Defensive Shooting While Sitting Down

Here's another important video from the Personal Defense Network. The steps for going through a presentation while seated are gonna be very similar to presentation while we're standing, of course, we're gonna start with recognition of the threat, you can't address a threat unless you've recognized it first, when we recognize the threat, it's gonna be very different from when we're standing, when we orient towards the threat, and lower our center of gravity and go through all those steps, when we're seated, we certainly would orient our head towards the threat, we may or may not be able to move our body, we're then going to reach for the gun, but as we do, we're gonna move our strong side leg over to our weak side leg, clearing a path for the firearm, and also making it easier to get to that hip holster or inside the waistband holster, which is so common in our carry methods, once we've got our grip on the gun, we're gonna bring it up out of the holster, orient towards the threat, extend through our ready position, and then, of course, touch, press, come back into the ready position, where we would either stand up or stay seated, depending on different circumstances, go back to the holster, moving our right leg over to our left again to clear it from the muzzle as we go back in. Up! Up! Right! Left! One handed, center! As you can see, using the chair to rack the slide on those one handed reloads, may be the most convenient thing you can do in this position also. Center! Practicing these one handed shooting fundamentals is important in all the positions, if you encounter a reload or a malfunction, you need to fight through it under the conditions from which you set for that drill, one handed seated shooting includes one handed seated reloading in the event that you need to reload. To finish this drill out, we're actually gonna assume that the situation is more like exactly what we see, and what Casey is gonna do, is as soon as I give the command to fire, and he clears the firearm from the holster and starts to extend, he's also gonna start to get up, he's not gonna necessarily wait until he's standing in a perfect position, he's gonna shoot as soon as he reaches extension, keeping the firearm parallel with and in his line of sight, but he's gonna get up out of the chair while he's doing this, of course, if someone was shooting at you, you would wanna do your lateral movement, you'd wanna get out of the way of where the bullets were being shot, so getting up out of a chair while you're drawing and presenting, is also an important skill to practice. Center! Excellent. Seated shooting is an important part of shooting in unorthodox situations. Now, we've got a situation where the chair actually has arms, it's gonna be a little harder to get in, but the principles of course are exactly the same, it may actually be easier to get up out of a chair with arms, but it's not gonna be as easy to draw the firearm while you're seated. The presentation steps are gonna be exactly the same, we're gonna recognize, we're gonna reach back and grip, then as we do, we're gonna move our strong leg over towards our weak, we're gonna bring the firearm up, extend through the ready position, touch and press. Again, we bring the firearm back into the ready position, or get up out of the chair, in this case, we're gonna have Jeremiah stay in the chair, and go through several iterations of multiple shot drills on the right, left and center, including reloads. Two handed, center! It's important that Jeremiah go through all those steps that he recognized his attacker every time, that he has a justification in his head for why he's using lethal force in this situation. Right! Right! You may feel that a chair with arms is actually gonna preclude you from being able to get to that firearm, and given any particular chair design or body shape, or your level of coordination, combined with where you carry the firearm, it may be very difficult, it may be near impossible, or it may be very easy, if you don't experiment and actually train in the type of chair that you think you're gonna be in during the day, for instance, the chair you sit in at your office, or the chair you usually sit in at home, if you happen to have a firearm at those times, you should already have practiced and trained what the most efficient, effective and appropriate technique would be. After standing and sitting, the next most likely situation you might have to shoot from would, of course, be from the ground. There are a variety of positions you could end up in while you're on the ground, but of course, the fundamentals of extend, touch, press, are still gonna apply, you wanna keep the firearm extended in your line of sight, parallel with your line of sight, touch the trigger and press the trigger, using balance of speed and precision principles to decide whether you're shooting intuitively, with mechanical shooting principles, to make sure that you get a hit that significantly affects the target's ability to present a lethal threat. As with all of our shooting practice, if we don't try it, we won't be aware of how to do it, and we won't be able to recognize the proper way to do it when we're in a critical incident, this isn't the kind of stuff you wanna be figuring out during a lethal encounter, you wanna practice it on a range, in a safe and controlled environment, so you can understand how to execute the techniques appropriately when you need to. Jeremiah is down on the ground now in a very comfortable seated position, this would be a position you may find yourself in, at the park, in your yard, probably not one that you would fall into, or one that you would encounter in the middle of a critical incident, but it may be one where a critical incident begins. Because of the position of the legs, it's not gonna be as easy as it was before to move our strong side leg towards our weak side leg, so that we can clear and bring our firearm up without covering our own leg with the muzzle. What we're gonna do instead this time, is use that crossing technique that we learned for shooting to the weak side from a seated position, by coming up, orienting the muzzle parallel to our thighs, and crossing to the center, so that he can extend, touch and press, Jeremiah's gonna execute those commands now, step-by-step. Recognize, grip, up, orient parallel with the thigh and across, extend, touch, press, and back into the ready position, and holstering the same way, parallel with the thigh, back into the holster. One thing I wanna point out, Jeremiah, you come back to the ready position safely, it's not necessary to bring the firearm way out here around the leg, like we see several people doing on the ranges, go ahead and demonstrate the wrong way, bringing it way out around the leg, it's inefficient, it's inconsistent with our normal holstering procedure, come back to the ready position, and what we're gonna wanna do instead, is keep the firearm very close to us, parallel with our thigh, directly over sideways, and then down into the holster, this is much more consistent with our standard holstering technique, and we wanna make sure that we're as consistent as we can be, because that's what leads to better efficiency in our firearms handling. It's important whenever you practice a new technique that you do it slow and step-by-step, but once you understand the individual components of the technique, you can go ahead and speed it up. Center! And of course, once you understand the components of any technique, we wanna train as realistically as possible, we don't know how many shots it's gonna take to stop our next lethal threat, so we wanna shoot a random number of multiple shots each time, two, three, maybe four, each string of fire. Right! Left! All right. The next position we may find ourselves in, which is much more likely to be a situation we find in the middle of a critical incident, would be falling down into a seated position with our legs extended out in front of us and our knees up, in this position, we're again, gonna cross in a parallel manner, instead of trying to get our legs out of the way of the muzzle, crossing that leg in a parallel manner, allows us to get the firearm into the shooting position as quickly and efficiently as possible, while maintaining safe muzzle interaction. Center! And as always being able to handle all of our firearm skills in any position we may be shooting, is vitally important. Left! But of course, when we talk about seated shooting, we don't just sit in a folding chair, perfectly square, back straight, with nothing else around us, this may be the position we're in when we realize we need to use a firearm to defend ourselves or others, if I'm sitting here, and of course, I'm in the simulated range at Valhalla, which looks a lot like a living room scene, and we've got targets up in front of us, I'm using my frangible ammunition, ear protection, eye protection, if I were in this position, wearing a firearm inside of my home or in some other environment, and a threat were to appear through this door, I have no other option but to address it, I'm gonna use exactly the same principles I used earlier when I was seated in a perfectly sterile environment, I'm gonna make sure that my right knee comes over towards my left, I'm gonna clear my hip, draw, come across parallel with my thigh, extend, touch, press, press, and back into the ready position. As soon as I reach extension, I'm shooting, that's key, as soon as that firearm is extended directly in my line of sight and parallel with my line of sight, wherever I am in that process of moving, I'm gonna shoot, as I can, I'm gonna do my lateral movement, and then of course, when the shooting's over, I'm gonna come back into my ready position, if the target had been coming through this side of the room, and again, I was in this position, it'd be very easy to recognize, react, draw, extend, and again, come back into a ready position after having moved off line. Similarly, if someone in the room that I was with, presented themselves as a threat across from me, I may or may not move, we're gonna go a little faster this time, let you see exactly how the reaction would be if someone in the couch across from me were to stand up and present a threat. The key to being prepared to shoot while you're seated, is understanding that basic principle of clearing your strong side leg, so that you're not covering yourself, and then extending parallel to the thigh. Again, seated in a couch with deep cushions, it may not be as easy to get up and get off the couch for a lot of people, so we're simply gonna stay here, and shoot as fast and as efficiently as we can, to end the threat, we may not be able to get up and out of this kind of a couch situation. Check out more videos just like this one at the Personal Defense Network.