Point Shooting: An Objective Look
- 2 days ago
- 4 min read
by Jim Wilson
There was a time, back in the olden days, when point shooting was taught in just about every police firearms academy. The only reason that it wasn’t taught in citizen defensive schools was because there were no defensive schools for citizens. All of that changed when Jeff Cooper founded the American Pistol Institute, that we now call Gunsite, in 1976—the main thrust of which was the use of two hands on the gun and bringing it to eye level to fire shots. He called it the Modern Technique of the Pistol. This is excellent defensive training, but the implication was that point shooting no longer had a place in personal defense.
In real life, outside the square range, however, we find that there may be times in a fight that we can’t get two hands on the gun. Or it may be too dark to see the sights. Or we may simply not have time to bring the gun to eye level; in the real world a person might be lucky to just have time to clear his holster and fire a shot. It is the close-range attacks that are the deadliest and require the quickest responses to survive. I have witnessed one of these, and it was point shooting that solved the problem.
