These guys worked with spy stuff in Great Britain during WWII, previously with the police in Shanghai. The general idea is to hold the pistol with both hands, face the target full on, hold the gun in the middle of your body, pointing, not aiming at a man size target beginning five feet away, and blasting away. No prizes, awards or medals for shooting, that will make the guys take time to aim.
Has anyone tried this? I’m curious enough to try it the next time I go to a range.
That’s basically how the US Army taught me to shoot a pistol. IIRC the very brief pre-marksmanship training at my Armor Officer Basic Course called the method “Quick Fire.” It was the isosceles firing postion and relied on that powerful innate pointing reflex to aim. There’s a good argument for shooting fast and accurately enough over more accurately but slower when the stakes are literally life and death. It’s simple which helps when the life and death stakes have triggered an adrenaline dump as part of the fight, flight, or freeze response. It also doesn’t take as much training time. That’s an important factor when you have to produce a lot of decently skilled police or military members efficiently.
With body armor that includes a strike plate there’s the added benefit of keeping that plate forward when firing isosceles. Without body armor that bigger exposed area can be an issue. I’d mostly transitioned from isosceles to a modified weaver in the days before body armor wear was a regular thing. I still used the pointing gesture as my primary initial aim. I’d keep the weapon near my body and only extend to point and fire. For qualification tables with multiple simultaneous targets I’d bring the weapon back in to the body as I rotated between targets and then reextend. For me it was still faster than rotating and aiming.
My Grandfather swore by holding his index finger next to the cylinder, using his middle finger on the trigger and pointing. I never saw him shoot.
It was a Colt .32/20. I fired it a snake, and couldn’t see or hear for five seconds to aim again.
I’m interested in finding out more about these stances, but is there anywhere I can learn more about them that’s not a MOAR GUNZ EXTRA NRA site?
I bought a copy on Ebay.
Here is the Marine Corp Pistol manual: https://www.marines.mil/Portals/59/Publications/MCRP%203-01B%20Pistol%20Marksmanship.pdf
I thought the Marines still used the 1911A1.
Thank you!
The “Shooting to Live” techniques seem to work pretty well with Nerf guns vs my kids. The whole idea is that you have to shoot first, with accuracy being secondary. So they describe a method that’s fast, and that’ll get you on target more or less. It’s one-handed, FYI, not a two-handed stance, unless you’re taking long shots (as they call them). Basically you hold the gun properly and instinctively aim by pointing it as if you were pointing your index finger at something. On page 5 they go into how people can generally instinctively point at a target without having to get into a stance, look through sights, etc… and they basically tell you how to aim a pistol the same way through the book.
Another interesting fact- Fairbairn and Sykes were commando/special forces trainers, especially in close quarters combat, andthe classic commando fighting knife was developed and named after them.
FYI, here’s an online version of the book:
As I understand it:
The M1911A1 was replaced by the M9 (Beretta 9mm) as the standard sidearm throughout the U.S. military after 1986, but it took years to phase out, and some specialized units retained them, or upgraded to a modernized .45 ACP pistol. Marine Force Recon units apparently still used a variant of the M1911A1 until at least 2016, and maybe some units still have them, but the M9 is the standard USMC sidearm outside of those specialized units.
Thanks, gdave.