On Seeing and Sighting

[Steven Cline]

Here are two articles on the eye movement and focus of two levels of LEOs focus when stressed to shoot fast and accurate. The findings on the subjects eye movement and focus is interesting.

Part one of a two-part series

By Force Science Research Center

A major new study by the Force Science Research Center for the first time has identified exactly how the “gaze patterns” of officers who are likely to win gunfights differ from those who are likely to lose them.

Winners, it is revealed, tend to anticipate an emerging threat sooner, shoot to stop it faster and more accurately, and make fewer errors in judgment because of the unique way in which they watch a potential attacker’s body as a deadly confrontation unfolds.

A key finding: Those who win lethal assaults do so, in part, because they achieve target acquisition with their firearm in a way that is directly opposite of how most officers are trained.

“This unique study shows that winning a gunfight involves more than just issues of action and reaction times,” FSRC’s executive director Dr. Bill Lewinski told Force Science News. “Where an officer is looking during an encounter, what kind of information he is picking up, and how he is processing it are also vitally important. An effective gaze control strategy can help officers minimize or defeat the action/reaction advantage that the suspect might otherwise have.

“In short, an officer’s performance can be impaired or enhanced by where his eyes and attention are focused in the midst of a deadly encounter.”

What the new study discovered about that phenomenon, Lewinski says, could have significant repercussions on law enforcement firearms training.

The study was conducted by Lewinski and Dr. Joan Vickers of Canada’s University of Calgary, a renowned researcher of the relationship between eye movement and athletic performance. They recently presented the first detailed report of their findings at the prestigious International Conference on Spatial Cognition in Rome.

Their full paper, “Gaze Control and Shooting Performance of Elite and Rookie Police Officers During a Force-on-Force Encounter,” will be posted on the Force Science website once it has been published in an academic journal. Meanwhile, FSN’s two-part series is the first disclosure to the international law enforcement community about the study’s surprising practical discoveries.

FORCE-ON-FORCE SET-UP

Field work for the research was conducted a year ago in the United Kingdom with the help of 24 police volunteers. Eleven were highly experienced, male veterans of an Emergency Response Team (ERT), seasoned in fighting terrorists among other assignments, with a median age of nearly 39. The rest were younger rookies (median age just over 30), seven of them female, who had completed their pre-service firearms and simulation training and were considered “ready for the street.” Both groups predominately were right-eye shooters.

The research scenario, designed by Lewinski, was based on an actual incident. One at a time the volunteers were armed with a holstered Glock pistol fitted to fire a single Simunition cartridge and told they were on duty to “provide security” at an embassy office where intelligence had indicated an armed encounter would occur that day.

About 20 feet in front of the officer being tested was a receptionist at a desk. Presently an adult male, playing the role of a civilian tourist, entered the room and engaged the receptionist in conversation regarding a problem with his passport, keeping his back to the subject officer.

Initially the exchange was polite but as the receptionist proved not to be helpful the man became increasingly agitated. About three seconds before the end of the one-minute scenario, his voice started to rise and he began cursing and slapping the table. Suddenly, in an explosion of rage, he yanked an object from under his coat and pivoted quickly.

In most instances, the object was a handgun and he fired at the officer. But randomly he spun around only with a cell phone. The volunteers were not advised in advance of this “catch” switch. They were told only that they should “handle the threat” appropriately, using their handgun.

“The suspect’s dynamic turning and shooting unfolded very rapidly,” Lewinski says, “and presented quite a challenge for any officer. We wanted to detect the clearest demonstration of operational differences, and that’s why groups of the best and the least experienced officers were chosen.”

Each volunteer went through the scenario seven times. According to the researchers, no significant change was noticed in their reactions with repetition.

SOPHISTICATED MONITORING

During the scenario, each officer wore a light-weight, head-mounted apparatus with two sophisticated and highly sensitive computer-interactive components: 1) a small video camera that filmed the scene being played out in front of the officer from the officer’s perspective, and 2) a mobile monocular “eye tracker” that used reflection off of the officer’s cornea to precisely document his line of sight.

Just where the officer’s gaze was directed at any given split-second was overlaid on the digital image the camera was recording, in the form of a small red circle. In other words, exactly where the officer was looking, when he was looking there, in what sequence, and for how long were all captured in a continuous, time-coded format that allowed every location of his gaze to be noted and analyzed later.

A separate video camera was placed in the room to photograph each officer frontally from head to toe as he experienced and reacted to the role-playing. These images were later synced with those from the headgear. (The data collection system, developed by Vickers, is called the vision-in-action method. Samples of the recordings will be posted on the Force Science website when the academic paper is posted. For more information, see Vickers’ book, Perception, Cognition and Decision Training: The Quiet Eye in Action.)

Keeping the scenario consistent across all officers, of course, was critical for comparison purposes. So the receptionist (played by FSRC executive Patricia Thiem) and the suspect (played by Lt. Lee Edwards of the Minneapolis PD) worked extensively with an acting coach, who trained them to maintain the same timing and mannerisms across repeated performances.

The field recordings took two full weeks to complete; the subsequent analysis took months. Here are the most significant findings:

SHOOTING PERFORMANCE

The ERT officers — considered the elite shooters in the study — strongly out-performed the rookies.

• First of all, the ERT spent significantly less time assessing the situation before drawing their gun. On whole, they drew “well before the assailant began his pivot,” Vickers reports. Most drew early and “held [their gun] at chest level before aiming.” The rookies tended to delay drawing until about a second after his turn.

• The ERT shot before the assailant got his round off 92.5 percent of the time, beating him by an average of nearly 180 milliseconds (ms). The rookies shot first only about 42 percent of the time and on average lagged behind the attacker by more than 13 ms. Responding “very poorly,” the study says, the rookies essentially “reacted to his attack, rather than being ahead of him as were the ERT during every phase of the encounter.”

• ERT hit the assailant nearly 75 percent of the time, compared to about 54 percent — ”slightly more than chance” — for the recently trained rookies. ERT hits were in the upper torso (center mass) 62 percent of the time, versus about 48 percent for the rookies.

• In more than 60 percent of their trials, rookies fired when the assailant brandished a cell phone instead of a gun, compared to only about 18 percent for the ERT.

GAZE PATTERNS

Anyone would expect highly experienced elites to shoot better than rank novices, but what’s impressive is the relationship that gaze and focus appeared to have to performance.

As part of their meticulous analysis of where the test subjects were looking during the last critical seven seconds of the scenario, the researchers tabulated two important factors: fixations (when an officer’s gaze was stable on an object or location within a three-degree visual angle for 100 ms or longer) and saccades (when the eyes moved rapidly from one fixed location to another for at least 66.66 ms).

Among their discoveries, these are considered most meaningful:

• The ERT officers tended to use fixations of only short duration early in the encounter, during their initial assessment and as the suspect began to pivot toward them. Then they used longer-duration fixations as they aimed and fired. “They needed less time to ‘read’ critical cues” and acquire external feedback information that “allowed them to prepare their shooting movements in advance and prevail over the assailant,” the researchers explain. Thus the ERT “were ahead of the assailant in terms of their motor phases and gaze control across all phases of the encounter.”

• “The rookies used an opposite strategy and had long-duration fixations at the outset and shorter durations as they aimed and fired.” In effect, “the rookies were behind” the suspect’s actions and were “caught by surprise.” They “used a reactive strategy where they acquired information at the last moment, which was inadequate both in terms of its content and timing for the extreme demands of the encounter.”

• “The ERT had a higher frequency of fixations than the rookies in all phases [of the scenario] except the aim/fire phase, when the ERT had fewer fixations to fewer locations than the rookies, indicative of greater focus and concentration as they aimed and fired.”

• The ERT increasingly directed their attention to the suspect’s gun hand/arm as the scenario evolved. “They increased the percent of fixations to this location from 21 percent in the assessment and early pivot phases to 71 percent during the final two seconds. On hits, the ERT directed 86 percent of their final fixations to this one location, revealing a remarkable degree of focus and concentration under fire.” And, the study explains, they had time for a final, undisturbed period of super-concentration that Vicker’s calls “the quiet eye,” which has been linked with high performance across many different genres of athletics. In this, their eye remained settled on a defined target location through trigger pull.

• “The rookies did not show the same funneling of their attention to the assailant’s gun hand/arm,” the study points out. Early on, similar to the ERT, they concentrated a minority of their fixations there. But at the time the suspect aimed and fired, only 33 percent of the rookies’ fixations were directed there, a modest and inadequate increase. And whatever quiet-eye time they exhibited was significantly lower.

TELL-TALE SACCADE

Perhaps most startling, the officers’ last abrupt shift of gaze before firing was found to be radically different between the two groups.

The rookie’s final saccade, especially among those who missed when they fired, “occurred at the same time they tried to fixate the target and aim,” the study reveals. At that critical moment in the last 500 ms, the rookies in a staggering 82 percent of their tests took their eyes off the assailant and attempted to look at their own gun, trying to find or confirm sight alignment as they aimed. “This pulled them out of the gunfight for what turned out to be a significant period of time,” Lewinski says. Vickers adds: “On a high percentage of their shots, the rookies did not see the assailant as they fired,” contributing to inaccurate shooting and the misjudgment of the cell phone as a threat.

About 30 percent of the ERT also looked at their gun, but their timing was different. Most of those gaze-shifts occurred before the officers aimed, “followed by the onset of their aim and fixation on the target and firing.”

FLAWED TRAINING?

The researchers pose the possibility that the rookies’ training may have contributed to their poor performance. They were taught pistolcraft “similar to how most police officers first learn to shoot a handgun: to focus first on the rear sight, then on the front sight, and finally on the target, aligning all three before pulling the trigger.”

“This is a very time-consuming process and one that was not successful in this study,” Vickers says.

Somewhere across their training, practice, and experience, the successful ERT officers had learned what essentially is a reverse process: Their immediate and predominate focus is on the weapon carried by their attacker. With their gaze concentrated there, they bring their gun up to their line of sight and catch their sights only in their peripheral vision, a subtle “sight glimpse,” as Lewinski terms it. “They have an unconscious kinesthetic sense to know that their gun is up and positioned properly,” he says. “This is a focus strategy that Olympic shooters use,” says Vickers, “and it is simpler, faster, and more effective.”

As the assailant’s actual attack got underway, the elite officers were zeroed in on a “weapons focus.” That is, the ERT officers’ “fixations were not directed to the assailant’s centre of mass as he pivoted and fired, but to the weapon itself, which he held away from his body until the moment he fired. The ERT tracked the weapon as soon as it was visible, using a series of fixations. Because he was moving rapidly, it was only during the last few milliseconds that his centre mass presented a viable target.”

“This intense attentiveness to the weapon can have memory implications later on,” Lewinski explains. “Now we have an empirical study showing why an officer who survives a gunfight may be unable to identify a perpetrator’s face or recall other important details proximate to the shooting, such as the body position or turning action of the subject.”

Now that the study has documented important ways in which expert shooters behave, how can trainers best convey these elite skills to other officers? “FSRC plans to do more work with Dr. Vickers to identify answers to that question,” Lewinski says. “But already, these findings suggest some important changes that will point us in the right direction.”

and

I. “Point shooting” clarification…Plus: What new gaze pattern findings mean for your training

Part 2 of a 2-part series

Editor’s Note: In Transmission #134 [10/9/09], Part 1 of this series reported significant new findings from the Force Science Research Center about how an officer’s “gaze pattern” in evaluating a potential assailant affects his or her ability to win a gunfight. The research reveals that “elite,” highly experienced officers are better able to quickly and accurately read visual threat cues, focus sooner and longer on where a possible attacker will present a weapon, and draw and fire faster to defeat an assault, compared to less experienced and less successful officers. Part 2 addresses the training implications of this research..

First, a clarification….

Some readers concluded from Part 1 that the Force Science Research Center “endorses” so-called point shooting, where a handgun’s muzzle is positioned toward the target and the gun is fired without significant reference to the sights.

That assumption apparently was drawn from one of the important discoveries of the gaze-pattern study, which was conducted in the United Kingdom by Dr. Bill Lewinski, FSRC’s executive director, and Dr. Joan Vickers, a visual tracking expert at the University of Calgary in Canada.

The researchers found that just before firing in an armed confrontation rookies tended to look away from their target and search for their sights for reassurance of their aim, thereby, in Lewinski’s words, “pulling themselves out of the gunfight at a critical moment and negatively affecting their accuracy, their speed of response, and their awareness of what the suspect was doing.”

Most of the highly experienced officers in the study, in contrast, concentrated their visual focus on the target/suspect, catching only a fast glimpse of their sights in their peripheral vision and relying primarily on “an unconscious kinesthetic sense to know that their gun is up and positioned properly.”

“This should not be interpreted as sanctioning or promoting any training method in shooting, especially under life-threatening high stress, becomes problematic, and in this which the sights are ignored,” Lewinski emphasizes. “It’s true that point shooting can be effective at short distances and probably is instinctively used by many officers in responding to close encounters. But at greater distances, the accuracy of just pointing and study officers were responding to a lethal threat that was 15-20 feet away.

“The rookies had successfully completed firearms training that emphasized traditional sight alignment, but they had no actual street experience. The elite officers began their careers with that same training. But at the time of the study, they were members of a specialized SWAT cadre with years of hard-core street experience. They train constantly and consistently win international competitions.

“Through innumerable repetitions they have developed a highly accurate feel—a strong kinesthetic sense—for raising their gun to a proper alignment without consciously thinking about it or making a pronounced visual or attentional shift to it. If you ran a laser beam from their eye to the target, it would shine right through their sights.“Careful sight alignment was an important step in starting them toward that point of excellence. Experience and intensive training are ultimately what brought them there. Over a long time, they were able to transition from one emphasis to another. Yet even at their exceptional performance level, referencing the sights in some manner, however fleetingly or peripherally, was still part of their response in the type of rapidly unfolding encounter designed for this study.”

As to the training implications of the gaze-pattern study….

More specifics may be known in 1 to 2 years when a new study soon to be launched in England is completed. That research, Lewinski says, will attempt to identify scientifically which teaching methods are most effective for addressing individual student needs and aptitudes so that trainees can more quickly and confidently acquire elite-level use-of-force skills, including firearms performance.

“That study will explore how to fit teaching styles to the individual learning styles of trainees, how much and what kind of training most rapidly and lastingly influences behavior, how to maximize benefits in restricted teaching time, and so on,” Lewinski says. “We will then be able to set standards based on the science of human performance, rather than on tradition, trainer suppositions and preferences, and lawmakers’ dictates, which will be a major breakthrough.”

Meanwhile, Lewinski says, there are important lessons to be drawn immediately from the gaze study so far as instructors, investigators, and individual officers are concerned.

For trainers. For those departments that have not yet joined the 21st century, the message is clearer than ever: It is time to move beyond conventional “qualification” firearms training.

“We are not teaching officers to shoot accurately at the speed of a gunfight before they graduate from academy training,” Lewinski declares. Much more instruction and practice is needed to prepare them to deal with rapidly unfolding, dynamic, high-threat encounters.”

In the recent study, he explains, “the elite officers were able to read danger cues early on and anticipate the suspect’s actions ahead of time so they could stay ahead of the fight. They knew where a gun was likely to appear and were focused there before it did. So they were able to get protective rounds off sooner than the suspect and sooner than the rookies.

“That anticipatory skill can only be developed through experience. At the training level, that means extensive experience with dynamic force-on-force encounters and realistic simulations in which you learn by ‘being there’ over and over again in a wide variety of encounters what to expect and how to look for and recognize danger cues.”

At the same time, repetitive exposure to weapon manipulation at gunfight speed is critical. “There needs to be a much better level of pure shooting skill developed than most departments teach at this point,” Lewinski says. “A gun is a tool, and officers need to be so practiced with it that the mechanics of using it become automatic and unconscious. That frees up more time and attention for decision-making and for concentration on the adversary’s behavior.”

In the study, for instance, the superior mechanical skill and anticipation of danger exhibited by the elite officers allowed them to expend more time and stronger concentration on the suspect’s shooting hand when he spun toward them in the encounter. As a result, they scored significantly better at correctly identifying a cell phone vs. a gun in his hand and tailoring their responses accordingly than did the novice officers.

Training to a gunfight level may well require more time and money than is currently allotted, Lewinski concedes. But departments should ask themselves a tough question, he says: “What level of liability are you willing to accept with your training?” And they must acknowledge that “meeting some current state qualification standard does not in itself mean that officers are going to be successful on the street and make great decisions and deliver great performance when the chips are down and lives are on the line. Any department owes nothing less than the best training for its officers.”

For investigators. The sophisticated eye-tracking device used in the study revealed an important finding for investigators. As the testing scenario unfolded, the visual field of expert shooters and rookies alike narrowed significantly. At the moment of firing, the elites tended to have full concentration on the suspect’s weapon. Many of the novices, because they were searching for their sights, did not even see the suspect himself when they pulled the trigger.

“What is not given attention cannot be remembered,” Lewinski says, “and investigators need to stay conscious of this. There may be much about the gunfight environment, including details about the suspect’s behavior, that an involved officer simply cannot remember because it didn’t register on his narrowly focused brain. And that should not be equated with his being evasive or deceptive.

“The more an investigator pushes an officer to elicit facts that the officer doesn’t know, the more likely the officer will ‘guesstimate’ in an effort to satisfy the questioner and the higher the probability of error and inconsistency.

“Investigators should probe with their questioning only to the extent that officers are comfortable in responding. Their being unable to remember everything should not diminish their credibility in any way.”

For officers. “So far as line officers are concerned, the study presents a challenge of personal commitment,” Lewinski says. “What the study proves is pretty straightforward: Your success in an armed confrontation is likely to be determined by your training and experience.

“Is the training provided by your department sufficient to convince you that you can perform accurately at the speed of a gunfight when your life depends on it?

“If not, what are you doing on your own to bridge that gap?”

I need to re-read Brian's book and his writings on seeing to compare.

Open for discussion and dissection and digestion on what the study means to improving our shooting... if at all.

Edited March 1, 2012 by Steven Cline

[Steven Cline]

What does the 75% hit ratio mean?

It seems that the researchers are concluding that since the ERT had higher percentage of hits their technique was better, is that the proper conclusion?

Or, was it that my having more experience they overcame an actual error?

Could it be that had they focused on their front sight their hit ratio would have climbed to 100% or nearly 100%?

What do you think the equipment would show you doing?

At 7 yards or less how much front sight focus do you have?

I know that on some easy shots I have recall of target focus.

Edited March 1, 2012 by Steven Cline

[Merlin Orr]

"Winners, it is revealed, tend to anticipate an emerging threat sooner, shoot to stop it faster and more accurately, and make fewer errors in judgment..."     "In short, an officer's performance can be impaired or enhanced by where his eyes and attention are focused in the midst of a deadly encounter."<div><br> <img src="http://www.brianenos.com/forums/public/style_emoticons/default/cheers.gif" class="bbc_emoticon" alt="">

</div>

Edited March 1, 2012 by Merlin Orr

[MarkCO]

When I was still racing (NHRA and NASCAR) I had my visual focus tested as part of a study, and I think it is relevant. The majority of the drivers in the upper ranks had what the researcher called "advanced edge focus". In essence, it was the ability to shift the brain focus without shifting the eye focus. For instance, in drag racing, the ability to co-ordinate the foot/hands with three visual points (the finish line, christmas tree and tach) and consistently cut a light with a spread of no more than 0.1 seconds was associated with the drivers who had this edge focus ability. The same in NASCAR was the ability to focus on your line while also mentally collecting the information from the surrounding cars. This translated into fewer wrecks for the drivers with this ability.

The testing has advanced and if you go read the articles on "Quiet Eye" (most of it is related to golf and baseball) you will find some similarities. I have been playing with catching the edge of the target in the peripheral (mental focus) while maintaining visual front sight focus and it seems to be helping. Some people just seem to have these skills (don't know if is natrral or taught), but the research is looking like it can be learned.

When I was deciding what to be when I grow up in my 20s, I took some military tests and one of the recruiters, after my eye test got very excited and tried to get me to sign. He told me that very few people could shift from left to right eye focus on command and even fewer still could focus on a point at distance and perceive basic shapes in the peripheral. I was stupid and thought he was jerking my chain to get me in, but in hind sight it probably would have been good for me.

[Chills1994]

Well... Right off the bat, their study has confounding issues because 7 rookie officers were female. I am ASSuming that all the ERT personnel were male. Whatever statistically significant differences they found, I'd be curious as to how they took gender based differences into effect.

Don't get me wrong... I am not out to disparage female cops or female shooters, but it should be no surprise to us here that women and men see or view the world differently.

[Sin-ster]

My first thought was, "This is what distinguishes combat shooting from the game we play-- more attention paid to the target, as it's not just sitting still and waiting for good hits to land."

I thought the notion of swingers, Texas Stars and PPRs might contend against that, but it occurred to me that typically, our goal is to either "ambush" those targets, or knock them all down before they start moving. It's easier, after all...

Then it hit me that *we* are moving, and at such a high rate of speed that it probably translates into equal (if not greater) difficulty in achieving good hits. And we all know the importance of front sight focus in that regard, as well as snapping the eyes to the nearest target, and back again.

The second part of the article alluded to this, although it still seems to be saying that the officers were using more of a Level 2 type of focus as discussed in Brian's book. It hit me then, when they started talking about the close ranges-- they were talking about perfect NPA and index, along with "seeing what the officers needed to see".

I think overall, the study reinforces what we've already known %100. For a long time, I was unable to recall or even detect what I was seeing in many instances of "impressive shooting"; I just took for granted that I was seeing what I could see. Now more than ever, I am keenly aware of these things (in real time no less) and realized that my brain has actually caught up with my eyes-- an actually more advanced part of the learning process. As it relates to our game, this article is actually only scratching the surface of an accomplished shooter's abilities-- there's so much more to the topic that no one has directly studied, but is common to us all.

Great read, BTW!

[rgkeller]

So at less than seven yards the experienced and competition winning ERT officers his the bad guy in the chest less than two thirds of the time, despite having almost a minute to prepare for an encounter, including drawing their handgun.

Color me less than impressed.

[web4]

Does anyone have any suggested exercises for shooting a pistol with both eyes open with iron sights? Thanks for any help.

[Edubya]

Does anyone have any suggested exercises for shooting a pistol with both eyes open with iron sights? Thanks for any help.

I pretty much gave up on keeping both eyes open and now miss just as badly with both eyes closed.

EW

[kiloindiatango]

So at less than seven yards the experienced and competition winning ERT officers his the bad guy in the chest less than two thirds of the time, despite having almost a minute to prepare for an encounter, including drawing their handgun.

Color me less than impressed.

The game changes significantly when your targets are shooting back, even if it's just simunitions (they hurt!).

[DyNo!]

Sight focused shooting is a great tactic with time, distance, and cover.

Otherwise - it is unreasonable to expect someone in a life or death situation with a pistol in their face to find a proper sight picture. (Not that the sights aren't already aligned from a good index)

Edited March 12, 2012 by DyNo!

[DyNo!]

I accidentally found this - here's the video of the experiment.

Edited March 18, 2012 by DyNo!

[ORIGINALTEX]

Just a slightly educated WAG here, but I believe people who shoot a lot, especially competitively or special team in the military or law enforcement who shoot more than the average grunt, have a higher hit ratio even without good sight focus and possible are quicker to hit, simply because they spend more time with the gun up in their fact properly aligned than people who don't do this. Its like putting your key in the ignition. If you drove the vehicle twice a year ony, you would have to look for the ignition to put the key in, but if you drive it every day or 3-4 times a week, you don't have to really look any more. Every time you bring the gun up and get a good sight picture, it re-enforces on you body mechanics where exactly the gun needs to be to make a good hit, so when things get hairy, you are more likly to bring the gun exactly where it needs to be even with out a stong focus on the sights.

[Tom D.]

For naysayers and doubters, go thru a FoF class and see what happens to your highly refined shooting skills and please report back.

[MarkCO]

For naysayers and doubters, go thru a FoF class and see what happens to your highly refined shooting skills and please report back.

First time I did FOF, I was a "student" day one and an "instructor" day two. I was amazed at many things!

[baa]

For naysayers and doubters, go thru a FoF class and see what happens to your highly refined shooting skills and please report back.

Agreed. Actually, just get a couple USPSA shooters together with Airsoft guns to see how quickly refinement goes out the window.

That all said, I do agree with the concept that the more you shoot at a high level, be it our game or "the real world" the more likely you are to successfully hit a target, even under stress. With the above Airsoft limited gun wars, he/she who has the more developed NPA/index tends to hit first, even when sight picture, aiming, stance, footwork, etc break down.

[Chills1994]

I accidentally found this - here's the video of the experiment.

In a way that's kind of dumb scenario....interesting nonetheless....tracking some of the saccadic eye movements...

if you're a bad guy, and you're gonna cap the lady behind the table with a cop standing behind you....well....that's kinda dumb. or the perp is just plum crazy and doesn't care about going out himself.

anywhoo...the media report via the YouTube video, doesn't go over the specifics of the study ....experienced vs. inexperienced....men vs. women....

soooooooo.....

You know how you hear about certain so called medical "studies" every single newscast. This week I think it is "eating red meat causes cancer". Last week, I think it was "seafood has too much mercury". If you're anything like me, the first question that pops in my head is "hmmn...gee....I wonder who paid for that study?"

so in the same vein, now, I am wondering if the deck wasn't intentionally stacked to make the experts look more expert and the novices...well...more like novices.

Edited March 19, 2012 by Chills1994

[MattYvip]

For naysayers and doubters, go thru a FoF class and see what happens to your highly refined shooting skills and please report back.

+1 Been on both ends of it, competition and FoF training. It's amazing how groups open up when you got stuff whizzing by your head.

That being said, if you can't hit a target with no stress, you certainly can't hope to hit it (sans luck) with high stress. Thats why the USPSA/IDPA games do help. The competitive nature of the sport simiulates in some small part that stress. Plus the gun handling skills you obtain make "running" the gun second nature.

[Steven Cline]

My thoughts:

In truth these are some of the most critical sentences I read:

"the rookies in a staggering 82 percent of their tests took their eyes off the assailant and attempted to look at their own gun, trying to find or confirm sight alignment as they aimed."

This, to me confirmed that they were very poorly prepared/trained with not nearly enough practice. They lacked confidence. Essentially the "fumbled" their way through the scenario when it came time to act. Tactics aside. There comes a time when all ya have is the shooting. I don't think rookie cops were ready for the shooting.

"If you ran a laser beam from their eye to the target, it would shine right through their sights. 'Careful sight alignment was an important step in starting them toward that point of excellence.'"

"Through innumerable repetitions they have developed a highly accurate feel—a strong kinesthetic sense—for raising their gun to a proper alignment without consciously thinking about it or making a pronounced visual or attentional shift to it... Experience and intensive training are ultimately what brought them there. Over a long time, they were able to transition from one emphasis to another."

I agree with Baa, so does some of the writings about the results- the NPA and drilled mechanics saw the "elites" through the situation well above the rookies.

However.

At what appears to be well under 7 yards, closer to 5 yards, 75% accuracy for the elites doesn't leave me unimpressed. It leaves me aghast.

I know some people want to instantly rejoin with "go do some FoF," or some version "paper targets don't shoot back." "I have," and "I know that."

These LEOs knew they were dealing with sims and though it hurts, it don't kill and except for a possibly small level of anxiety over, "getting stung/hurt/experiencing some pain" I do not expect much impact on their shooting skill. I noted the heavy protective gear and gloves (which may or may not have affected their shooting skill depending on how they train). I air-soft with my son and his friends in light clothing. Not sims. But, after a very short adjustment I "gun" like I game and it wins. Speed and accuracy matter. It's only after I'm getting stung with pellets (in the lips is a mother)that I begin to worry about getting stung. Same thing with paint-ball. The pain is a nice lesson teacher that you did something wrong. Practicing to shoot through any anxiety is a very valuable lesson.

Sometimes there is some projection involved. Apparently some people had a very negative reaction to their first FoF engagement. They stressed maybe. Doesn't mean that is everyone's experience.

Edited May 30, 2012 by Steven Cline

[Steven Cline]

That being said, if you can't hit a target with no stress, you certainly can't hope to hit it (sans luck) with high stress. Thats why the USPSA/IDPA games do help. The competitive nature of the sport simiulates in some small part that stress. Plus the gun handling skills you obtain make "running" the gun second nature.

No truer words have been said. I don't know if some blow-hards understand how it comes across, but their demeaning of all practice us "gamers" put in is rather silly. As if somehow handling a gun second nature is detrimental to winning a gun fight.

[MattYvip]

Having been in LE for a short while I've learned that most LEOs will not go to the range on match day because they don't want their ego's busted by some non-LEO shooter, especially that 16 year old female shooter who's running the pink (read non-tactical) belt. So it's easier on their ego to bust on "gamers" like us. My favorite line is "In the real world..." followed by some crap they read in SOF magazine (decent mag by the way not meaning to trash it). The truth is most C class shooters can smoke most LEOs especially those who think us "gamers" aren't "real world" enough.

Running a gun in competition is the same as running a gun in the real world. ONLY your tactics change.