Lessons from observing 5000 gunfights

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Paladin
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Lessons from observing 5000 gunfights

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Re: Lessons from observing 5000 gunfights

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:tiphat:
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Re: Lessons from observing 5000 gunfights

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Post by oljames3 »

John is up to over 15,000, now. If you have not subscribed to his YouTube channels, you are missing out.
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCsE_m2 ... 4mw/videos
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC-i64E ... b3w/videos
O. Lee James, III Captain, US Army (Retired 2012), Honorable Order of St. Barbara
2/19FA, 1st Cavalry Division 73-78; 56FA BDE (Pershing) 78-81
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Re: Lessons from observing 5000 gunfights

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I used to watch him when he first got started but for some reason he annoys me. I like to follow people who have some real world fighting experience too (like Pat McNamara), there’s a world of difference in just knowing theory and actually using it in real life. Anyone can view videos and make up commentary but most have never been in a gunfight. Just my opinion but most probably won’t agree. I will admit he has a large variety of videos but they can be found doing searches yourself and you don’t have to listen to his commentary when viewing them.

I never did understand why people will follow firearm instructors with no actual experience or questionable backgrounds (James Yeager comes to mind). John C has many certifications but any one of us can get those. There are plenty of guys who have had real world experience and can tell you first hand what does and does not work for me to follow someone who only knows theory.
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Re: Lessons from observing 5000 gunfights

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oljames3 wrote: Sat Sep 07, 2019 1:41 pm John is up to over 15,000, now. If you have not subscribed to his YouTube channels, you are missing out.
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCsE_m2 ... 4mw/videos
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC-i64E ... b3w/videos
I watch him daily. Excellent ideas given as he parses each of the events.
Unless we keep the barbarian virtues, gaining the civilized ones will be of little avail. Oversentimentality, oversoftness, washiness, and mushiness are the great dangers of this age and of this people." Teddy Roosevelt"
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Re: Lessons from observing 5000 gunfights

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I also watch John daily. I attended most of his classes at the NRA expo in Fort Worth too.
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Re: Lessons from observing 5000 gunfights

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Caliber wrote: Thu Sep 12, 2019 1:29 pm I also watch John daily. I attended most of his classes at the NRA expo in Fort Worth too.
Curious if his list has changed any?
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Re: Lessons from observing 5000 gunfights

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Post by oljames3 »

Paladin wrote: Wed Feb 12, 2020 3:07 pm
Caliber wrote: Thu Sep 12, 2019 1:29 pm I also watch John daily. I attended most of his classes at the NRA expo in Fort Worth too.
Curious if his list has changed any?
Yes, John Correia's list has changed. From the original post of this thread, John Daub is discussing Correia's list from 2016. I attended the ASP Survive the Fight and Church Safety tour in Lubbock in October of 2019. Correia, as of then, had watched over 20,000 videos. Here are some high points from the ASP slide deck.

1. Carry your gun

2. Most gunfights aren't entangled gunfights. Empty-handed skills are important but rare once the gun comes out. They're necessary for LE more than CCW, by a long shot. For CCW, empty-handed skills are critical for the 80% of assaults that don't rise to the level of deadly force response. So go to your martial arts training.

3. In public, the place for attacks is almost always transitional spaces. A transitional space is any location that (1) allows attackers to prey on potential victims with an element of surprise and (2) provides ready escape for the attackers.

4. Paying Attention (I.e. “situational awareness”) is the most under-utilized skill in avoiding a gunfight and responding to it effectively. Some come at you unexpectedly and unavoidably, but SO often I see people ignore pre-attack cues and lose initiative and options. Attention buys you time, time buys you options.

5. About 1/3 of the encounters of all kinds that I narrate involve multiple attackers. They tend to use numbers to overwhelm people, and tend to be cowards when their advantage evaporates. CCW encounters break fast enough that I seldom see a victim engage more than two attackers with their firearm before the rest run off. CCW holders TEND to use more shots overall against a single attacker than multiples.

6. He who puts the first shot into meaty bits on the other guy, wins. Marksmanship is the Master. Not 100%, but darn near, at least partially because of the FIBS Factor. (“FUDGE, I’ve Been Shot!”) Related to this is FIBSA (“FUDGE, I’m Being Shot At!”) though that has a lesser effect. Therefore, training a fast and reliable draw and first shot in the meaty bits is most important, in my opinion. It is THE critical skill to winning the gunfight. The best cover is fire superiority.

7. Gunfights are won and lost in tenths of seconds sometimes. Being first is foremost. I have seen people killed because they carried their gun with an empty chamber and didn’t have time to chamber a round and be first on target. I have seen people lose the element of surprise in a counterambush
because of the sound of chambering a round. In a real gunfight the gun has to be ready NOW.

8. We owe a great deal of gratitude to those in the LE community for their knowledge of pistol use; that said, we must recognize that CCW gunfights and LE gunfights start differently and end differently. The difference in mission MUST be understood to contextualize Tactics, Techniques, and Procedures to the appropriate place.

9. From what I have seen, most CCW gunfights happen between 3 and 7 yards for the actual shooting. Tom Givens has it right here by estimating it at a car length. That said, shots at 15 to even 20 yards ARE possible in CCW incidents, especially in stopping active killers, and so that skill isn’t insignificant once the 3-7 yard skill is fast and reliable.

10. Follow-up shots are very often necessary regardless of handgun caliber. Terminal ballistics in all handgun calibers are pretty much the same. Often gunfights don’t END with that first shot, so keep at him until he decides he is done fighting. This is where multiple target acquisition is important, because it simulates a moving target to hit.

11. MOST of what is taught in the martial arts/combatives community on gun disarms is hokum. I do see a good number of disarms of attackers, but seldom with any kind of sophistication or “that was a perfect [insert your favorite martial art here] disarm.”

12. People have a crazy tendency to use the gun one-handed, mostly because they have stuff in their support hand. I’ve never seen an injured support hand lead to one-handed shooting. I have seen ONE on-duty cop need to switch the gun to support hand only shooting because of an injured main arm.
Learning to drop what's in your hands and get two hands on the gun is a necessary skill for fast and accurate shooting.

13. You simply WILL NOT stand still while someone wants to kill you in your close proximity. Unless you're counterambushing, when the gun comes out you will move. So learning to move with purpose to put ourselves in the position to shoot well is also a critical skill. Inside of 5 yards, people move.

14. Concealment ain't cover, but it works identically in 99.9% of cases. People won't shoot what they can't see, so if you can get to concealment, you’re
good. Learn to shoot through it if your threat is behind it.

15. Chasing deadly threats is another bad habit that I see all the time. Learn to shoot and then scoot. Move AWAY from the threat. In followup action I see a lot of people put themselves back into danger by chasing threats.

16. People love cover so much they give it a hug. Reliably. Like all the time. LEO and CCW alike. Learning distance from cover/concealment is an important skill and one that is necessary.

17. Malfunctions happen. They just do. But if you’re carrying a quality gun, they're rare. In all my videos I have never seen someone clear a malfunction that needed a tap to the baseplate to get the gun back working again… cycle the slide and reassess is necessary though. In a couple of instances, a strip, cycle, reload would have helped.

18. Combat reloads are almost vanishingly insignificant factors in CCW gunfights. I have seen precisely 3 reloads in a real gunfight that weren't on-duty LEO. And none of those affected the outcome of the fight. I have seen about 7 or 8 where a higher capacity firearm or the presence of a reload might have affected the outcome. So, 0.2% of what I have witnessed. I like Tom Givens' focus on the PROACTIVE reload once the fight is over. That has value in my opinion. If you carry a reload and don’t have your trauma medical equipment on you, I would recommend changing that.

19. Knife attacks are brutal, fast, mean, and personal. If you get to see the knife, then refer to the Tueller Principle for getting your gun in the fight.
If you don’t see it until he has a leveraging arm on you, your gun is useless until you have positional dominance and have secured that knife one way or
the other. Thinking you’re going to bring a gun to a knife fight is a good way to die of blood loss.

20. I have seen one home invasion situation where a pistol-mounted light would have been useful for a homeowner, but have never seen one outside the home where a WML would have been a factor for a non-LEO. HUGE CAVEAT HERE: that could easily be because video recording technology for very low light situations is rare (though getting more common and affordable). My gut tells me that if it’s too dark for you to see a threat outside the home, it’s too dark for them to see you as well and so attacks are very rare.

21. There are some things that the defensive training community has great love for that I have never seen in a CCW gunfight recorded on video in any capacity.
(a) a defensive knife used to get to a gun or in any capacity by someone carrying a gun;
(b) a gunfight that required one-handed manipulation of the pistol controls other than the trigger;
(c) a transition in a CCW gunfight from strong hand to support hand and subsequent use of the gun (ONE LE video);
(d) TWICE a gun dropped and then recovered and used in the gunfight;
(e) a CCW use a firearm muzzle strike in any capacity;
(f) a backup gun (BUG) used in any CCW capacity whatsoever, and only once ever for LEO on camera

22. If there’s one lesson that I have learned again…and again…and again from moderating comments on social media from people watching my lessons, it’s the sheer number of people who are woefully, terribly misinformed and uninformed about the legal and moral aspects of using deadly force. Remember, the District Attorney won’t care what you thought the law was; neither will the jury. And you’ll pay your attorney $400+ an hour to sell your story, so make sure they can tell the jury that you acted in an objectively responsible and legal fashion.
O. Lee James, III Captain, US Army (Retired 2012), Honorable Order of St. Barbara
2/19FA, 1st Cavalry Division 73-78; 56FA BDE (Pershing) 78-81
NRA, NRA Basic Pistol Shooting Instructor, Rangemaster Certified, GOA, TSRA, NAR L1
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Re: Lessons from observing 5000 gunfights

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Post by Paladin »

Outstanding list! :cheers2:
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Re: Lessons from observing 5000 gunfights

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Post by Charles L. Cotton »

How in the world did anyone find 20,000 videos of gunfights? I wouldn't think there were that many recorded on video.

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Re: Lessons from observing 5000 gunfights

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Post by STR8-SHOT »

A lot of the gun shooting vids seem to occur in Brazil. The best ones are when an off-duty officer unexpectedly takes care of business during a robbery.

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Re: Lessons from observing 5000 gunfights

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One thing to keep in mind about the (lack of) knife usage by defenders -- I think the percentage of people who actually train with a knife is far far lower than those who train with their gun. If you haven't done some training to access and use your knife during a fight, then it's not going to happen during the real thing.

I would not use my knife to "get to my gun." I would use it because it's the best tool to deter/disable/destroy whoever is attacking me. The fact I"m using it at all means I am in a hands-on deadly fight, and for that I think a knife is better -- a gun is too easy to deflect or foul or disarm, and now I have at least one hand tied up just trying to hold onto the gun so it doesn't get used on me. It's a lot dicier (heh) for an opponent to try to grab a knife in your hand, especially if it is shorter rather than longer blade, and it's really hard for him to block stab-stab-stab-stab...stab.
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Re: Lessons from observing 5000 gunfights

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Post by STR8-SHOT »

Good point ELB. But I would recommend slashing major muscles that would immediately debilitate the use of their leg or arm if you have enough distance and leverage. Stabbing seems to have more of a delayed response, especially if they are running on adrenaline and drugs. Good to train and think of your plan ahead of time. Knife fights are ugly.
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Re: Lessons from observing 5000 gunfights

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Post by 03Lightningrocks »

Well this thread took a morbid turn. :biggrinjester:
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