Last week, a significant day in law enforcement history passed. On April 6, 1970 four young CHP officers, all with less than two years on the job, lost their lives in what has become to be widely known as, “The Newhall Incident.”
Many in law enforcement point to this incident as one of the groundbreaking wake-up calls to the need for enhanced officer survival training. Officers Walt Frago, George Alleyn, James Pence, and Roger Gore, did not lose their lives in vain, for from this tragic event, a number of critical tactics and training methods were developed.
One of these is how we conduct firearms training. During the subsequent investigation of the shooting, empty brass casings were discovered in one of the officer’s pockets. During this horrendous firefight, which only lasted 4 ½ minutes, the officer did what he had been trained to do on the range. He took his focus off the target and took the time to gather his spent shell casings and put them in his pocket.
Why did this happen? Because back then we didn’t know any better. To save time at the end of a day on the range, or perhaps as a short cut thought up by officers themselves, officers were either trained, or allowed, to empty their revolver’s cylinder into their hand and retain the empty brass in a pocket, rather then spend time picking them up later. Let’s face it; if we can find an easier way of doing things, we’ll do it. That’s just human nature. It’s not something that is unique to law enforcement.
From this incident, we came to believe that in the heat of the battle, we’ll automatically fall back onto our training, or conditioning, when under stress. How else can you explain empty shell casings in a dead officer’s pocket?
Many who are against point shooting subscribe to this dogma as absolute. But it isn’t entirely true. These people believe that if you train in sighted fire, under stress you’ll automatically resort to your sighted fire skills, because you’ll “fall back” on your training.
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However, not everyone who was involved in a shooting back then had empty brass in his or her pockets. We sometimes will fall back onto our training, or our bad habits that have been allowed to take place on the range, if they are physically possible to do. We can’t, however, leap tall buildings, which is to say that we can’t do something that is physically impossible. Let’s take a look at a few of these impossibilities, with the most obvious one first.
The human eye cannot focus on two objects at two different distances at the same time. It is physically impossible to do, even under the extreme stress of a life or death encounter, where all kinds of weird things can happen to your body. It can’t physically be done.
Put this information into the context of a shooting, and either the bad guy was in focus, or your sights were in focus, it can’t be both. A number of officers have reported that they suffered from what is called “extreme focus” during their shooting incident. Cases of extreme focus allow you to see minute details that would normally go unnoticed, like a torn button on a shirt, or the ability to see the bad guy’s trigger finger, with clarity, pulling the trigger from 35 or 40 feet away.
Have you ever had the victim of an armed robbery tell you that the gun pointed in their face “was huge, like a cannon” but when you apprehend the perpetrator, he’s got a small caliber semi-auto, like a .25 or .32 auto. How about someone being able to count the rounds in the cylinder of a revolver from 10 or 15 feet away? These are just a couple of examples of extreme focus; there are many others.
We have a natural tendency to focus on the source of the danger, the source of the threat. In a deadly force confrontation, this would be the bad guy and his weapon. This explains why a number of bad guys are shot in their gun hand, gun arm, and gun side of the body. But this also occurs when that weapon is a knife, or some other type of instrument.
But guess what? The bad guy is also focusing on the source of his danger, his threat, and that is you and your firearm. This explains why a number of officers are shot in their gun hand, gun arm, and gun side of their body
While we’re on the topic of sight, let’s talk about a couple of other vision anomalies that can occur under stress. The one you most often hear about is tunnel vision, where your vision automatically reduces down to around a 15% field of view. We are visual creatures. Our brain relies on the visual input from our eyes to help make its decisions. Because of this, evolution has made it so our eyes will automatically focus, or tunnel in, on an object that poses a threat to us. Isn’t that why officers are taught on the range to scan back and forth for a secondary threat?
There is also the loss of near vision, where it is physically impossible to focus on an object at less than four feet. This pretty much rules out being able to see your gun in your hand, let alone your sights for any type of sight picture.
Additionally there is the loss of monocular vision, which means you will not be able to close one eye to align your sights to get the “proper sight picture.” Because of this, you’ll be forced to shoot with binocular vision, or both eyes open.
Officers that have been involved in shootings have reported that it was difficult for them to focus on the bad guy in low light, especially if he was moving. If you look at the FBI’s yearly report on officers killed and assaulted in the line of duty, you’ll see that the vast majority of officer-involved shootings occur between the hours of 6 p.m. and 6 a.m., with the bulk of those occurring between the hours of 10 p.m. to 2 a.m. – which is pretty much hours of darkness for most parts of this country.
If you take these vision irregularities, combined with a huge dump of adrenaline, an increased heart rate, and the resulting loss of fine and complex motor skills, and it’s not hard to figure out that it will be difficult, if not impossible, to obtain some type of traditional sight picture. If this is the case, then shouldn’t we be training in something that can be physically done under these conditions, like point shooting? Because we can’t leap tall buildings, we need to train in something that we can do, and that is point shooting.
However, we also need to train out those things that we can – but shouldn’t – do, so we don’t get caught with empty brass in our pockets.
About the author:
Michael T. Rayburn is a 30 + year veteran of Law Enforcement, and is currently an Adjunct Instructor for Smith & Wesson. Mike is the author of four books, Advanced Vehicle Stop Tactics, Advanced Patrol Tactics, Combat Gunfighting, & Combat Shotgun. His video, Instinctive Point Shooting with Mike Rayburn, is a top seller in the Law Enforcement and combat shooting communities. Mike can be reached at www.combatgunfighting.com.
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