Editor’s Note: In PoliceOne “First Person” essays, our Members and Columnists candidly share their own unique view of the world. This is a platform from which individual officers can share their own personal insights on issues confronting cops today, as well as opinions, observations, and advice on living life behind the thin blue line. This week’s essay comes from PoliceOne Member W. Hock Hochheim, a retired Texas police officer who teaches hand, stick, knife and gun tactics. Do you want to share your own perspective with other P1 Members? Send us an e-mail with your story.
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By W. Hock Hochheim
In this day and age of prolific paintball gaming, it is hard to find the classic definition of old-school, snap-shooting, a form of a long gun quick draw. The paintball version has overcome the Internet searches with its style that does not exactly follow suit with what I was taught in the Army decades ago.
Basically, snap shooting was taught as a sudden, desperate, unsighted, emergency fire from no-cover or cover positions. Let me quickly explain two terms I will use here. Sighted fire means using the sights on the weapon for aiming. Unsighted fire is not using the sights on the weapon, but rather doing your best to point the weapon at the enemy in a split-second emergency.
Gun range, paper target shooters who insist you must ALWAYS use your sights, all the time, have obviously never been in such a horrific, split-second emergency. Lots of older instructors used the term snap shooting for such emergencies. This meant bringing the barrel up (or down) to the enemy and shooting instantly to send explosions and bullets “down range” until a better position or sighted fire could be managed.
Other than passed-down verbal lore, I had to dig further back into old military manuals as well as the more popular, original Rex Applegate’s Kill or Get Killed book to find some official military, source material on the subject. In this book, Applegate also called snap shooting “instinctive shooting” and my goal here is not to open up the tired, sighted-versus-point shooting debate.
My goal here is to re-document this information as well as to report, via a recent, true police shooting, how important it is for all police to officers to be able to recognize the tactics and dangerousness of an opponent who split-second, snap shoots at you. You might not like to shoot the snap way and will always use your sights? But I am here to state that your enemy might not agree.
The long gun (or sub-gun) could often be carried low in the arms and sling-less. It could also be the classic shoulder-borne carry with a sling as the photos display here, as in barrel-up/barrel-down, or as in the case of the horizontal nature of the commando carry - barrel horizontal. The weapon could be clipped by its stock via a lanyard to the shoulder of a tactical vest, and therefore also be carried with the barrel down or mostly down.
These are two classic military, long gun weapon carries. Over the shoulder barrel-up (or barrel down), and the old-school Commando Carry. In the Commando Carry, the weapon is already horizontal and can be fired quickly right from this hip height.
In the case of a sudden ambush for example, the slung or unslung weapon barrel is brought up. The bearer could snap shoot from three elevations — hip height, biceps height, and shoulder height. In the case of the biceps height, the stock could be right on the muscle, or between the arm and torso. Once the enemy has been engaged in this emergency, the shooter can attempt sighted fire.
Recognizing Hip Fire: A Case in Point
In the year 2000 a Texas police officer, who shall remain nameless in deference to the family, conducted a traffic stop which was recorded by his dash board camera. The stopped car was quite a distance from the police car in a roadside, country setting right beside a busy, interstate highway. The driver of the stopped vehicle, an elderly, gaunt man in a cowboy hat emerged from his car with a rifle held at hip height. The trooper exited his squad car and demanded the armed man drop his weapon several times in a strong, command voice.
The low barrel of the rifle was aimed at the officer from the first second he emerged from his car. The man ignored these commands and from this hip height, fired several times while slowly marching forward toward the officer and camera. One early round hit the officer right in the throat. The wounded officer crawled onto the front seat of his car. The man reached into the police car, grabbed the mike and told the dispatcher that “the officer has been shot” and to send help. At this point, one might assume he would ambush all other responding officers?
Other officers arrived as this man, his weapon hip-high, wandered in amongst the all these cars. The arriving officers also yelled for him to drop the rifle. It would not be unusual for an armed Texan to see a police shooting and go to the aid of an officer. No doubt these responding officers had to consider this possibility when approaching. It became apparent that the man was not just a witness and was acting irrationally. I am not even sure if the responders knew that the wounded officer was prone on the front seat of the car. At one point the man raised the rifle to near biceps high and all the officers’ voices and poses intensified. He lowered the rifle. They eventually cornered the old man and arrested him way back at his own car. Meanwhile the wounded officer died in his squad.
I watched this film in 2010 while attending a police use of force class with many other veteran officers. It was gruesome as the microphone caught of every gasping, wet breath of the wounded officer. The surviving officer’s wife later toured the state in police functions reviewing the case. She suggested that the old man looked enough like the officer’s grandfather to cause him to pause and not shoot in the beginning of the encounter.
As I watched ALL the officers on the scene, it was apparent to me that none of them, first or last, thought that the low, hip-line, low-arm carry was an immediate, imminent threat! In their mind’s eye, this was not a “shoot moment.” In their mind’s eye only a bicep or shoulder height long gun was a shoot moment. This was even more evident when the shooter raised his weapon higher. They all intensified with every inch the long gun climbed upward.
I often say when I teach interactive, gun training sessions with simulated ammo that I really don’t care how you shoot. That is for you to select from your training and experience. I do however worry about how the bad guy shoots! It is important for all our people to know — and physically recognize — how the bad guys will carry, pull, and shoot weapons. This is best done with simulated ammunition and staged, combat scenarios designed to identify these problems and develop skills.
We spend time in and around shooting qualifications, training, and schools and we define how good shooters shoot. We capture the proper “look.” The look and moves become ingrained in our brain.
We shoot proper and see all those around us shooting properly. Then a city gang thug busts a cap at us, or a hillbilly cranks a radical round off in an oddball, yet instinctive, radical manner.
It wasn’t proper! It wasn’t right! But it still kills.
You might not like the idea of snap shooting or instinct or point shooting. You might even belittle it. But if so, you are thinking very one-dimensionally. You’d best recognize that the enemy can shoot and kill you from any snap shot position, whether you think them unsophisticated and ever-so-poorly trained.
W. Hock Hochheim is a retired Texas police officer who teaches hand, stick, knife and gun tactics. Visit his website at www.HocksCQC.com.
