True, but if you’re going to spray 'n pray anyway, better to have the recoil work for you by naturally spraying the room rather than against you by killing the ceiling.
I always thought that the pose was used to muddle the forensic evidence that might identify the height of the shooter. In hat pose the shooter could hold the gun at various heights and angles whereas a normal hip shot or straight arm shot provided forensic evidence of the shooter’s size.
But waddoo I know.
That goes along with the urban legend that the “low riding” style so popular among the gangbanger demographic was promoted for similar reasons - its a lot easier to run down someone who is having to use one arm to hold their pants up.
Acutally, I would prefer the gangbangers do learn to hit what they’re aiming at – usually each other. Better that than hitting kids on the playground.
In fact, cops and/or the NRA should offer free weapons training to gangbangers, as a method of reducing collateral damage from their shooting sprees.
From Slate’s Explainer column: Why Do Rappers Hold Their Guns Sideways? Because it looks so Hollywood, by Brian Palmer.
Also, some soldiers held their machine guns sideways in WWI and WWII, so the recoil would send stray bullets towards other human targets, as opposed to the air.
Not so much the C96 as the M712 Schnellfeuer (full-auto) variant and, more specifically, the Chinese (and Spanish) knock-offs thereof.
I’d be interested to see some sort of photographic or primary source proof of that, as it seems a bit dubious to me.
The primary SMGs of the main players in WWII were the Thompson SMG (US/UK/Cth), Sten Gun (UK/Cth), MP-40 (Germany) and the PPSH-41 (USSR). An M1A1 Thompson weighs about 5-6kgs fully loaded and has a 600 r/min rate of fire. In my practical experience with the Tommy Gun, they don’t kick much and they’re pretty easy to contol. The Sten Gun will likely jam if you hold it sideways with the magazine sticking down (ie, the most “natural” way to hold it sideways), the MP-40 might feasibly be employed this way but I’ve never seen contemporary photos of movie footage of it happening, and the PPSh-41 fired a (relatively) low-powered handgun cartridge with a high RPM from a bulky 72-round drum magazine, so holding it “gangsta style” would probably be too much effort, much like doing so with the M1928A1 Thompson.
The article says that the technique was used before 1950 with the Mauser C96 or the grease gun.
It’s well established that the Mauser Broomhandle was sometimes employed “gangsta style” since at least the 1920s. The “Grease Gun” only dates to the closing years of WWII, and like the Thompson, I’ve yet to see photos or footage of soldiers employing it “Gangsta style”. That doesn’t mean it never happened, of course, but I dispute that it was widespread.
How can a gun magazine test something that was a hoax?
I know the sights were a hoax. The magazine was testing the gangsta pose.
Also helps the economy minded gangsta who reloads!
Sudhir Venkatesh (Harvard sociologist who “embedded” himself with a Chicago crack gang for his dissertation) did a study on the availability and pricing of illegal firearms in Chicago. In the course of that study, he noticed that the average gang member’s knowledge of firearms is abyssmally low. That is, they often wouldn’t understand things like bullet calibers - they’d find bullets that (they hoped) would work with their guns purely through trial and error. Many gang members were also largely indifferent to whether or not their guns actually worked - these things were for display, not violence. See: “Underground Gun Markets”, http://www.nber.org/papers/w11737.pdf
In the Marriott Marquis incident recently here in New York, where some CD seller guy getting chased by the cops tried to fire on them with a machine pistol, the gun supposedly jammed after only two shots because he held it sideways & the shell casing got stuck. Could just be New York Post tabloid speculation, but take it for whatever it’s worth.
If holding a handgun in that fashion was more effective in terms of accuracy, somebody forgot to tell my Marine Corps marksmanship instructor. Patently absurd.
I vaguely remember reading about some gun magazine that had a picture of an Israeli soldier holding his handgun sideways on the cover. He wasn’t shooting that way, of course; he was loading. (Evidently loading sideways like that is easier for women while being no harder for men, so the Israeli army started doing it.) The image was seen as Cool tm and Badass tm by the gangsta community and caught on as a way to shoot, even though it’s, well, stupid.
But take this all with a shaker of salt – I have no idea where I read it, and a cursory Google turns up nothing.
Even if such an image exists, I doubt it had any impact on the origin or spread of this fashion. As noted above, gang members have very little weapons literacy, and other studies show they have a low rates of overall literacy. Functional illiterates don’t tend to read Guns & Ammo or American Handgunner. Like most fashions, it undoubtedly spread through visual media: movies, TV shows, music videos, etc.
Ok. Just for the sake of clarity, I’m not claiming anything: I’m just passing on what was in the article. I don’t think the article was trying to imply that the practice was widespread: they were just researching the pose’s antecedents. (If you have a specific and fundamental disagreement with the paragraph in the article that I summarized -and you may not- you might send the author an email and let us know what he says.)
When I went through the police academy back in 1975, this is how we were trained to draw and fire. Most combat situations, according to statistics kept by the FBI, occurred at 7 yards or less. We were trained to point-shoot quite well at that range and to not extend and fire by sight unless we were shooting something further away. And the instructor’s advice on doing that was: don’t.
What you were taught sounds like some variation on Rex Applegate’s Point Shooting technique (also known as Natural Point of Aim or Natural Position). This was quite common in peace officer training in the ‘Sixties and ‘Seventies, but while some officers could obtain reasonable accuracy with this technique at close range overall performance was variable, and it was very difficult for officers to transition between this position to visually indexed fire that is necessary for accuracy at longer ranges. The two handed technique was shown to be superior in practical competition (IPSC), and Jeff Cooper promoted Jack Weaver’s eponymous stance as part of the “Modern Technique of the Pistol”. This stance, modifications of it (“Close Weaver”), and the Isoceles stance predominated professional handgun training. This makes a lot of sense, because under the stress of combat fine motor skills and coordination disappear, so a rigid, repeatable stance that is suitable for all pistol ranges is easier to train and condition for than one that requires a greater degree of eye-hand coordination and proprioception and is suited only to near field engagements (even if those are the most common range). Many major police departments that drill in two handed shooting technique have achieved real-world combat hit rates in excess of 70%, which is vastly higher than historical hit rages.
As far as the previously-mentioned Israeli shooting position, while it is hard to say without a picture, it used to be policy in the IDF to carry automatic sidearms with a round unchambered, necessitating racking the slide before engagement. This wasn’t done due to any tactical superiority but because many of the motley collection of weapons used by the early years of the IDF had unreliable or no manual safeties, and it was easier and safer to train everyone the same way. Turning the arm sideways with the top of the slide facing inward is easier and faster than brining the off-hand over the top of the gun and pulling the slide the way you often see in movies. You would not load the gun in this position (generally the gun is rotated ~45 degrees about its firing axis with the magazine well facing in and down to give clear access) and you certainly wouldn’t fire it from this position.
Stranger