Editor’s Note: Be aware of your local and state as well as federal laws and how they apply to carrying firearms and self-defense. This article does not represent training advice/guidance. Please seek training from a professional firearms trainer for your self-defense needs.
You’re facing a deadly threat. You’re unsure of what your next move should be. Stress and tension are clouding your thoughts. What’s the “right” next move? Will you make the right choice, or the wrong one?
For years now, instructors have taught defensive shooting students to begin their response to a deadly threat by “getting off the X” — that is, not standing still like a compliant target for their opponent. There are any number of situations where this makes perfect sense.
But there are some where it does not. Every now and then you find someone on the gun-related internet — or even an instructor — who tells you that when danger breaks out you must ALWAYS move.
“Always” can be a dangerous word …
Totality of Circumstances
The courts tell us that deadly force situations must always be examined with consideration to “the totality of the circumstances.” And common sense tells us the exact same thing.
Let’s look at some hypothetical situations. Suppose you have seen the danger coming. You have wisely moved to the best available cover (something that stops bullets) at a position which gives you the best possible commanding view of the danger scene. Your weapon is drawn and ready to be fired if necessary. You know exactly where the danger is and how it would have to approach to harm you. You are in control of access and egress. This position is your “X”, the spot you’ll be in if and when you have to start shooting.
Why on Earth would you leave that dominating position? Just because somebody told you to always “get off the X”?
When To Move
The proverbial Bad Guy is coming at you from in close with a knife, club, or his hands reaching for your pistol? It does indeed make good sense to move as you shoot. Moving straight back is not your best option: the (bad) guy can move forward a whole lot faster than the (good) guy can move backward.
You’re caught in the open and under fire from multiple opponents? A run to cover starts looking awfully good, so long as you move as fast as you can and get to cover before you return fire. I invoke master instructor John Farnam’s advice here: “If you’re going to run, run! If you’re going to shoot, shoot!”
The trouble with moving and shooting simultaneously is that it’s difficult as hell. Your body is the shooting platform, and it’s going to bounce each time one of your feet hits the ground.
Real-World Cases
Example 1: Eli Dicken. This young armed citizen was the certified hero who stopped a mass murder in an Indiana shopping mall. When the gunman started killing people with a rifle, Dicken drew his compact 9mm pistol and opened fire from an estimated 42 yards. The opponent didn’t go down. Dicken moved closer, and fired some more. It is unclear whether he fired while moving or shot with a move-stop-fire cadence. His movement was apparently to secure hits. He succeeded.
Example 2: Jeff Hall. Some years ago I earned a black belt in Ho-Jutsu, the modernized art of martial arts combined with weaponcraft, which Soke Hall reconstituted for modern times with firearms. Hall himself is a multiple gunfight survivor. He teaches a class to police which he calls “Finish the Fight” which emphasizes a “stand your ground and shoot the opponent” philosophy. In his class, he discusses multiple cases of cops who tried to fire while running and failed to stop the threat, and multiple cases of officers who stood, aimed, and dropped their murderous opponents with center hits.
Example 3: the NYPD Stakeout Unit. I knew the two men on the squad who had killed the most armed criminals in face-to-face gunfights, Bill Allard and Jim Cirillo. Both knew how to shoot while moving … and both knew how difficult it was.
In one of Allard’s shootings, he was moving in on his two heavily armed opponents as he shot them — killing them both — and he did it to get a more effective angle of fire under those particular circumstances. Most of the time for both of those famous New York cops, their successful course of action was to take cover, carefully aim at the most vital parts of their opponents, and squeeze off the shots that put those bad people down and out.
Example 4: Jim Semone. This big-city Ohio cop prevailed in a dozen or more gunfights, one of them after he had been shot in the face with a .357 Magnum from ambush. Back in the 1980s when the late Ray Chapman and I were going around the country teaching Advanced Officer Survival Seminars for the Police Marksman Association, Jim was a guest lecturer for us in Ohio.
His advice for survival boiled down to “Suck it up for about a second, take a solid stance, aim your gun, and shoot your opponent dead center.” Suffice to say, it worked for him.
Example 5: “The Givens/Rangemaster Survivors.” Tom Givens is one of the all-time great gunfight survival instructors of our time. He has kept meticulous track of incidents in which his students have needed to use what he taught them. Tom teaches how to step off that X and draw and shoot, but he teaches it as only one component of the many skills one needs to survive a murder attempt.
He told me recently, “About 10% of our student incidents involved any real movement. I can only think of three in which the movement had an obvious important effect on the outcome. Two of those were at very close range, as in arm’s length in one case, and about 2.5 steps away in the other. In the third, the student moved away from innocents to draw fire away from them, while simultaneously moving to cover nearby.”
Tom added, “I think the emphasis on moving comes from force-on-force role play (FoF). There, everybody knows everybody has a gun, and the ‘bad guy’ is thinking, ‘When this guy moves, I will shoot him.’ I don’t care how well FoF is done, we cannot erase from the players’ minds that their opponent has a gun.”
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Givens concludes, “In actual incidents, the sudden appearance of a concealed handgun by the defender seems to knock the Bad Guy off the rails just long enough.”
Considering the Dynamics Involved
A basic truth of the shooting/moving thing is this: it is easier for a standing shooter to hit a moving target than for a moving shooter to hit a standing target, let alone for a moving shooter to hit a moving target.
A point to consider: the shotgun, with its spreading pattern of pellets, has always been the firearm of choice for moving targets. Consider the shotgun sports: skeet, trap, sporting clays. Find a trap or skeet shooter who is so good that he or she can reliably break 25 out of 25, or even 100 of 100, flying clay disks. Now put that many disks out on a backstop at the same distance and tell this ace shooter, “I want you to shoot on the run and hit those stationary targets from the same distance.”
They’ll probably tell you you’re nuts. And they’ll have a good point. (It may relieve the embarrassment if you tell them, “Some crazy guy in a gun article told me to ask you that.”)
As noted in the beginning of this article, “Get Off the X” is sometimes the best strategy.
But not always.
When getting off the X is the best strategy, now the choice is to shoot while moving or from a solid stance once you’re reached the place to which you chose to move (which hopefully also offers solid cover). In either case, you won’t want this to be the first time you’ve fired a gun while moving, or your first time shooting immediately after strenuously moving to your shooting position. There are super squad shooters out there who can shoot with accuracy on a dead run. Top instructor Gabe White comes to mind. Most of us, however, are not Gabe White.
There are few absolutes in training for the use of defensive firearms. “Get off the X,” I respectfully submit, is not one of those absolutes.
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