I was watching the Hong Kong action classic Hard Boiled the other night (which is an awesome film, incidentally). The film, like many other John Woo movies, has a scene in which the hero wields dual handguns to successfully take out a bunch of bad guys and look awesome while doing it.
It’s a fairly common trope in movies and video games (because it looks awesome), but as pretty much any firearm enthusiast will tell you, it’s quite difficult to do effectively in real life.
Historically, cowboys were famous for fighting with two guns - but realistically, they had a second gun not for Epic Shootout Coolness but because it was faster to draw a second, loaded gun rather than dick about reloading the first one.
What I’m wondering is if there’s any reliable examples from the modern era (let’s say 1900 onwards) of someone effectively wielding two handguns at the same time in real life?
By effectively, I mean actually using them, firing them repeatedly, and ideally hitting what they were aiming at (as opposed to just randomly firing them off).
Modern Cowboy Action Shooting competitions involve a category known as Gunfighter style, which involves using two handguns, but I’m excluding that from the purposes of this OP, along with movies, re-enactments, “plinking” and so on.
Mythbusters tested it one time. They found it’s mostly bullshit. Adam and Jamie are both decent shooters but as soon as they tried shooting with a gun in each hand, their ability to hit targets disappeared.
If you look up the term “Macedonian Shooting” it’s apparently an old Russian technique used by Tsar (and later Soviet) officers where they would take two revolvers, press them tightly against one another and fire them, putting two bullets into the same general spot and increasing stopping power. This was effective back before submachine guns when somebody needed something small enough to conceal but still packed firepower. Apparently modern Russian special forces still train with it but its more for suppressive fire on the quick rather than for damage potential.
Some good links there, thanks for those - the Firearm Blog has some excellent and well-written stuff on it and that article was no exception.
I’m surprised the Russians developed a twin-revolver style; the Smith & Wesson Model 3 is single action and far too bulky/heavy to use in the manner described, while the Nagant M1895 has a famously atrocious trigger pull in double-action mode; I can’t see it lending itself well to a twin-gun style.
hardly real world but the arcade game Area 51 is a 2 player shooter, I used to play with both guns at one time. I could shoot with good accuracy (70%ish hit rate) with my right hand and pull around 40% with the off hand on a good day, usually the off hand was more like 25-30% hit rate.
The idea was to fire to hit with one hand and fire to suppress with the other, and Always take the shotgun upgrade for your off hand.
with tons of practice I suspect you could get pretty damn good at it, in an actual gun fight with multiple opponents shooting back I suspect you are dead.
At very close range, say, firing at opponents in the same room there could be some value in firing two guns. At a range of 50’ or more you would definitely want to be aiming down the sight of one pistol/gun as the accuracy of shooting straight will land more bullets on target much better than firing twice as many bullets.
The strategy of aiming with your right handgun for accuracy, and firing with the left handgun for suppressing fire seems to me might be a good tactic as mentioned by some posters above. Maybe. Hehehe. Really I would say it could be a good tactic in video games. It’s hard for me to think of any real life combat situations where firing two guns at one time would be the best tactic to use. If you are in the situation I opened this post with where you are in the same room with people who you want to kill then I think you already screwed up by getting yourself in that situation.
And with percussion revolvers prior to cartridges, it was not unusual for a weapon to fail, jam up, or even explode, so having pistols in both hands ensured the ability to still return fire. Even with cartridge guns, it is still easier to have guns in both hands (people didn’t generally brace to aim until double action revolvers became popular) so if one failed or was empty it could be dropped and the other passed over.
As someone who has taught tactical shooting, including point shooting, I would contest both of these statements. You can learn to point shoot (e.g. without visually indexing the sights) with a single pistol by extensively training to hold the gun in a specific position (generally with the gun hand braced against the rib cage). I have never seen someone learn to accurately point shoot on both strong and weak sides, and I don’t think it is really possible to shoot both simultaneously with any degree of accuracy even at elevator distances. There is just too much going on for the body to maintain good proprioception. Under duress of combat with pistols in each hand a shooter is generally going to end up shooting wide and high in both directions, which is just wasting ammunition.
The notion of suppressing fire in personal combat is essentially bogus. In many after action reports, participants in a firefight or even simulation often don’t realize they’re being shot at, or where the rounds are coming from. In such cases, suppressive fire is worse than useless; it wastes ammunition, puts bystanders at greater risk, and does nothing to inhibit return fire. In a real firefight the appropriate action is to identify the target, put iron on silhouette, and keep squeezing the trigger until the target falls immobile, then return the weapon to high ready and scan for threats. A close combat situation is no time to get creative; the instinct should be to fall back to basic training and technique without being clever in ways that look cool but fail the survival test.
There are multiple factors to take into account though.
That was their first time firing two guns at once. The fact that they did poorly on their first attempt doesn’t mean it is impossible for someone trained to do it.
The level of recoil on the pistols matters. If they were firing 22s then maybe they would’ve had better control.
The amount of one handed stability may depend on both strength training and just shooting practice.
There were no use of things like forearm stabilizers or laser sights to help with aim.
The fact that they failed with what seems like 9mm ammo on their first attempt doesn’t mean it is impossible. What if someone stronger who has done training attempts to do it with a lower recoil gun like a 22?
Under extreme duress, humans (and other animals) tend to reduce cognitive influence of some senses and extend others (e.g. tunnel vision and a stretched out time sense). Aural perception (hearing) is often substantially reduced during a firefight. And frankly, when bullets are flying it is often difficult to tell where they are coming from even if you aren’t in a highly stressed condition.
Dave Grossman and Loren Christensen’s On Combat goes into extensive detail on this in Section II: “Perceptual Distortions in Combat: An Altered State of Consciousness”, and in general is a good read for anyone interested in a survey of the physiological and psychological response to combat situations.
I think they mentioned they actually ran through several courses of fire to familiarize themselves with two-gun shooting and only showed the final round.
And they explained why it wasn’t working. Trying to switch back and forth between two guns betrays the basic fundamentals of good shooting. They said you’d be better off shooting one gun until it’s empty and then shooting the other one. And those fundamentals are going to apply regardless of the weapon.
Not sure this qualifies for the OP’s conditions but back in the 1950’s as a teenager, a friend & I, between us, had 2 semi-auto .22’s.
we would walk down a two pound coffee can with a weapon in each hand, constantly advancing so we would always be within 10-20 feet of the can and firing fairly rapidly, altering between each hand held out in front of us more or less not lowering either weapon.
We were not deliberately aiming, we were firing too fast for that but were chasing the can, I guess it is called ‘point’ shooting just as we would do with just one weapon. Sometimes we would hold the weapons down low near waist level.
Back then, we did a lot of shooting with all kinds of short & long weapons and got pretty good in our opinions. LOL
I was never as good off handed as I was dominate but I got pretty good at one handed slow fire with hand guns.
Just never ask me to throw something with my off hand/arm. I am totally helpless, then and now and all times in between.
Not only that, but loading a percussion revolver isn’t exactly quick and easy.
To load a modern cartridge revolver, you swing open the cylinder, pop the spent cartridges out, shove in six new ones, close the cylinder, and off you go. A speed loader helps, as you can shove all six cartridges in at once instead of putting them in individually.
A percussion revolver (like the two that Wild Bill Hickok carried), isn’t quite so simple. You put the powder into the cylinder, put the ball in, rotate the cylinder so that you can use the revolver’s built-in ramrod lever to pack it all down, and repeat for the other five cylinders. Then you grease all six cylinders to reduce the chance of a chain fire (powder or residue left on the cylinder can cause other cylinders to fire, which is a very bad thing since they aren’t the cylinders behind the barrel at the time - it basically means the gun explodes in your hand, not fun). Now you turn the revolver around, pop off the old percussion cap on the other side of the cylinder, put a new one in place, and again repeat for the other 5 cylinders. You can use paper powder cartridges to speed up the loading a bit (that way you don’t have to measure out the powder charge for each cylinder) but it’s painfully slow no matter what you do.
Reloading a cartridge revolver while someone is shooting at you is bad enough. I’d hate to have to reload a percussion revolver in the middle of a fight.
During the Civil War, cavalry men often carried two or more pistols, and if they didn’t have a bunch of pistols they often had a couple of spare cylinders already loaded and ready to go that could be popped into their pistol relatively quickly.
As I mentioned above, Wild Bill Hickok carried two pistols, model 1851 Navy Colt percussion revolvers. Unlike what you see in cowboy movies, he carried them in a sash, not a holster, and he carried them “backwards” so that he could draw them cavalry style (aka the cavalry twist).
Not surprisingly, there’s a TV Tropes page about dual wielding. You can find it here:
What is surprising is that it does have some interesting entries under the Real Life section. Most of the dual wields under there are examples like Wild Bill, who carried a second done to avoid reloading and didn’t fire both at the same time. However, there are these:
What’s interesting is the internet is full of people saying “I’ve fired two guns at targets before and did OK at at!”; I don’t disbelieve them - it’s absolutely possible to to do and wouldn’t take an insurmountable amount of practice to achieve some degree of proficiency with it.
What’s surprising is the complete lack of instances of soldiers or police officers or people in similar situations doing it (Guy dual-wielding automatic weapons notwithstanding) - I’m surprised there aren’t reliable stories of it from (say) World War II or something like that.
High level shooters know how to track the sights in recoil and shoot very quickly, a firm consistent grip is paramount to this.
Now dual weilding with a weaker one handed grip and two sight pictures to keep track of?
Add to that, service caliber handguns tend to be marginal for immediately stopping an armed and motivated human. So you really, really want to shoot accurately if you want to be effective with it.
There is no way anybody would shoot 2 pistols more quickly and accurately than with one.
Maybe they can get close with low recoiling .22’s and use lasers at close range, but still cant beat the same with a single gun IMO.
Hollywood is very loosely based on reality sometimes…
edit: Was the character doing flips and taking out multiple opponents who are armed with long guns too? heheh
