I recently read a book written by Andy Stanford titled Surgical Speed Shooting. It was published in 2001. He has trained under instructors such as Massad Ayoob, Clay Babcock, and Jim Cirillo. Stanford was a firearms instructor until recently in 2015 when he decided to take a stab at making music.
Stanford starts this book by going over the quickest ways to stop a deadly threat. He covers a few different physical stops and how long the attacker may still be able to function for after encountering these. He explains that in his findings, untrained shooters can shoot four shots per second with a handgun. That is pretty quick. He covers ways to mitigate muzzle flip and shoot quicker and more accurately. Lets face it, it doesn’t matter how quick one can shoot unless they are putting shots on target. He covers techniques that he has learned and borrowed from Clay Babcock. For example, he covers Babcock’s idea of in a two-handed grip to keep the support hand’s fingers pointed towards the ground at a 30-45 degree angle opposed to the typical 90 degree support hand hold. This helps cam the muzzle down. This technique applies to those-shooting semi-autos. The support hand should be much less of an angle when shooting a revolver. Stanford gives many great pointers and many of them are simple but sometimes get overlooked. He even explains his reasons behind each technique which helps me justify why I might give a particular technique a try and see if it works better for me than a technique that I might have been using beforehand. A way that I justify adopting a new technique is if it makes my shots quicker or more accurate. I like how he even broke down each part of the shooting stance and explains why recoil effects you differently between the modified weaver stance and the isosceles stance. The techniques he gives are all ones that might help the shooter fire with quicker split times and without stringing shots and still getting acceptable accuracy. He explains that the shooter can identify around 30 distinct images per second. This is how people are able to shoot accurately quickly. Stanford even covers some retention shooting and what he doesn’t like to see shooters to do and why. After this he touches pretty heavily on Clay Babcock’s revolver manipulating techniques. These skills are often overlooked. He even gives some great pointers for the left handers shooting revolvers. Overall, I would definitely recommend this read. It was quick just under 150 pages. Even being this short, I felt that I got enough new information out of it that it was worth it to me.
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