Tueller vs the Mover

The Tueller Drill has become a standard for answering the questions of when and why do I shoot an individual threaten me with a contact weapon.  Dennis Tueller has stated that he only intended the drill as a representation of reaction time as distance.  He selected, mostly by accident I suspect, typical city surfaces: dry, hard packed, medium friction and relatively clean, like a sidewalk or asphalt parking lot.  Had these test initially been done on an icy Chicago parking lot in December or swampy, over grown field in Indiana, we would probably have a different set of ‘magic’ times and distance.  Even the clothing and type of holster and carry will make a difference.

The mover is a simple set up and pulled over uneven ground it seems to pitch and chatter as it moves frighteningly fast towards you.

Understanding this will help you better survive both the confrontation and the resulting legal challenges.  Here’s a few of my resent test results and interpretations.

Toward the end of summer I set up a Tueller Drill stage.  I set up several targets to ‘time in’ at 21 feet and set up the traveler with indexes at 21 and 10 feet.  This year thanks to my CED7000 timer I got response times to the traveler.

https://www.shootersconnectionstore.com/CED-7000-Timer-P168.aspx

The CED7000 has what they call ‘Spy mode.’  It’s designed to help you ‘spy’ on your IDPA competition.  In this mode activating the timer doesn’t sound a buzzer.  So when you hear the competition ‘Beep!’ you press the start button and the timer secretly records shots.

I utilized it by pressing start when the mover started moving and recorded the first shot on target.  The normal Comstock mode was used to time in.

My selection of shooters had different skill levels.  While I would have preferred to record timing in data from a -1 or Zero hit on an IDPA target, I couldn’t beat any shooter up over it so I took any hit on cardboard.  Reviewing the small data set indicated that some shooters didn’t understand the goal of timing in was an acceptable hit as fast as possible and not a perfect hit regardless of time.

Timing in VS 21 ft. Mover mark (Average Value)

No concealment garment

Shooter	Timed in	21 ft. Mover
Frank	1.76 sec	0.98 sec
John	1.62 sec	1.04 sec
Bruce	1.65 sec	1.0 sec
Bill	2.28 sec	1.3 sec

Everyone appears to have improved and decreased their time by as much as 82%.  There are a couple things happening here.  

Timing in usually has you bringing the gunsights up to the line of vision connected to the target.  With the traveler moving as you draw, it us usually within 6 feet by the time the gun has cleared the holster and started on its trip to your line of vision.  Usually the shots are fired with what Colonel Fairbairn called point shooting and Massad Ayoob calls aimed indexing.  Basically, the top of the gun’s slide is in your central vision superimposed over the target.  A moment of finger gun experimentation reveals a range of effective shooting position for a nearby target.

Even though it’s just a moving sheet of cardboard, there is an element of surprise and adrenaline spike. For a moment you are strong, faster and less sensitive to pain at the cost of loss of fine motor skills.

Observations suggest the most successful shooters, defined as getting one or more shots off at the target more than an arms distance away, have one habit.  They simultaneous draw and step back, then add a step to the side.  This effectively increases the distance by anywhere from a foot to a yard.  As Dennis Tueller demonstrated in his first drill, distance is directly related to reactionary time.  More distance, more time to perform the indicated action.

Since the traveler runs on two steel cables, the participant is forced to move left.  Unfortunately we didn’t have any left handed shooters to test this but it was surmised that stepping to the non-dominant side keeps the gun more or less in line with the onrushing attacker.

Timing in with cover garment

Average time (seconds)

Participant	Timing in	21 ft. mover
Frank	1.92	1.10
Bruce	1.95	1.53
Bill	2.69	1.53

I believe the previous analysis is still valid but to complicate this small sample is the shooters used different cover garments and carry positions.  An open shirt was faster than a pull-over garment.  For an attacker with a contact weapon, all these shooters were just barely able to get there shots off in time.  

It is important to understand an extended arm with an extended contact weapon actually reduces the distance and the reaction time.  These times may be inadequate against an aggressive assailant.

To be continued