Like clockwork, every time police officers encounters a Type 3 uncooperative attacker, the comment section fills with phrases like “failure to stop” or “body-armor drill.” Or if the writer is a seasoned citizen, “Mozambique Drill.” Expert trainers will pontificate as to the necessity of “transitioning to the head” to make that “stopping shot.”
Despite such learned advice, where do we return? Center mass. The vast majority of training and qualification targets for both armed citizens and law enforcement have the “5-ring” or the preferred zone somewhere between the sternum and the stomach. For many, any hit from the sternum to the crotchal area is scored as a 5. Therefore, as long as the shooter in question spreads all their rounds out in the 5-ring, they pass the qualification and move on.
Some of you might be saying, “So, what’s wrong with that? They passed the qual. What more can we ask of them?” To that way of thinking, as long as their future attackers are all Type 1 and Type 2 felons, they should be fine. Any bullet that lands will do the job.
The problem is, there are Type 3 felons out there who aren’t impressed by the sight of guns and aren’t inclined to notice when bullets impact somewhere on their body.
We have numerous examples, the famous ones, and the ones most people have never heard of, such as: FBI Miami Shootout, North Hollywood Bank Robbery, and the Skokie,Illinois bank robber. We had the recent Meriden, Connecticut EDP who just kept on killing with a baseball bat despite being confronted with a gun and shot several times. There have been lots of others over the years.
Experienced trainers have said, “shot placement” until they’re blue in the face. One of the primary examples was North Hollywood and the robbers who were wearing body armor. The 9mm rounds were bouncing off and officers kept on hammering “center mass” despite their bullets doing nothing.
Before you paint me as a cop-basher, allow me a moment to consider common LE firearms training practice. In the police academy, all officers are run through the failure to stop drill or body armor drill. They’re taught to fire two to the chest and then put one in the head. That’s one drill during the entire firearms training program. Cadets are told, “If you ever encounter a failure to stop, shoot the two plus one to the face.” Sounds good, right?
The Primacy Effect in Firearms Training
When I went through the academy, we likely fired 10 to 20 head shots compared to about 950 to 1000 center mass shots. Which aiming point on the target do you think was built into us as the default?
Also, after leaving the academy, about 99 percent of what was called “firearms training” was actually just shooting the state-mandated qualification course annually. The qual course had zero “failure to stop” drills.
What you end up with is officers who have now been on the street for five, seven, or ten years and they haven’t done the failure drill since they were cadets. What are the chances that, during a hyper-violent lethal force encounter with an armed felon, the officer will revert back to that one drill that they did a few times eight years ago?
Humans don’t “rise to the occasion” during deadly encounters, they default to whichever level of training they have mastered. If the qualification target awards a 5 score for any hit from the sternum to the stomach, that’s where the bullets will go.
Even the best agencies in the United States have somewhere around a fifty percent hit-to-miss ratio. The average is much lower. Going back to the shot placement discussion, we have to put the rounds that hit in a place where they’ll do the most good immediately, not some time later. During the Skokie, Illinois incident, despite being shot numerous times with a .45 ACP, the bank robber emptied two pistols at the lone officer in under one minute.
The Thoracic Triangle
It’s been around twenty years or so since I was introduced to the “thoracic triangle” target area. The TT is located by drawing a straight line from the bridge of the nose to the right nipple, over to the left nipple, and back up to the bridge of the nose.
The way it was related to me, everything in the TT is vital to humans; you have the tops of the lungs, the heart is at the bottom of the triangle, you have the spinal column, and the brain stem is at the top. The way my instructor explained it, he said, “If you start hitting stuff in the TT, the bad guy will tend to notice it.”
When firearms trainers endorse the failure to stop or body armor drill, they usually refer to the face/head shot as the “stopping shot.” Isn’t that the whole point of shooting a deadly felon who’s in the process of trying to kill you or an innocent person? Shouldn’t our goal for every round fired be a stopping shot?
Yeah, but sometimes bad guys just stop when you hit them anywhere in their body.
Yes, and some bad guys stop when you point a gun at them. Neither of those things help you when the Type 3 killer is hellbent on making you a dead person.
The problem is, you won’t know which type of attacker you’re dealing with until after the fight. What that means, from a practical standpoint, is that every deadly attacker should be treated as a Type 3 from the beginning. That’s the best way to ensure the survival of the defender and innocent victims.
Changing Our Training
History has shown that the “failure to stop” or “body armor drill” is almost never employed unless the defender in question is on their second, third, fourth, etc, deadly force fight. The defender who has yet to face a deadly attacker on the street will always default to shooting center mass. Sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn’t.
If we are truly serious about preparing the good guys to succeed and survive in the most violent and deadly encounters they could face, we need to be serious about where we train them to put their bullets and how we build on the primacy effect.
For our students, the “hit zone” for all of our targets, cardboard or paper, is the thoracic triangle. We don’t shoot the TT occasionally for a failure drill, we shoot it every time so that the habit is developed to keep the gun up high and put bullets in a place where they can do the most effective damage.
Paul G. Markel is a combat decorated United States Marine veteran. He is also the founder of Student of the Gun University and has been teaching Small Arms & Tactics to military personnel, police officers, and citizens for over three decades.
I see your thoracic triangle and raise you a pelvic girdle cuz muh body armor…..hurrrr durrrrr.
This is the sort of autistic hyper nerding nonsense that turns so many people off [insert thing here].
It’s fun for tryhards and children who like to argue about superheros. For the normies it acts as an elitist barrier.
Just put holes in the bad guy. Is that so hard?
The TT is the way I was trained, along with some others but primarily TT. But in actual DGU application I discovered TT was more difficult to achieve when both you and the bad guy are moving around so hits on center mass or other body parts worked. But on the type 3, it was the TT that ended the second one for good, and spinal shots that stopped and paralyzed the first one.
Yes. Aim High, Shoot Low