I never tried drawing and firing on the clock till today. I figured it probably took a full second to look up from the phone and then look back down and hit the stop button.
Biggest thing learned today is how slow it is to reach, draw and get on target!
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For the sake of fairness I started the stopwatch with my trigger finger. I then had to reach in with the same hand whereas I think my hand would already be there and working slightly out of the holster if the hair was standing up on my neck.
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Probably “hair standing up on your neck” isn’t justification for starting to draw your gun.
The accepted standard is a more realistic (and most importantly, consistent) start position such as hands at shoulder height or held out in front in a ‘surrender position’ or hands up palms out in a “I’m not a threat” or “back off” position. Or just a natural standing position hands loose at sides. Don’t probably get to start hand on gun when it’s defensive. Maybe if you’re pocket carrying (assuming you have perfect situational awareness which isn’t possible), but if you pocket carry, definitely run the react/draw/hit drills from the pocket on a timer as well.
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Bingo!
I don’t think it’s unreasonable for my hand to be in my pocket.
For the timed challenge making sure the holster got hooked and didn’t come out along with turning my pocket inside out ate up a lot of time in my mind.
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Maybe, maybe not. You aren’t always going to know ahead of time that lethal force will be needed imminently. Need to run it both ways, hand in pocket, and just walking up to the line and then going at the beep from hands up
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In a competition, the starting position is whatever the rule of the competition requires.
In a defensive crisis, the starting position is however you happen to be at GO time.
In timed practice, I think it’s important to compare apples to apples — i.e. benchmark from the same start position each time. Whatever you think most likely in your defense or competition seems reasonable.
Definitely, it’s important to practice and learn your capability from all plausible starting points — hands up, hands down, hands staged, hands occupied, facing away, etc. I think it’s worthwhile to time different positions so you know what’s faster and what’s slower and by how much. But in tracking progress on the universal increments: • establish grip, • draw, • present, • fire
I think it helps to do most timing from a single start position.
Personally, I benchmark from a semi-staged relaxed “fig leaf” position. I am willing to rip a fingernail off on my belt in a fight for life. But I’m not willing to do it twelve times during a practice session — I only carry so many bandaids, and need my hands to do more than heal in between sessions. So I “cheat” my primary start, and do some work from other positions to understand how they differ.
I agree that including unrelated activity (messing with camera, Mantis, kitchen timer, etc) within a measured period of 1-4 seconds will render the time measurement sort of meaningless.
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My “iron” sights are milled into the stainless steel frame of my Centennial.
They aren’t going to get knocked out of alignment
They don’t depend on batteries
They can’t snag on anything
I think they are as reliable as it gets
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Reliability of those “sights” would definitely be a check on the pro side when doing pro/con analysis
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For my purposes iron sights have never failed me, even with my somewhat compromised vision. For EDC, my purpose is to hold “minute of bad guy” groups with reasonable speed at typical SD distances.
I’m currently working on point shooting so, no sights to worry about!
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always they don’t crack generally they don’t lose zero they won’t scoot off the gun unless they’re cheap and believe it or not point shooting with iron sights is actually easier for me I don’t trust red dots yet the tech is still a little new for me
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My H&K irons slid sideways, and they aren’t cheap lol. Everything can and will fail.
Having two sighting systems vs one is more reliable, and the red dot is faster and more accurate. See video I posted earlier
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