Click here to download the catalog as a PDF file. To view this site you need Adobe Flash Player and your browser must allow javaScripts. Go here to get the latest Flash Player. HANDGUNS • MASSAD AYOOB • WHAT CAN YOU SEE IN THE MIRROR (IMAGE)? Suppose you woke up tomorrow with your opposite hand dominant. Could you protect yourself? re you right-handed? A Suppose tomorrow morning you strapped a straight-draw beginner went through. It made me a more patient firearms instructor and, I hope, a better one. holster on your left hip and became a newborn southpaw. (Vice versa if you’re a lefty.) I call it “mirror image” shooting, and I’ve found a lot of value in it. Almost 30 years ago, I was en route to Ray Chapman’s advanced pistol course in Missouri when I sustained a crushing comminuted fracture of my right index finger at the base joint, in a freak accident. I showed up in a cast from fingertip to forearm and shot the whole thing left-hand only. I learned a lot about “wounded officer” manipulations and return of fire … and I learned more than that. I had almost literally grown up with a gun in my hand. The sidearm had become an extension of myself, and as an instructor I had occasionally found myself losing patience with new shooters who just “couldn’t get it.” Now, feeling what it was like to hold an awkward, alien, threatening object instead of that familiar extension of my hand, I better understood what a Why Mirror Image? Since I started Lethal Force Institute in 1981, I made a point of teaching a course or shooting a match mirror image once a year, and asked my staff instructors to do the same. Why? Partly so they could get the epiphany I got at Chapman Academy. And, partly, because if you can’t teach your own non-dominant hand to do something, how do you think you’re going to teach a whole separate, human organism? We routinely train weak-hand only in case the gun arm is wounded. Why total mirror image? Because after you win the gunfight and the wounded arm starts to heal — or, more likely, after some more ordinary injury or surgery between finger and shoulder has put our dominant arm out of commission for a while — you want to be able to protect yourself and your family while the afflicted limb is healing. Coming home from the hospital hurt is a lousy time to start thinking about getting an ambidextrous gun, a weak side holster, and most important, the skill to work a Maswasaccuratebutslo-o-o-wshootinglefty. GunisaBoblloydCustomS&W686,withleft handthumb-breakholsterfromHighnoon. handgun from the “weaker” side of the body. After that smashed finger, I had to carry southpaw for some six months, but in a few weeks when the cast came off, the healing hand was able to support the firing hand, insert a magazine, etc. The ProArms Podcast crew and I celebrated the 4th of July 2009 by shooting an IDPA match mirror image at the excellent Gateway shooting facility in Jacksonville, Florida. The rest of the 70-shooter field, of course, was shooting “strong hand.” It was … instructive. Lessons The experience reinforced for me the importance of “conscious competence” (i.e., thinking about what you’re doing as you do it) vs. “unconscious competence” or running on autopilot. A complex psychomotor skill like drawing and firing a handgun, or reloading one, takes thousands of repetitions before so-called “long term muscle memory” makes it automatic. Every time one of us part-time southpaws performed a sloppy draw or bobbled a reload, it was because we were trying to draw a check on unconscious competence when we just hadn’t made enough deposits to cover it in the “muscle memory” bank. I don’t remember ever taking 11 seconds to refill a sixgun with a speedloader before, but Arrowsshowspentbrassfromdoubletapas JonStrayersmokesthecoursewithGlock 17,shootinghisfirstsouthpawmatch. 8 WWW.GUNSMAGAZINE.COM • DECEMBER 2009