There are plenty of ways to simulate the exercise with no risk. If you want to do stress exercises, you need to come up with a different way. This[1] is one of the standard ways. Notice that at no point does a real gun get pointed at a human being? That's by design.
Fail. Absolute fail.
We say "the gun is always loaded" even when we "know" it is not, because if we never, ever point a gun at something that we don't want to destroy, we will never make that one in a million mistake.
Fail. Sorry for the forcefulness, but this kind of gun "play" always deserves to be called out and discouraged.
Assume that you're a hostage negotiator, or someone in the police or military that otherwise expects to end up in a situation where someone is pointing a presumably loaded weapon at you at close range. I think there's a good argument to be made that you should train for this circumstance under the most realistic conditions you can muster, rather than hoping that your first live experience will go just the way it did on paper. If having a real gun pointed at you helps to simulate and train your real life response, this might be a good strategy.
Personally, as someone not in such a field, I'll spend the bulk of my efforts on figuring out how to avoid such situations. But for a professional training for a situation they expect to encounter, this is not 'play'.
If you intend to replicate your experiments in the future, you can explicitly seat a snap cap in the chamber and leave the magazine out (no mag safety on the Glock). That way you are still violating rules 2-4, but possibly not rule 1.
But would that always work on a Glock, which has an odd striker arrangement instead of a traditional exposed hammer, and doesn't have a way to decock it without pulling the trigger?
Heh... Considering that all the participants were scientists, I'm surprised they concluded that one event caused the other.
Wonder if anyones done any research on training this for martial arts.
The article suggests that actions where you're primed to act and then startled into action are faster than ones where you act of your own volition.
So, could you (for example) condition yourself into being startled by say a raised eyebrow, at which point you would be able to carry out a pre-planned attack with the same speed as a reaction.
Sometimes you can just feel the rythm in which oponent will react, and then passing him is easy and pleasurable at the same time. And looks cool. That's why I love basketball :)
Did the BBC misinterpret the data, or did the scienceblogs article make a mistake?
Button pressing /= drawing and aiming.
The defender has less incentive to aim, and besides your brain already has the calculations made. In hunting the snapshot is a frequent killer due simply to reaction with no conscious aiming. IIRC the NRA has ~40,000 bullseye shooters who have to have rapidfire accuracy on multiple targets to attain the grade. This requires the ability to make snapshots.
I'm not going to believe any result on gunslinging until someone picks up a properly weighted pistol that has to be aimed and fired (whether it be a blank or using an LED sighter). Otherwise it's not scientific, you're fucking with the variables and the very nature of the experiment.
Just because you can do something faster, it doesn't always mean you finish faster.
As far as I know this is the first test to show that startle response extends beyond reaction time, it's an interesting piece of data. It's worth noting that it's possible to force yourself into a state of mind similar to being startled, which may very well eliminate the advantage to "shooting" second.
I'm hoping the author of this article just didn't want to elaborate, but Bohr never thought it could've just been that he was faster at drawing than his opponents? Switching it so he was the first to draw some of the time would have been better design.
I don't feel lucky!
Bohr noticed that the man who drew first invariably got shot, and speculated that the intentional act of drawing and shooting was slower to execute than the action in response.
Haha, really? So he formed a hypothesis based on movies? I'm fairly sure its just poorly written in the article but if it is not thats just silly.
Edit: Formatting
