Caleb recently blogged about shooting on the move in a competition context and one of the things he said really resonated with my overall philosophy about SOM in general: “In a match, shooting on the move isn’t a ‘can I’ question, but a ‘should I’ question.”
Over the past year or so I’ve done some SOM-specific classes for law enforcement agencies and I always begin the class with a very similar point. Before we talk about how to shoot on the move, we need to think about why to shoot on the move.
First, I begin with two assumptions:
- People shoot better when standing still than while moving. So if I need maximum shooting ability, I should stand still instead of moving.
- People can move faster when they’re not trying to shoot accurately. So if I need maximum movement speed, I should run instead of shooting.
That leads to a pretty important conclusion. I should only shoot on the move if I’m both (a) moving fast enough to make it worth the compromise of my shooting and (b) shooting well enough to make it worth the compromise of my movement.
All too often, shooters practice their SOM by moving at a snail’s pace and launching a barrage at targets as fast as they can. Outside of some very limited competition settings, emptying the gun in the space of two steps isn’t accomplishing anything useful in terms of moving your feet. My goal isn’t to shoot faster while moving slowly. My goal is to move faster while getting good hits. Or as I say in class, think foot speed not trigger speed.
And if you can’t move fast enough to matter, don’t move … or don’t shoot.
Train hard & stay safe! ToddG
This is the same philosophy that Paul Howe teaches about shooting on the move. He has even gone into giving several examples of it during his experience in Somalia. It seems to go against what we see in the movies, on the action pistol range, and what other instructors may teach, but it has a lot of really well thought out merit.
I know in my case I have enough problems shooting or running without trying to combine them. :p
Shooting on the move is important and should be practiced because shooting is what you should do if your ALREADY moving and have a threat.
Suvorov – Does Howe maintain the stance he’s published in his article – mostly either or?
Always made sense to me. Ken Hackathorn was big on shooting while moving – I gathered partly because it’s hard to stay still when someone is close and shooting at YOU and for darkness where even a little movement can work in your favor. Interesting stuff.
The IPSC Superman
I always thought that was cool as hell…
Great article! You hit this one of the park!!
Moving while shooting is really intended for close-up encounters. You hope to move faster than the opponent can track you with his gun. The question is whether you can track him accurately enough to make it worth while.
I used to live in a place where there was a tire swing hanging from a tree. I’d practice with an airsoft gun, running past the tire and trying to put my shots through the “donut hole” while I was moving. I got pretty good at it, but of course the tire wasn’t shooting back. I recommend doing something similar to that, to sharpen your skill.
And what about the bad guy who’s NOT shooting at you while you engage his buddy? What if you’re moving slowly enough for him to hit YOU?
Or what if you are just standing there and he decides to SOM…
Shooting on the Move is a skill-set required by all shooters in competition and defensive settings. It is also fact of probability that someone standing still will get hit more than a person that moves.
“Fact of probability” from where?
That’s the entire point. Moving slowly does not, in fact, make someone harder to hit. Ken Hackathorn was the first person I heard discuss this and as has Paul Howe per Suvorov’s comment above. We’ve seen it many times running force on force whether it be Sims, airsoft, or SIRTs.
As JoeFromSidney points out, if your goal is to make yourself harder to hit you need to move enough to make yourself hard to track. As distance extends past very short range, the amount of movement needed to achieve that goes up.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Probability
I never said anything about being slow. The faster you move the less likely you will get hit. However you have to practice the skill in order to enhance it. There is a Police shooting video where a suspect “dances” around a cop’s attempts to shoot him from 1 foot away.
If you are moving then you are much less likely get hit. The faster you move the probability of you getting hit goes down.
If you practice shooting on the move then you may be able to enhance your skill set to the point where you will gain a significant advantage.
The problem is that people confuse contexts. What a uniformed cop needs may be different from what the armed citizen needs. What the armed citizen needs may be different than what a S.F. soldier needs.
Shooting while moving is only useful in a narrow niche. If you’re working with a team, stopping to shoot a threat blocks the door and keeps the rest of your team out. Shooting and moving makes a lot of sense when you have a lot of friends with guns waiting for you to get out of the way.
I don’t see much other use for it.
I agree with John Hearne in this case. There is a very small niche, almost nill, where there would be a benefit in SOM. Even with extreme practice there is still the realization that you are accountable for every round that exits the gun. Is anybody that good in an adrenaline induced scenario? I think not…
Now if we were talking quick sporadic movements after recognition of the attack and then setting and taking the shot…different story.
I think we are getting off track here. This was about Caleb’s article and Tom’s opinions drawn from that article. The original article was about competitive shooting. Not SWAT teams performing dynamic entries, armed citizens defending themselves, or Cops getting into gunfights. It was about the difference between A and B Class shooter and Master Grand Master shooters in a sport. If you want to break the threshold of Master class or IDPA expert then you need to learn to shoot on the move.
That’s what Caleb’s article was about. It’s not what mine was about, though…