If you are one of the growing number of people who have decided to carry a gun and if you’ve had some kind of basic handgun training class, you will have been taught some kind of correct way to stand and hold your gun while you are either aiming or firing. There are a few variants of whatever the proper shooting stance is supposed to be, depending on what style of instruction is in favor at the moment. Shooting stances are important for long-range firing and when using handguns that have excessive recoil, since the stance, grip and arm angles will allow you to control the weapon.

When you move from target shooting into the world of close range gunfighting, whatever stance or shooting position you were taught can be filed with other useless things that don’t work, because up close, there’s no time to get into position unless you want to play bullet catcher. Since time is critical – since you must be firing at the threat while avoiding the threat’s fire at you – what technique will work? How about whatever you would naturally do anyway. You already know it, so just use that. Get the gun running. Just point it at the bad guys. You can point, you’ve done it all your life. Point and shoot them. Move out of their way by either walking or running. That’s it. Nothing fancy, no special techniques to practice for years.

A gunfight isn’t the time that hitting within a half inch of where you are aiming is important. Just hitting is important. That’s all. Point and you’ll hit. You don’t need to see the sights, you don’t need both hands on the gun, you just need to be shooting a lot in a hurry. At five or six feet, a human is pretty hard to miss (which is also why you need to be moving or you will get hit by the bad guys). Do not get hung up by strange and unnatural techniques that work at a pistol range but will get you killed in a gunfight. You can learn how to shoot a big revolver at a target 100 yards away later. For now, consider the natural, instinctive idea of pointing the gun and shooting the bad guys. That will keep you alive so you can learn whatever you want later instead of having your next lesson be determining the dimensions of a casket from the inside.