In lots of older movies and TV shows, whenever a copper pulls his revolver, he stands in this bizarre stance. It’s kind of crouched over, holding the gun about chest-high, close-in with a bent forearm.
I have never seen this outside ‘o’ th’ movies. I think it has something to do with the copper trying to sneak up on Al Capone and his cronies.
Really, I think that’s all it is: just Hollywood un-Magic.
Tripler
But when the bad guy gets shot and kicks his feet up in the air–that’s real.
Sounds like point shooting, which was/is a legitimate method of training police to use handguns. The idea is to develop the ability to hit targets at close range without the use of the sights, which are often useless at night.
There is a stance that we use called ‘the third eye’ which sounds somewhat like what you’re describing. When in the third eye, the gun is held in close to your chest, pointing straight out at whatever you are facing. It is used when maneuvering in tighter areas where you don’t want your gun too far out in front of you lest you get it taken away by someone around a corner. It is also, as pointed out above, a way to fire in close quarters without aiming.
So, yes, it’s still used today.
I seem to recall that this was the old FBI stance, taught to their agents and copied by police. The idea was to keep the gun close to your body so it couldn’t get snatched away. Accuracy was lacking. It was replaced when somebody developed something better.
Point shooting has, unfortunately, become somewhat passe, as has rigorous firearm training in general among law enforcement officers. Point shooting can be effective at short ranges (<20 feet) but requires regular drilling to remain in training.
Stranger
I always call this the ‘Eliot Ness’ position. Like you see Robert Stack doing on reruns of ‘The Untouchables’. Hand very high up on the gun; it would probably bite the web of his hand if it didn’t have blanks in it.
The weird one now is the pistol held sideways, handle horizontal, in all the movies like Pulp Fiction. That can’t be for real.
That’s the gangsta style.
I’m pretty sure that style of gun handling was popularized (if not invented) by John Woo. Here’s a site about pistol stances.
The fuzz? Show some respect, ya mope. 
Point shooting is about 80% of what we get here. The theory being that most police involved shootings happen at 20 feet or less.
Whats changing now is the stance. The Weaver Stance was taught for years. Now they’re teaching the Isosceles Stance. I like the I.S. better, but after 20 years of Weaver it took a long time to shoot that way without thinking about it.
Both stances can be seen HERE.
About a third of the way down the page.
Hmm…I’ve never liked the Isosceles stance; it just seems to hold the gun way out in front and extremely vulnerable to being snatched. I guess I learned to shoot in Weaver stance, though I never knew of the term until I started shooting competitively. I’m guessing that i.s. is easier to teach and therefore preferred on those grounds, though I wouldn’t want to hold a gun in that position while clearing a house.
The over-the-head horizontal gun position is just damned silly; There’s simply no way you can accurately aim a gun that way, and it falls squarely in the realm of cinema b.s. along with the leaping through the air and firing with two pistols.
Stranger
I do that all the time. But only in slow motion when I have awesome background light.
It’s real. Real inaccurate, but real. I don’t think it’s used by anyone who’s ever gone through any kind of legitimate firearms training, but that still leaves plenty of nitwits whose only training is what they think looks cool on TV.
I always thought the weird gun stance was a TV thing, so that the gun wouldn’t get held out of the camera frame. The same reason why everyone always stands so close together in groups in TV drama.
Guess I was wrong. 
I prefer diving through the air with both pistols blazing. They love it when I do that down at the range. I can tell because everyone runs out of the room to tell everyone else how cool it is.
Next time they’ll just fire at you.
I did see a “stance” where you sit on the ground with knees up, feet planted in front of you and elbows resting on the knees. I think this was for long-range pistol shooting, either a competition or hunting. (As in “he’s so tough, he hunts bears with a pistol.”)
It makes for a great position when photographing with a zoom, but without a tripod.
