One of my message board members, Catnip48, emailed me this video link, with the comments, “Not sure what to think of this. Doesn’t seem like falling to the ground to engage a close range threat would ever be a good idea but on the other hand what if you fell or were pushed to the ground? Thoughts?” After I gave her my reply, she said, “Commentary worthy of your blog, I think.” So here it is, following the video link.
I could pick a few nits with his technique, for instance he never practices moving offline during the draw; his idea of moving to the rear to create distance seems to be taking a single step before he fires the first shot, stopping for a moment, then continuing on; always firing his first shot one-handed; and he does seem to have trouble with that whole “reholstering” concept. But the falling to the ground thing makes perfect sense. It’s not that he’s planning to deliberately do that, it’s that he’s training to still keep fighting even if he’s taken off his feet.
There was a time in the 1990s when ground fighting with the handgun was, like, the trendy New Wave in combat handgun training. I don’t say that to put it down, it’s a good idea. What had been observed among cops in real fights was that if they ever got taken off their feet, they’d never even attempt to draw their gun and fight with it, even though they could have, even when being stomped into the ground by multiple attackers. Why? Because they’d never trained to draw or shoot a handgun from the ground. So when they suddenly found themselves on the ground, their mind kind of went into vapor lock. They didn’t know what to do because they’d never done it before.
Ken Hackathorn has observed that one of the predictable responses of the human mind under extreme stress, for instance someone is trying to kill you, is that a person will almost never attempt to do anything they don’t already know they can do well. Which is one big reason it behooves us to train hard and get good before the fight. In the case of the guy in this video, it’s not that he’s planning to throw himself down on his ass in the middle of a fight, because obviously that’s less than ideal, it’s that he’s training himself to continue fighting after he’s been bowled over, i.e. someone else has put him on the ground, and since he doesn’t have someone there TO bowl him over, he has no choice but to simulate the process by flinging his body backward, himself.