Defensive Shooting in a Vehicle

Here's another important video from the Personal Defense Network. This is an unorthodox shooting situation, but it's not a situation that's uncommon. In fact, it's something you probably do every day, and for a significant amount of time every day. When we've identified that threat, we're gonna need to treat this like any other seated shooting situation, and as fast as we can, get our right leg over towards our left leg, of course, if we're a right handed shooter. Our strong leg over towards our weak leg.

Now, it goes without saying if the vehicle's still moving at the point when you realize you need to use a firearm, as odd as that may be, if you can envision such a circumstance, and you're gonna think about such a circumstance, you need to have a plan for, you're still holding the brake down, you're stopping the car, maybe you're accelerating as you reach for your gun. The reality is those things are awfully contrived. So we're gonna deal with, specifically, a static car, where we're pinned in, we have no other option but to respond with a firearm. If you needed to ever draw your firearm while you were still driving, naturally, you'd still have a hand on the wheel, and you'd be either working the gas or the brakes, whatever would be appropriate. In this case, the car is stopped.

I'm gonna move my strong leg over to the weak leg, clear whatever concealment garment I'm wearing, reach back as I lean forward to get as good a grip as I can on the firearm, and again, pull straight up out of the holster. At this point, as I go to the threat, if the threat were to be outside of my passenger window, I'd simply orient and extend. This is about as natural a position as you can get in a car, when you're in the driver's seat. If you're going to go out of the front of the vehicle, you're going to come up, orient, and lean back as you extend. What you wouldn't want to do is jam the firearm into the steering wheel, or of course into the windshield that's gonna be there.

Now, depending on the configuration of your car, maybe you don't have to lean back very much. In this particular vehicle, we picture where a windshield would be, for me to get full extension and proper presentation of the firearm towards a threat in front of the car, I need to lean back. I might even need to come up out of the seat a little bit. Now, all of this becomes that much more cumbersome if you happen to be wearing your seatbelt. If you're wearing your seatbelt at the time this happens, you might want to think about how you're gonna deal with that.

I can't remove my concealment garment if I have a seatbelt down across my body. The first thing I'm gonna have to do is reach back and release that seat belt. As it comes out of the way I'm going to open my concealment garment, grab my pistol, come straight up, orient, and then extend. And what we haven't talked about is a situation where the threat is actually at the driver's side and we've decided to use a firearm because we have no other choice. As the firearm comes up, and orients in this direction, as we're gonna cross our body, just like any other seated situation, we're gonna go parallel with our thighs.

If we're staying in the vehicle and we go parallel with our thighs, and lean this way, we can still get a full extension by leaning towards the passenger side of the car, without jamming the firearm into the window. Of course, I wouldn't want to do that if we were to jam the front of the firearm into the window, not only would we maybe not reach full extension, but it's possible we could take the firearm out of battery and it wouldn't fire at all. So we're gonna lean back, and extend this way so that we have enough room inside the vehicle to get that extension. In front of our line of sight, parallel with our line of sight, towards the threat, and then touch and press as appropriate. If we were to want to get out of the vehicle with a firearm drawn, one of the best ways to do this without worrying about getting hung up on the steering wheel, we wouldn't want to go into the steering wheel, we wouldn't want to go here and jam against the steering wheel.

One of the best things to do is simply gonna be to come up, come across, parallel with our thighs, find the steering wheel on purpose, and rotate over the top as we go out of the vehicle. By doing it that way, we make sure that the muzzle never points down at our lower body as we get out, and we make sure that we aren't jamming it into the steering wheel where it would get caught and hung up as we tried to exit the vehicle, or orient the firearm towards a threat. Check out more videos just like this one at the Personal Defense Network.