capabilities really are. When the Test comes, the weather will be whatever it will be, and we must be both competent and confident, regardless. Precious few of life's genuinely beneficial experiences are enjoyable! And, not one of the "world-record" shooting scores you've heard about were accomplished in a cold, muddy ditch, at night, in the rain! /John (John and I have touched upon this topic before. My philosophy is that adverse conditions, while good to test developed skills, are not the optimal environment in which to acquire them.) 7 Oct 09 Manual decocking: In our Courses, we see many manually-decocking pistols, mostly SIGs, but H&Ks, Berettas, and S&Ws also. I own several but now carry them only for demonstration purposes. Last weekend, during an Urban Rifle Course, I required students to rapidly transition from rifle, to pistol, then back to rifle. This required that pistols be draw quickly (one-handed), immediately fired several times at a close target, then re-holstered quickly, so rifles could then be reloaded and fired immediately, all as the student is moving aggressively. Several times, I was compelled to physically stop students from holstering cocked SIG/226s! Their response was, upon looking at the cocked pistol about to go into their holster, "Oh ... Oops!... I almost forgot!" Like someone using the pistol for the first time! However, for these same students, the 226 was their "carry gun." Thus, who insist on carrying manually-decocking pistols need to practice with them extensively, so the foregoing doesn't happen. Even then, we occasionally see it, even among ostensibly experienced shooters. In my opinion, when your goal is to impress everyone with high scores, a manually-decocking pistol may be at least arguable. When your goal is to emerge victorious from fights, with all the stresses therewith associated, you are better served with a self-decocking (DAO) pistol. Hence, the current popularity of the SIG/P250, SIG/DAK, Glock, Kahr, S&W/M&P, H&K/LEM, Beretta PX4/C, et al, and the declining popularity of S&W's, SIG's, Beretta's, and H&K's line of manually-decocking pistols. We, of course, can train students to correctly carry and operate any pistol, but I consider the addition of a manual decocking lever to be more an impediment than a benefit. I know, full-well, there are die-hard proponents of manually-decocking pistols, many among my circle of friends. But, last weekend yielded yet another confirmation of the inherent defect in that system. New shooters don't need to be encumbered with it! /John (In January 1994 the now-defunct American Society of Law Enforcement Trainers held its annual seminar in Arlington VA, with live-fire courses on the US Park Police range in DC. As a result, we were instructed not to bring our own firearms unless we were in the small minority of attendees who would be legal to carry in the District. As a consequence, I used a DAO SIG P226 in the course offered by SIG Academy and discovered that, under stress, My second shot in a two-shot string did not go low and to the left of my first shot, as it would if I had used a DA/SA pistol. It was this experience that taught me that, unless I have the time to take a very deliberate shot, I shoot better double-action. I also realize that this is not true for everyone. I have come to believe that the DA/SA pistol, or "manually-decocking" pistol, as John calls it, is an unnecessarily challenging one to teach and prefer using or teaching the use of a pistol that has already made up it's mind if it wants to be double-action or single-action. That said, the only student I ever had try to holster one of these "solution in search of a problem" pistols while still cocked attempted to do it so consistently that he convinced me he was doing it on purpose, so he would not have to struggle with the double-action trigger stroke.) 8 Oct 09 Follow-up, from our Instructors: Instructor One: "It used to be that the 1911 was the only custom game in town. Now, nearly every main-stream pistol has a busy aftermarket following, determined to 'improve' on the original design. In Classes, we've seen Glocks with more custom parts than 1911s of ten years ago! The unhappy truth is that precious few of these 'customized' pistols run well. In fact, most break down during a typical, weekend Class. If I could go back twenty years, to when I first started carrying a concealed pistol, knowing what I know now, I could save the $20,000.00 it cost me vainly seeking an ever-elusive 'equipment advantage.' After owning all manner gaudy, glittering, expensive, custom pistols, having come full-circle, I now find myself older, wiser, poorer, but more stable, and constantly armed with a plain-vanilla G19. I have reluctantly come to the inescapable conclusion that removing drama from my life serves my best interests infinitely more than seeking it! Manual decoking-levers, redundant manual safety levers (insisted upon by corporate lawyers who have never in their lives even carried a gun), ambidextrous/enlarged controls, other absurd accessories all represent extra drama, drama that I don't need in the context of an already mentally-complex gunfight! In the face of an imminent threat, I'll take any pistol, over no pistol! However, given a choice, this 'mature male' will select the less complex, less dramatic, less garish, every time!" Instructor Two: "When a student asks, 'When do I decock?' simply reply, 'Any time your finger breaks direct contact with the trigger.' We don't worry about 'excessive decocking.' We want students manually de-cocking at every opportunity, as 'excessive decocking' is not harmful, always renders a pistol that is immediately ready to fire anyway, and, at worst, can be only considered an 'extra step.' And, we want to habitually avoid having that trigger finger come into the trigger guard expecting a heavy, first trigger pull, only to grope aimlessly and ultimately slam into the lighter, secondary trigger position, precipitously generating an ND!" Comment: Along with the "plain-vanilla" G19 mentioned above also goes the SA/XD, XD/M, SIG/P250, SIG/DAK, Kahr, S&W/M&P, H&K/LEM, Beretta PX4/C. All are recommended! /John (A list member showed up for training in Show Low with a Glock pistol that had been "improved" for him by Gabe Paz, owner/operator of Glockmeister. When I taught him to fire the pistol with both thumbs pointing forward, he complained of irritation of the edge of the support-hand thumb. I took his pistol to determine why he was experiencing a problem neither I nor any of my other students had experienced shooting from that position. I discovered that the slide lock, the part which is pulled downward during the disassembly process, not only projected farther than normal, its grooves had sharper ridges. When my inquiry revealed that this was sold to him as an aftermarket "improvement," I requested that he ask Mr. Paz how many times he had ever seen an operator need to perform a "speed field strip" of a Glock pistol. My experience is that those who purchase these gimmicks generally do so to gain a minute fraction of a second in shooting their monthly matches, risking reliability on the street, where the threats are not made of cardboard. John [as well as Instructor One] and I disagree over ambidextrous safeties - I want my firearms to be equally operable in either hand. I think Instructor Two makes a very convincing argument against the DA/SA trigger system.) -- Stephen P. Wenger, KE7QBY Firearm safety - It's a matter for education, not legislation. http://www.spw-duf.info .