Aiming Center Mass vs. Quick Stop–Which is Better?

I remember the first deer that I shot.

I was about 80 yards away, waited until I had my angle, and hit it with a heart-double-lung shot with my .308. It bucked and then sprinted off as if it hadn’t watched enough TV to know how it was supposed to react when shot.

I was impatient, so we only waited a few minutes and went to where it had been when I took the shot.

Relieved to see bright red blood, we started tracking it and found it 150-200 yards away after having jumped 2 fences.

It was a clean shot—textbook, in fact. It was a South Texas deer, so I had way MORE than enough gun.

But it didn’t stop the deer instantly.

And if she would have been an attacker, we would have been hands-on before she dropped.

For years, this kind of confused me. Heart-lung shots would get me good kills, but rarely instant stops.  It really made me question self-defense teaching, because almost all of the self-defense literature said that you need to aim center-mass in a lethal force encounter–even with severely inadequate defensive pistol rounds.

This, even though there are cases every year of bad guys absorbing 5, 10, 15, or more rounds and still staying in the fight.

In a recent Force Science training I was at with Mike Musengo, he told us about a fellow officer who put multiple center-mass hits on a threat…including one that took out the aorta, and the attacker STILL stayed in the fight for 13.5 seconds with a non-functioning circulatory system.

The fact is, “clean kills” and “lethal hits” have a time component.  It’s OK if you shoot a grass eater that’s 100 yards away and it runs away from you for 10-15 seconds before expiring.

It’s NOT OK for a mortally wounded meat eater (2 legged or 4 legged) who’s charging you to have 10-15 seconds to put the hurt on you before expiring…like this:

When you break it down, stopping an attacker or stopping the threat is a function of eliminating the attacker’s intent, ability, and/or opportunity to keep hurting you.

You can take away opportunity by removing their mobility or their ability to use projectile weapons, moving behind cover, or other strategies.

You can take away their intent by convincing them that they should stop fighting.

And the most effective way to take away their ability is to interrupt their central nervous system either mechanically (trauma to the mid-brain, spinal cord, or the limb they’re using to attack you), hydraulically (blood flow delivering oxygen to the brain), or electrically (interrupt the signal between the brain and the muscles wielding the weapon(s)).

Center-mass shots depend on the attacker giving up, a drop in blood pressure, a hydraulic shockwave possibly traveling up the arteries and creating an aneurysm in the brain, or a bullet hitting the spinal cord. And, as we’ve seen in hunting and numerous after-action reports, a drop in blood pressure isn’t always a quick solution and sometimes falling causes blood pressure to rise back up to where the attacker is able to continue fighting.

Each critical hit that doesn’t immediately stop the threat speeds up the countdown until the threat is no longer a threat, but, because of the time component, this means that a threat that’s close to you may take MORE solid hits than one that’s further away.

When you’re talking about a situation where you need to use a firearm to defend yourself, you’re not talking about shooting a well-adjusted person. You’re talking about someone who, at that moment, is trying to cause you or another innocent person great bodily harm and who’s acting like a wild animal.

So, as a defensive shooter trying to improve survivability, the holy grail for me became, how do I stop a threat quickly with an under-powered weapon (pistol) without risking missing errant shots?  If an attacker doesn’t choose to stop attacking after the first shot, how can I minimize the damage that they are able to do to me, you, or my other friends, relatives, and clients?

One thing was that I did as a result was to train myself to see targets 3 dimensionally and started aiming for the spine, even with the armpit instead of aiming at center-mass.

The concept of “Aim small, miss small” comes into play here and if I miss my 1-2” target by 400%, I’m still making “combat accurate” hits on center-mass.

Then, if you can pile round after round, you have a very good chance of stopping the threat psychologically, hydraulically, or electrically while attempting to drill through to the spinal cord.

Worst case, you end up with the same number of rounds on target as if you would have aimed center-mass and the center mass hits hopefully slow down the head enough that you can transition to the head or pelvis>head if necessary.

Best case, you stop the threat much sooner…with fewer shots fired and less risk to yourself and innocent bystanders.

So, how does a shooter with limited time and budget make it happen?

The answer is high quality at-home training.

To be clear, “high quality” is not grinding out 500 trigger presses in a night, playing “gun games” or grinding out a high volume of any drill like dime drills, wall drills, or other low-leverage drills.

High quality means breaking down the shooting process, mastering the individual components, combining them back together, and then adding in more and more real-world context with training like Draw Stroke Mastery and Praxis Gunfight Training.

The Draw Stroke Mastery sub-second draw stroke training was the first and only at-home training course that guarantees (and delivers) a DRAMATICALLY faster and more accurate hits from the holster in minimal time using cutting edge neurology and drills and training concepts.  Used by instructors across the country to shortcut the learning process for their students, you can go straight to the source, and get started today by clicking >HERE<.

Want 360 degree, dynamic gunfighting skills in addition to a fast draw stroke?  The Cadillac of firearms training in 2024 is Praxis Gunfight Training.  Built on the ground-breaking training structure laid out in the best selling book, “Real World Gunfight Training,” it is a step-by-step follow-along at-home firearms training program (like a follow-along workout video) that will help you build gunfighting skills in the comfort of your own home faster and more affordably than live fire training at the range and build skills that will carry over to the real world better than anything but high-volume force-on-force training.  It’s the best bang for the buck in firearms training today, and you can start it today by clicking >HERE<

If you own a firearm for defensive purposes and haven’t been through both of them…what are you waiting for?  The need for these skills is skyrocketing, and there’s no better time to get started than today.  Go ahead and click the links above and get started today.

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