Yup.....
The belt-buckle-to-belt-buckle conundrum is one that sooner or later, most who take training/practice seriously will come to realize.
We don't exist in a two-dimensional world, and the fact that we're shooting to damage three-dimensional targets (organs) that are themselves situated in a three-dimensional container (the body) which can, at any one time, be oriented differently in three-dimensional space....it's a complicated equation!
In 2016, we saw this incident here in Ohio -
Man with CCW permit shoots armed Family Dollar robbery suspect - which sparked some discussion on the Ohioans for Concealed Carry Forums, of which I made the following reply regarding not just head shots, but specific to this case, someone who was "shot in the eye." --->
It's really all about the angles, and what tissues are disrupted/destroyed via the bullet's passing.
"Belt-buckle-to-belt-buckle" is what we typically look at when we are shooting on the square range. Our target is a one-dimensional one, and we therefore must make the necessary anatomical correlations as-such.
Once the body starts to rotate and present at different angles in space, things get considerably more complicated.
Let's forget the "skull kill shot" for a bit. Let's make this easier, how big is the target - let's say high-center-mass - when a person is sideways?
From the late Louis Awerbuck's teachings - for those of you who are unfamiliar, his "Mirage Target System" (of the former Yavapai Firearms Academy, which he was the head of until he passed away recently) ranks right up there with the Rogers Reactive, and is unique in simulating a real-world, dynamic, encounter, complete with backdrop and foreground concerns - we understand that a dynamic, real-world confrontation in which both parties are moving will make marksmanship considerably harder: that there is a very physical/mathematical reason why even trained individuals miss at close range.
In addition to the body-size metric Mr. Awerbuck presented in the free Panteao Productions "Tactical Tips" segment ( abstracted from his full-length DVD, from the same source:
Panteao Productions - Louis Awerbuck: Body Sizes ), we are reminded by him that the actual "vital area" for a human target, high-center-mass, is really no wider than ~ 9 inches, full-frontal, no matter how big the person. That this "breast-plate," as he calls it, essentially shrinks when the target is presented to the shooter at an angle.
You can visualize this "shrinkage" quite easily simply by holding up any two-dimensional printed target tilting it away from you. For example, the width of an 8 and 1/2 inch wide sheet of common notebook/copier paper becomes an apparent 6 inches, with only about a 20-degree shift. Additionally, Mr. Awerbuck points out that shooting at a side-profile of a person, you only have a 4-inch wide target to work with, that by the time a target is bladed away from you by 45 degrees, this is all you have of their vital zone (this is alluded to when he presented the "folded" printed target in the "Target Selection" free "Tactical Tip" from Panteao, again available on YouTube as an abstracted segment:
Panteao Productions - Louis Awerbuck: Target Selection ).
Additional complications arise from anatomic concerns when the body is rotated in space, and these considerations are not visualized with standard 2-dimensional targets.
In June of 2015, this video popped up on the PDN -
Firearms Training: Angles with 2D vs 3D Targets | PDN . Similarly, Mr. Claude Werner's excellent article "Why I hate the -3 Zone" also applies here, in-spades:
Why I hate the -3 zone . And, more recently,
https://gundocdoctrine.wordpress.com/2017/06/09/2978/ and
https://www.police1.com/police-prod...ohn-hearne-cannot-be-missed-mFJ5JbXQULErfZ0k/
So with this in-mind, let's go back to that "skull shot." Let's look at the CNS shot - typically portrayed in various two-dimensional targets as either the "eye box" (VTAC and Opsgear), "triangle of death" (what we called it in medical school - and is shown by targets such as those for The Reston Group and the Federal Air Marshal Service) or "the fatal T" (Glockstore/Lenny Magill head-shot overlay).
We are reminded by Awerbuck that this "kill zone" zone as it is printed on paper is only valid when the target is directly facing us in much the same manner that we view a flat-range 2-dimensional paper target. Why? Look at the anatomy - look at what we are actually shooting: we're not shooting "the brain" as a whole - that critical "eyebox/death triangle/fatal-T" delineates an area not only of material weakness in the bony structure that is our head, but also has further implications in terms of the areas of the brain which govern the vital functions that keeps us, as humans, alive. To-wit, Representative Gabrielle Giffords was "shot in the brain."
Boy survives arrow shot through the eye
And let's not forget this one - showing just how much difference a fraction of an inch - or even a variance in individual anatomy - can potentially make:
Florida woman survives gunshot between the eyes
We should remember that similar implications carry over to the vital organs and large vessels in the "high center chest" critical area - that depending on how that target actually presents in real-time, in 3-dimensions, taking that "high center chest" shot may actually not produce the result we want (i.e. incapacitation) - that maybe the shot needed to have instead entered through the abdomen or even the crotch, or, in going back to the CNS example, maybe through the neck area in order to reach the anatomy that we need to disrupt.
Marksmanship is never a bad thing.
In addition to the above anatomic/physical considerations, Awerbuck also reminds us that the physical circumstances of the fight can also be used to explain why even trained shooters miss at even close range - that the inverse proportions and simple angular geometry can demonstrate that a dynamic, moving target can well be easier to hit at 13 yards than it is to hit at 3, and that furthermore, at closer range, that angular deviation open up more of the backdrop, making Cooper's "Rule 4" all that much more important when shooting in the "real world." [ Having a hard time grasping these concepts?
https://activeselfprotection.com/defend ... g-thieves/ ]
So, as-usual, this is my embarrassingly long way of coming to the point that I want to make.....
It's all too easy to say that "combat effective" shooting is more than sufficient for "the real world."
But that flat-range 2-dimensional target we're shooting at is far from "the real world," and getting "combat effective" hits on it does not translate to what we know of either anatomy or physics. "Combat accuracy" is not a measure of how well one can shoot. It's what the end-result is, after an actual defensive event in which we have discharged our firearm. It accounts for our movements, that of the threat, and the four-thousand-and-one other factors that go into ahat defensive shootout that makes it so much more stressful than even the hardest drill/test we have run on the range. It's what our performance FALLS TO, from the height of perfection that we have attained and truly mastered in practice.
One of Clint Smith's "Clintisms" is that mediocre shooting is often all that's needed to win a gunfight. A corollary to that is the Clintism that we train to magnificence so that we can fall to adequate when under pressure.
If one can only attain adequate or mediocre performance when under training stress, what will he/she fall to, when faced with a violent confrontation?
No-one ever wished they shot slower or were less accurate.
Yes, shooting more rounds, faster, inherently biases the BSA template and compromises accuracy.
That is true for everybody from the completely-fresh-to-shooting novice all the way to the most badass of ninja-killers and even top-tier competition shooters.
But our shots have to count, and here's a lot more involved than what we usually do, when we're on the flat range.