Session 3: Defensive Accuracy: Head Shots

We could say some of the same things about the head, right? If we come up here to the human head. That's a bad guy. Bad guy. And we look at this center part.

Well, again, in this center-y area of the head, there's some really important stuff in there. If we put bullets into that area and we in fact go through that area, right, like, if we say, shoot somebody through the nose, we don't mean sideways through the nose. Like, this way, right? Or in through here, or in through here. If we go through the head, the center of the head especially, the base of the brain, the top of the spine, we're very likely to significantly affect the target's ability to present a lethal threat.

But I will tell you that I am not as confident in the average person's ability to put bullets out of a defensive hand gun into that area in the same way that they can officially put bullets into this area, much quicker. We also have a lot more armor up here, right? We have heavy bone in the cheek. We have heavy bone in the jaw. We have rounded bone, some of which is pretty dense in certain areas around the skull.

And when you look at angles and the shape of bullets, pistol bullets particularly, and the way they react sometimes and they hit these bones and you factor in the movement of the human head, right? Even just walking. Even as I walk forward, my head moves. If I'm running, the head moves even more, if I lower my center of gravity. If you point a gun at me and fire it and I flinch as the gun gets pointed at my face, because I know what's about to happen, the head moves pretty dramatically and rapidly.

So now, I've got this smaller target, an armored target, and it moves a lot. And in fact, when we start talking about how we articulate defensive accuracy in the training environment, if I have a situation where the size of the center of the head area, two or three inches, is moving four to six inches just with a flinch or just as I'm running towards you, or as I'm running away shooting and turning, if the three inch circle is moving four to six inches, I am going completely out of the area of what we call deviation control that I'm pointing the gun at. As I pull the trigger, the head flinches, and I'm not anywhere near it. Then you notice as I'm moving my head four to six inches, how far is my chest moving? Right?

Two or three inches, less? Depending on where I am on the chest. But also the chest area is a six to eight to 12 inch circle, oval, rectangle, square area. It's a much bigger area. So if it's hand-sized area that's only moving a third of a hand, well then, that shot still hits the vital area the overwhelming majority of the time, even with the flinch, even with the side-to-side movement of running or the turning movement, right?

So there's still this much higher, even when we factor the movement into the chest, there's still a much higher percentage of hitting going on as opposed to potentially zero percent up here, if that center of the face moves all the way out of the way and a round skips off the cheek. Not to say that someone may not be affected by a round skipping off their cheek. Just to say it's not the physiological affect that we're counting on.