Monday, October 19, 2015

Shooting stuff...

So, I mentioned that my draw was one of the things that needed work on that last FAST. Some of my readers, bless their hearts, took that as a solicitation for advice, and so I received unasked-for tips like this:
"[F]irst put something of moderate weight in your strong side jacket pocket. Keys, cell phone or similar. That extra weight won't slow you down and it will carry the corner of the jacket back behind you longer, clearing your grip area. And it helps if you're drawing with the wind from behind you."
I don't get it: The video was right there for the guy to watch, and it was pretty obvious that I wasn't having any issues with the cover garment fouling my draw, which was actually pretty non-grabasstic for a change. (And I happened to have a half-full pistol mag in my right pocket anyway, although not for any specific reason.)

In fact, slicing your hand between your body and the cover garment, letting the pinky lead the way along your ribs, seems to be consistently faster than making grandiose flipping-and-clearing gestures and then having to come back to the pistol that your hand has passed.

At any rate, the actual problem with my draw was a weakness in mechanics that the FAST is designed to provoke: By drawing to a 3"x5" target at seven yards, many people subconsciously slow their entire draw stroke down. In the video you can watch my hands react to the beep by racing to the gun as fast as I can and then s-l-o-w-l-y bringing it out to aim in on that small target. Instead, I should have drawn at full throttle the whole way and used the time saved to refine my sight picture at the end. The exaggeratedly slow extension did nothing practical to help my accuracy and killed my draw speed; without putting a stopwatch on the video, that looks about a 2.0-2.5, and I know I can get close to a half second off that with some work.

So one of the things I did at Blogorado was draw over and over again to the small poppers out at ten or fifteen yards.

But I forgot my timer back in Indy. Dammit.