lklawson
Grandmaster
I know that moving directly away to "increase distance" is popular and "zigzagging" seems to still (for some unknown reason) get some love, but I don't really recommend it.I just wanted to share a training experience I had years ago. We got a bunch of martial arts guys, brown belt and up, who had trained gun take aways in our art and we got a bunch of experienced shooters together. We had a police handgun instructor, teaching the class. (he also had rank in our system.) We paired the martial arts guys with the gun guys and trained our take aways. We learned a bunch of things. People who shoot guns a lot, do not let go of the gun. After a bit, we switched to using loaded air soft guns, to see if it really worked.
Towards the end of the class, someone brought up the statistic that when someone pulls a gun, if you run you will have a 90% or greater chance of surviving. Its hard to hit a moving target, the more distance you make, the harder the shot will be and you have to hit something vital, not just get hit. So, we decided to run our own test. We had the police handgun instructor pull a gun on one of the guys. That guy had to run and we marked out a distance of 10 yards to get to, thinking that would be a safe distance, where you should find cover or at least make the shot much harder. The shooter would wait until the other guy made the first move, before he opened fire. The the that ran, got hit about ten times, before he cleared the 10 yard line... We tried again, having the guy run side to side, random lateral movement. He got hit even more times, because it took longer to get passed the line. So, then, we said, most shooters won't have the same experience as this guy. We got one of the martial artists, who had only ever used a fake gun in his martial arts classes. This was the first time he ever held a real gun in his hand. (part of the earlier instruction) We made him the shooter. He missed once or twice, but was able to hit the running guy with at least 80% of the shots, one each trial. He was only hitting him 3 or 4 times before the guy crossed the line... on the first trial, he kept shooting the guy well after he crossed the line, because he was excited.
To sum up. We tried having the guy run, and the runner got shot quite a few times before he got 10 yards away. This happened with both a very experienced shooter and a very inexperienced shooter. Running straight away, or side to side did not make much difference in our tests.
We figure, it has to do with how the statistics are gathered. If a guy goes into a movie theater with 250 people and shoots 20 of them dead, while everyone runs... that says 90% of the time, running will save you, if the shooter is not trying to shoot you. If you go to a mall or school, with even more people... again, you get a pretty good survival rate, from running... as long as the shooter is not trying to shoot you.
I don't know if we did our testing right. But, I do think I got enough to know that when the gun comes out, if the guy wants to shoot you, whatever you do, is going to have a low percentage of success. There is not a simple answer. The worst thing you can do is freeze or be indecisive. But, is running better than trying a take away? Its hard to say.
Note: I am not arguing with the suggestion to move. I am just trying to share what we learned when we tried it. What we found was that running was not a "Get of Jail Free" card.
Ask any shotgunner, for instance, hitting targets moving more-or-less directly away is easy. Hitting targets that are moving laterally is harder. You have to lead and know your lead (which may be next to nothing at effective pistol distances). Further, my experience is that inexperienced shooters don't maintain their movement when they press the trigger. IOW, they halt the movement of the gun when the press the trigger. If the target is moving more-or-less directly away (even if "zigzagging"), then the chances of hitting are still pretty good. When moving laterally, the shooter has to keep moving with the moving target to hit.
Is this a "get out of jail free card?" Not even close. You're just trying to make it a bit harder.
Again, to reiterate, as much as possible that lateral movement should be toward cover, or concealment if cover is unavailable.
Thanks for sharing your experiment. It reinforces my observations about moving directly away or "zigzagging."
Peace favor your sword,
Kirk