I’m reluctant to write this post. I’ve written a lot about self-defense shooting in the past, but I just learned what I’m about to share while studying to be an EMT. (This has been in my draft bin for over 3 months) Seems a little strange to take something I learned about saving a gun shot victim and tell you where is the best place to shoot someone if you want to kill them.
The Goal of Self-Defense Shooting…
…is not to kill. It is to stop.
Someone is threatening your life and you want to make them stop being a threat. You’ve warned them away, told them you will shoot them, they haven’t stopped and you know they really intend to do immediate catastrophic damage. You are in fear for your life.
Now you know you need to use your weapon to stop them from harming you or the ones you love.
Shoot Them In The Chest
This is what I’ve been taught. This is what a lot of targets say to do. But I think it is a too high.
IPSC Target with Scores
If you want to make someone stop being a threat physically – as opposed to intellectually convincing them to stop – you have to make their brain stop working. There are two ways to do this: damage the central nervous system or make they lose consciousness due to blood loss.
Obviously if you can put a bullet in the upper part of the central nervous system that is good. That means hitting them in the head or through the upper part of the spine. (Hitting the lower part of the spine will paralyze their lower body but still give them the ability to shoot you).
There are a number of problems with hitting their central nervous system. The big one is the target is smaller than their chest. The spine is about 3 inches wide. The head is the biggest target and it isn’t that big and moves a lot.
Secondly the central nervous system is surrounded by a lot of thick bone. The skull for the brain and vertebrae for the spinal cord. And the rib cage for the upper spine as well.
So in general when we teach people to shoot, we are teaching them to make the person bleed a lot. Then go for the head shot.
Where To Shoot?
The point I’m slowly getting to is the area we tell people to shoot at doesn’t make you bleed much. Here’s why.
Hollow organs don’t bleed much, solid ones do. There are a couple of reasons for this. As most shooters know, part of what makes a bullet damage isn’t actual size, but the size of the shock wave it makes. This is why the exit wound is so much bigger than the entrance. It is also why a .223 rifle bullet is so much more damaging than a .22 pistol bullet. They are almost the same diameter, but one is going a lot faster causing more of a shock wave.
When a shock wave hits a hollow organ, the organ just moves. It compresses into its hollow spaces. When a bullet his a solid organ, like the spleen or the liver, the shock has no where to go, so the damage of the shock wave is directly effecting the organ.
Your solid organs in your abdomen are your liver, your spleen and your kidneys. They are solid for the nature of what they do, which is filter your blood in various ways. This also means they are very vascular. Vascular means they have lots of blood vessels and lots of blood in them.
Guess what that means when they get punctured.
You bleed. A lot.
One of my instructors actually said, if they had to be shot, they’d want to be shot in the lungs. There are lots of veins in the lungs, but they are hollow and compensate for holes. Plus a EMT on scene can help you breath, they can’t fix your liver.
So where should we train too shoot?
Right at the bottom of the rib cage.
Shoot in the red box
Look at the image to the right. You can see where all the vital organs are.
If you look a typical silhouette it is actually pretty good in the a the x ring is right in the middle of the torso, but it is an oval that is more vertical than horizontal. So while it rises up through the heart – which is behind a bone the sternum – a thick piece of bone – it it descends to encompasses the hollow organs of the body – the stomach, and intestines.
If you look at the IPSC target at the top of the post, A does a pretty good job of hitting the heart, but the lower/middle portions of C & D especially on the left of the torso include the big vascular liver and the smaller spleen on the right.
No target I’ve ever seen says it is better to hit on the left middle torso than on the right.
I will say you don’t want the contents of your digestive system loose in your torso. You’ll probably get an infection and die, but that won’t happen for days.
In conclusion, you need to take basic anatomy into consideration when shooting and training to shoot. The role of solid vascular organs, like the large easier to hit liver, verses hollow less vascular organs, like the lungs, make a big difference. Next time you hear about someone getting killed by a single 22 bullet, you’ll know they probably go hit in the liver, or when someone is shot 8 times by a cop’s 9mm and still don’t go down, they probably got hit in the lungs or stomach. Integrate this knowledge into your training.
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