When do you use it?

   For novice shooters, they may have to be no more than a couple of yards from the target to apply this technique. It’s very fast because the action is essentially no more than shoving the gun between you and the target. As you become more experienced you might be able to stretch this distance to as far as five yards.

Hip/Point/Retention Shooting

With point/hip/retention shooting, you have no visual reference of the gun or the gun’s sights as they relate to the target. It’s a close-range technique and a very fast technique, but it requires a tremendous.

What is it?

   The best way to explain this method is to describe it as cowboy shooting, at least the cowboy shooting you see in movies where the gun clears leather, is rotated toward the target, and is fired from the hip or near the hip in the retention position. This is a very hard skill to master because the gun is being aimed at the body position without a visual reference to its relationship to the target.

When do you use it?

   Obviously, this technique should be used when your target/attacker is very close—inside three yards—because with the gun closer to your body, it’s more difficult for the attacker to grab hold of. It’s a very fast technique, but it takes an experienced shooter to be able to hit a target, much less a vital zone, with this method at any distance at all. Most will max out at about three yards.

Making the Call On Aiming Technique

   Which is best? What might surprise you is that none of these techniques is better than the other. They’re all equally important because, from a tactical standpoint, they should all be applied based on the situation. If you’re three yards from the target and take the time to establish a precision sight picture, you might get your gun taken away from you or pull the trigger too late to save your life. Conversely, if you’re at 15 yards and try to Which is best? What might surprise you is that none of these techniques is better than the other. They’re all equally important because, from a tactical standpoint, they should all be applied based on the situation. If you’re three yards from the target and take the time to establish a precision sight picture, you might get your gun taken away from you or pull the trigger too late to save your life. Conversely, if you’re at 15 yards and try to shoot from the retention position, you could incapacitate your adversary with laughter because he’ll be cackling at your inability to hit anything. The key is to know your limitations with each technique and apply them accordingly.

   An experienced shooter will move between these techniques subconsciously as the situation dictates. The practice has taught them what they need to see or feel given the range, target size, and perceived available time. If you’re five yards from a threat and you think you need to point-shoot in order to incapacitate the threat before it reaches or shoots you, that’s a noble goal. However, the reality might be that you must shoot with a target focus or at least a flash-sight picture in order to get the hits you need as soon as they’re needed.

   To try to put some numbers to this and after the expenditure of a lot of ammunition, I found that I could keep five shots inside a 5-inch circle at 25 yards using the precision sight picture. The problem was, it took me about 15 seconds to do it. I also found that between one and three yards I could shoot from the retention position and keep five shots inside a 5-inch circle, about half the time in less than 2.5 seconds.

   With the gun indexing method, most of the time I could keep five shots inside a 5-inch circle out to about four yards and within about 3 seconds. By using the flash sight picture, I could stretch that distance to about 12 yards, but it took me about 5 seconds at that distance. As for the target focus technique, for me, it worked about as well as the flash-sight picture; however, I had to switch to a different handgun with a very bold XS Sights’ Big Dot Sight for the best results.

   Interestingly, with all the techniques where the handgun was being fired out in front of my face, I sometimes found I’d use multiple techniques for individual shots within the five-shot string. This was possible and happened because of conditioning/ practice. My brain recognized when the gun was indexed properly, when the front sight was positioned properly, and when I had the correct flash or even precision sight picture, and it made my finger pull the trigger.

How Do You Train and Practice Aiming?

   The best way to train or practice is the crawl, walk, run, method. Pick a reasonable distance, something between three and seven yards, and become proficient with the precision sight picture. When you get to where you can put five shots inside a 5-inch circle in less than 5 seconds, you’ll very likely be using the flash sight picture but not realize it. Then, you can try to do the same with a target focus, and ultimately, hopefully, progress with the same results by doing nothing but indexing the gun.

   As for effective hip/point/retention shooting where you can reliably hit the vital zone, that takes a hellacious amount of time on the range and lots and lots of ammo. I was once conducting a torture test with a Remington R51 and after about 250 rounds became bored. So, I started hip shooting/quick drawing. At first, I could hardly hit a silhouette target at 10 yards. But after the remaining 750 rounds and another two days on the range, I was getting hits from the holster in about a second. Even now, and after a lot more practice, I need to be inside five yards to reliably get vital zone hits with this technique.

   So, which technique should you use? All of them, but more specifically, the one that’ll allow you to get vital zone hits as fast as possible, given the situation.