Par Times for Defensive Drills

[frontlander]

Howdy all. A shooting buddy and I were doing some shotgun shooting today. Weather conditions cut our range time short (30 degrees, 30 mph wind and snowing) but we did get to run a few drills with my new shot timer. The drill: 3 bowling pins set 7 yards out, 2 yards between each pin. We started in the low ready position, round chambered, safety on. It seemed it was taking both of us about 1 second to raise up, find the sight picture (I was using ghost ringed 870, he a beaded Mossberg, both 18" barrels) and make a hit on the first pin. The next hit took another 0.5 second with the final hit coming at about 2.0 seconds. We were both quite surprised with our slowness. Especially when starting in the low ready position. We were both actually a few hundredths faster when we started with the gun unmounted. My theory is that the pendulum swing of bringing the gun up from low ready is hard to stop in order to find the proper sight picture. What sort of part times should we be shooting for in this type of drill? How long should it take to raise a gun from low ready (or any of the other positions) and make an accurate center hit on a CNS-sized target at 7 yards?

 

[Dave McC]

How high is up?

Lessee, you're firing off 3 shots in two seconds, and since you didn't say, we have to assume with good hits.At 7 yds,spread is minimal,so doing this requires a bit of precision.If you can neutralize 3 opponents in a crisis in two seconds, your chances of survival are better than normal.

The big variance in this will be reaction time. People differ greatly in how fast they react.

Once you groove in and practice some, sight acquisition and firing stroke will be faster, but the limiting factor still will be reaction time.

For comparison's sake, back when the State of Md gave me free ammo, I used this exercise for both demos and practice.

With a full mag and chamber, safety on, fire one round at each of 5 targets(Used the tombstone target) at 15 yards. The shotgun was down around my waist at the start. Time ran 5 seconds or less, sometimes down around 4.

I'm sure someone with better reaction times and hi tech equipment could beat that handily.

And BTW, where do you live? Frost this time of year means not close to me, it touched 90 yesterday.

HTH...

 

[Al Thompson]

Par times are a bit difficult to pin down. Without actually trying your drills, I can't offer an opinion.

Here's a link to some handgun drills that may give you a yardstick.

http://www.kuci.org/~dany/firearms/all_drills.html

Erick should have some good data as he's an adjunct instructor at Gunsite.

 

[frontlander]

We were more surprised by the time it took to react to the buzzer, acquire the first target, and fire than anything. Beins' that it takes me from 1.25 to 1.5 sec. to draw a handgun from an inside the waistband holster under a jacket and make a center hit on a 7 yard target, I thought that starting with a mounted gun would be much faster. But then I've practiced my draw thousands of times and I'm just starting out with the serious shotgun (have shot lots of clay pigeons and live birds).

Dave: I'm in Montana. We just had a nice June storm that dumped nearly 6" of moisture on us in 3 days. Most of it was rain but the higher elevations (where I'm located) had a foot or more of snow. This storm broke a 4 year drought. Last year we received only 6" of moisture the entire year. Now people are worried about flooding.

 

[Correia]

Frontlander, I don't know if this helps. I have some times from the last 3 gun match I shot in. However the drill was the one that Dave described above. 5 shots on metal tombstones.

I'll just look at the top 10 shooters. Because there were some truly abysmal times below that! We did basic variants of this stage 4 times. (2 birdshot, 2 with slugs) Surprisingly there were not very big differences in time between slugs and shot.

Times ranged from 2.89 to 6.53. Average for the top ten shooters was 5.16.

The fastest shooters, 2.39, 2.91, 3.19, 3.32. etc. were shooting semi autos. The fastest shooter was using an 26 inch bbl. 10 shot extension ported 11-87.

I was the fastest pump shooter (18 inch 870) at 4.52, 4.02, 4.57, and 4.52. The first two are birdshot times, the second two are slug times. The first 4.52 was because I shot the last target twice. I hit it, it was falling, but I shot quick enough that it looked like it was holding still, so I hit it again. If I hadn't done that I would have broke 4 seconds! And that would have been a personal record! Arrggh.

Now if you get out into the pro shooters, then the times on these drills drop drastically. These guys fire shotguns so fast your head will spin.

 

[Al Thompson]

Erick, your targets were IPSC type targets right? Those times on bowling pins might be tough.