Session 2: Defensive Accuracy: High Center Chest

So let's talk about the structure, this human anatomy structure, and where and how we can best stop the threat. We have a concept called combat accuracy or defensive accuracy. And defensive accuracy revolves around the idea that what we're trying to do with our gun, with our bullets, significantly affect the target's ability to present a lethal threat. That's how we define it. We are looking to significantly affect the target's ability to present a lethal threat. Sometimes when I ask a group of shooters out on the range, if I ask a group of shooters, what is your goal? When you pull the trigger on a gun, what is your goal? What do you expect to happen? Because I think very specifically, we need to be shooting with an expectation. We shouldn't be shooting hoping the bad guy is gonna stop. We should be shooting with an expectation that something is gonna happen. Otherwise, maybe shooting isn't the right thing to do. We shouldn't just be closing our eyes, pulling a trigger and hoping the bad man stops. We should have a specific expectation. That's part of pulling the trigger responsibly. What is our expectation? And people will say things like they wanna hit the target. Hitting the target, great target shooting expectation, great target shooting goal. I wanna hit the target. But we know that people have been hit by bullets and it has shown no immediate effect on their ability or interest to hurt someone. So hitting the target's not enough. Somebody might say, stop the threat, okay. That's again, we hope the threat will stop, but it's not reasonable to expect based on what we know about physics and physiology and empirical evidence about people being shot, it's not reasonable to expect that we're gonna fire a single pistol bullet and it's gonna stop the threat. The nature of the damage that our defensive pistols do to people doesn't usually result in what's been called a one-shot stop, physiologically, and we'll get back to that in a second. Even rifle bullets. If you don't hit specific parts of the body, it's not reasonable to expect, even a high powered rifle is going to stop a threat. So focusing on defensive hand guns especially as we usually do, we need to have a more specific articulation of our goal, of our expectation, and that's where this definition of defensive accuracy comes in. We want each bullet, every time we pull the trigger, we want each firing of a round to significantly affect the target's ability to present a lethal threat. That's reasonable, that we can expect. Overwhelmingly, the way we do that is by hitting our intended target. And we choose the intended target of the high center chest, and we describe the highest center chest physically as below the collarbone, above the diaphragm and in between the nipples. This is the area where we want to put the bullets. Overwhelmingly, bad guys are oriented towards us when they're trying to hurt us. If they're shooting at us, if they're running at us to stab us, we have that area available. With that description of that area, we have that area available to us to use as a target area. If I'm defending someone else, if I'm the bad guy shooting in this direction, or I'm going to stab someone and you guys are gonna defend that person from your angle, you're still shooting into the same area of the body but we would describe it differently. It's important to remember that the body is three-dimensional. The human torso is like a tube, like an oval. If we chop off at the collarbone and look down, it's a little oval tube, and inside the tube is some stuff. Some of the stuff's more important than other stuff. So if we look at the human anatomy, in this area, here's your collarbony parts. The center, and we keep it high at the bottom of the rib cage, this is the area that we're looking at. Under the collarbone, above the diaphragm in the middle, high center chest. We wanna go through that area. We don't wanna just hit that area in a two dimensional sense. If I'm looking at that area on that representation of a three-dimensional target and I'm shooting from this angle, I would rather hit over here. We think about the three-dimensional tube and pass through the tube, then I would hit over here on this side and maybe just hit the pectoral muscle and part of the rib cage and go out through this arm. Still a bad thing to have happened to you if you're the good guy, and something that will probably affect the bad guy's ability to hurt us, but not the same as hitting over here and driving at an angle through the center of that tube that is the high center chest. So we need to remember not just that picture but also this picture. The spine is here, heart lungsy parts in there. We don't wanna just cut through here, we wanna drive through the middle. I'm gonna through the middle. So if you picture inner oval or inner circle inside of the tube, you wanna go through that inside the edge, up above the bottom, down below the top. There's a little ball in there we wanna go through. If we think about physiological effects, that that's kind of the end of the story. Put holes through that area quickly so that we break down the ability of the body to process oxygen, to pump blood with that processed oxygen. We break down the body's ability to fight, and we might even hit the spine and break down the ability of the messages to get from the brain, to the hands and into the rest of the body. We might break down the body's ability to stay upright, if we can cut through that nervous system. There's a lot of potential for damage in that area. Given this surface size, in other words the ability that you would have to actually hit the area and the importance and the vitalness of the stuff in that area, this is our best proposition for shooting under the circumstances of the typical defensive moment, the dynamic critical incident that we see people actually need to defend themselves with guns. The best solution I can give you is, multiple rounds delivered quickly through the high center chest. Rounds that go through the high center chest are very likely to significantly affect the target's ability to present a lethal threat. And based on what I've seen, thousands of students, hundreds of rangers, dozens of times a year, the average person under the circumstances of a dynamic critical incident, very likely that you'll be able to put multiple rounds into the high center chest.