Defensive Shooting While Lying Down

Here's another important video from the Personal Defense Network. The next step in this process of having pictured someone falling down or being in a grounded position during a critical incident, would of course be laying all the way down. If you were in this position, able to see a threat, needing to engage it before you sat up, maybe your athletic ability or your abdominal strength doesn't allow you to sit up very quickly, you may need to shoot from this position. Again, we want to make sure that we're not gonna hit ourselves with the bullets that we're trying to fire at the threat. We're going to drop that strong side leg flat down as we come across our body and extend out.

So we'll start in this position where we've landed on the ground and during the presentation, we're gonna get that leg out of the way, about the same time we make contact with the grip of the firearm. Center! Right! You'll sit back up, Jeremiah. We're now going to look and see what would happen if we were in the same type of position but we landed on our left side.

We're gonna have the head up this way, your feet are going to be kicked out to the... further out. We're gonna have our head up at this direction, feet down at this direction, we've now fallen. When you practice this position, it's important to make sure that your arm is not under your body. If you fall down, you may instinctively put your hands up against your body to protect the rib cage, protect your torso.

After that initial impact, you want to then cognitively or intuitively move your hands out of the way so that you have them, and they're free to move in front of your body where you're gonna be using any of your skills as you come into that position. Make sure that you feel your rib cage down on the ground when you get ready to practice. Also note that, we're not using any special pads or any special surface area here. We're just training on a hard surface. If we have a dirt range, we're gonna train on the dirt.

We're gonna train in, as realistic way as we can without causing injury to ourselves or others. The procedure to extend, touch and press from this position is gonna be exactly the same as it is while standing. It's gonna be much harder however while grounded to get two handed shooting positions. If you don't need two hands to get the shot you need to get, the balance of speed and precision will allow you to shoot one handed. By all means do so because it's going to be much more efficient in these grounded positions Center!

And now returning to a seated position, and going over to the right side. This is going to be the most difficult position obviously to get the firearm out of the holster. It's also important while we're in these positions that we think about our ready position, and where we would be, if we were staged to address a threat or immediately after addressing a threat with shots where we would come back to it. We wouldn't always go right back to the holster. So in this position particularly, for safety sake and because it would be completely impractical to re-holster, Jeremiah is gonna come back to the ready position after a string of fire.

Right! Center! Notice that in this position, the ready position is modified. It's not quite in as close to the body and it's not up by the chest. Similarly, if Jeremiah rolls back over with the firearm out to where he's in a position where his left side is touching the ground, we'll see that we can get into almost exactly the same ready position we would get into, if we were standing.

In the back, with his legs out in front of him, if he's lying on his back with his legs in front of him, we're gonna see another modified ready position that keeps the muzzle up off of our bodies so that we're not pointed. And then from this ready position, we can still engage targets. Center! When engaging from the ready position, there's no need to flatten that leg out because we're coming straight through the center. This allows us to have more stable base with both sides of our body equalized.

Left! As always, this firearm needs to be de-cocked and it's de-cocked on the way back into the ready position. Consistency in our firearms handling, regardless of position is incredibly important. We're gonna holster the firearm and go into one last position. If Miles were to fall off forward, facing his potential threat and then needed to use his firearm, he's gonna reach back and draw, keeping the firearm parallel with his body, orienting the muzzle towards the threat and extending straight out in front of him with his strong hand.

What he's gonna do with his weak hand, is either, get into a partial push-up position with his left hand, clearing the way for him to get the firearm out and extended, so he can look through the firearm and into intuitive shooting position, where of course align the sights on the target, if the balance, its speed and precision, dictated the need or it can simply use his elbow and at least prop himself up the distance between the bottom of his forearm and his shoulder. But he definitely wants to get up off the ground. You wouldn't wanna be down with your chest flat depending on your body strength and your weight your mobility, your dexterity, and your coordination. You were gonna get your body up off the ground, as much as you can, to engage that target out in front of you posing a lethal threat Right! And this position again, it'd be very uncomfortable to try to re-holster.

We're just gonna stay in the ready position, and we'd probably get up to at least a kneeling if not a standing position prior to re-holstering. Left! Of course, if I happen to be wearing my firearm and I'm lying on the couch, watching TV, or I've been pushed down into this position by someone else where I've fallen over the couch, whatever the situation may be, I may need to shoot from this position. Clearly I can get my firearm out of the holster and extend into a position to shoot, much easier from here, than I can try and stand up and do that first. Efficiency is the key.

If the firearm was extended fully in my line of sight as I come up out of the holster, I can take the shot in any position from my body, as long as the firearm is efficiently extended into my line of sight and out towards the target, that's gonna be the trick, I'm gonna get up as I can, when I can and then react efficiently to the situation as it occurs. If I'm lying down at the moment of recognition and I can get the firearm into my line of sight, I'm gonna use it in that position. Again, unorthodox shooting situations include a variety of unorthodox shooting posi... Check out more videos, just like this one at the Personal Defense Network.