Well, since somebody brought up Darrell, might as well talk about him. Dean Speir, a rather famous and awfully sharp gunwriter eulogized him here, and you'll find my short remembrance on the same website.

I took training, repeatedly, from Darrell, over several years -- the first time at the recommendation of Chuck Donaldson, the MPD cop who issued me my first carry permit. I liked the guy, and more importantly, I liked that he kept looking at the received knowledge/belief/superstition in the gun community in terms of facts. "You want to talk about 'muscle memory?'" he'd ask. "Great. Show me the medical literature that says that there's such a thing. The Strasbourg Goat Tests? Where's the evidence that they every took place? Gimme."

He was like that.

You'll find much of his writing on his own website at http://www.plusp.com/classroom. Given some of the discussion here, of late, I'd suggest that you start reading with http://www.plusp.com/classroom/lesson25.php .

Hell of a nice guy, with one strange sense of humor, and a lot to say. I'd recommend reading his essays, and deciding -- and researching -- for yourself if what he says makes sense.

Thanks for that, I was beginning to feel a bit stupid.

I tend to agree with the position given in lesson 25. I've been robbed before, and I was in a blind panic when it happened. My reaction would not be to calmly assume a perfect stance and commence shooting. It would be to grab the gun and...well...to be perfectly honest, aim like I was pointing my finger at him. That's how I try and practice. I think one of these days I'm going to have to find a way to have a friend disrupt my concentration via sound (and do so in a safe manner) when I'm shooting to see what my reactions would really be like in a life or death situation.

Bartleby

Hmmm. My interactions with Darrell were limited to his basic two-day carry class in late 1999. I didn't ever do any others because, well, he wasn't my taste in instructors. He struck me as overly dogmatic on questions for which there isn't really one right or best answer. And it seemed that the more well-known self-defense writers whom he disliked or with whom he disagreed, he couldn't say one nice thing about--as if he enjoyed slamming everything about them, as if it were all or nothing; writers were either self-serving pretenders who should be disregarded and spat on, or all-knowing heros who could say and do no wrong.

But the thing that bothered me most was his insistence on point shooting (though, if I'm recalling correctly, he wanted it called something else). Assuming that my chest level is roughly at the chest level of the perp, hold the gun out at chest level and fire, and you'll hit the chest of the perp. My most vivid memory of that whole discussion was when he said that this would work out to 50 yards. That was the moment that I rolled my eyes and he lost me forever. In my view, a person who can insist on the truth of such a palpably absurd proposition can't be trusted to be a good judge as to whether *any* idea is sound or not. Reasonable minds can disagree on whether one should try and/or train oneself to use sights at, say, 7 yards or less. But go out the range sometime and try hitting an IPSC target at 50 yards by "feel" alone, and let me know how it works out for you.

I have no knowledge of Darrell's qualities as a person/father/husband/neighbor/etc. I have no reason to doubt the many who quite uniformly report him to be a fine man in all such aspects. But as an instructor in firearms, as I say, he just wasn't a good fit for me.

I think it'd be really informative to literally "hit the broad side of a barn" -- cover the side of an old barn or other large structure with paper, stand back 25/50 yards and see just exactly where those shots that miss a Trasnstar II are going.

See there are others that were not impressed with DM, and his teachings!

I was fortunate to take one of Darrell Mulroy's last carry classes a couple of months before he passed away. To me, his straightforward, challenging and opinionated teaching style was quite refreshing. He was very much an icon to the local armed self-defense community.

Say what you will about Darrell's reliance on what we now call "point shooting", but it DOES WORK at relatively close ranges and it will save your life. He had us practicing it in near-black lighting conditions at the Burnsville Pistol Range and it was very impressive how easy it was to rapidly achieve multiple COM hits.

To this day I finish-up my target shooting practices with Darrell's point shooting drills.

I went through 2 of his CC classes and I can't remember one time where he said point shooting was good out to 50 yards....we did all our shooting at combat range...7 yards.....most of LEO shootings occur at 3 yards or less anyway......

I agree that it's useful for people to learn that at close ranges you can usually shoot approximately where you need to be without waiting for a sight picture. With my long-slide Glocks, at least, I can usually hit an IPSC target out to 15 yards with my eyes closed. (That is, I'm lined up in front of it, draw and fire blind.) Other guns don't feel as naturally pointing for me. It's also good to know that if you level the muzzle right out of leather, you can be roughly on target before you even bring the gun up.

But that's a lousy way to *plan* on having your lethal-force encounter. It's great to have it as a backup, in case there's no time to get the into a standard sighted stance, or to have the sense that you're on target before your visual cortex registers a sight picture, but I'm queasy about teaching people to rely on that.

As for 50 yards, maybe that day was the only day he said it. I've spurted out some stupid things, not realizing until later how stupid they were, or instantly regretting them but deciding they're not worth correcting because they were just throwaway comments. But I remember it plain as day, because of how his credibility dropped to zero in a split second. I was stunned by it.

That said, results speak for themselves. His style and teachings obviously gave considerable confidence to many, many students over the years, and his personality obviously won many friends and admirers. Perhaps I missed out on something great by deciding he wasn't a good fit for me, and by not spending time to get to know him personally. My intention isn't to run down his entire life or his life's work. It's just to say, it didn't work for me.

Exactly. A nearly foolproof, automatic method to save your life when circumstances (darkness, surprise, the crippling effects of your own physiology) won't allow you to engage, with more refined target shooting practices, a determined assailant.

Darrell taught you well.

How many shoot-outs have you been in lately that it didn't work for you???....I'm guessing that you are also a CC instructor by your post...most LEO's are taught using sights and their miss ratio is over 80%...

I am finding Mulroy's writing to be as dogmatic as the writing he disparages. For instance, he writes here:



But I found this:



A similar explanation by another scientist is here:



This matches what we can intuit very well: you can practice something until it's "second nature."

When tying my shoes, I don't think, "The bunny goes twice around the tree and down the hole" -- my fingers just know what to do.

Sure you can, but the adrenalin is not rushing through your body..most LEO's can't even tell you how many shots they shot, and most will tell you that you lose all your senses and develop tunnel vision...tying shoes and someone shooting at you is really different....now this is just what I have read about street shootings...

I have no doubt that "muscle-memory" exists and that humans can become very good at various physical activities with practice, but even the scientists admit that muscle memory is a perishable commodity; eg, "However, if an individual becomes ill and is bedridden for any length of time, (even) walking must be relearned.."

Also perishable without constant practice is the refined shooting process of stance, grip, sight alignment, sight picture, breath control and trigger squeeze.

When a life or death combat situation is suddenly thrust upon you the fight-or-flight adrenaline response may further incapacitate the more refined elements of target shooting for even the highly trained.

See "What Really Happens in a Gunfight": http://www.handgunsmag.com/tactics_training/what_happens_gunfight/index.html

Remember that Darrell was teaching a basic handgun survival technique to students who may have recently purchased a pistol and may have very little range time under their belts.

Certainly there are distinctions, and the existence or nonexistence of muscle memory is not the determining factor in evaluating point shooting.

Still, his insistence that the concept is an invention of gun writers makes me wonder: On what other fallacies are his theories based?

As with all training and lore, my take on it is this: take what's useful to me, leave the rest, and no hard feelings.

Sure, but for the most part, they do remember how to work their wacky triple-dipple-retention holsters and their guns.

I am going to stick with my intuition: Practicing is better than not practicing.