James Williams, M.D. was teaching a class with Mas Ayoob, when one of the students, a probation and parole officer, asked, “Doc, how do I know where I should shoot?”
“It’s easy,” I replied glibly. “Go to med school, do a residency in critical care, practice in ICUs and ERs for about 20 years, and you’ll know exactly where to shoot the bad guy.”
Williams went on to design his “tactical anatomy” courses to answer that question less glibly:
Any hunter knows that to harvest a deer for your family’s winter meat you have to kill it cleanly. We train new hunters about deer anatomy, and teach them to place their bullets in the vital organs. Because if you shoot the deer any old place, it is likely to run off, wounded. It may well die, but if it is able to run a mile into the woods, its death will be a tragic waste. So we learn as hunters to stop the animal where we shoot it, by shooting it in the vital organs.
Now, lion hunters face a different problem than deer hunters. A wounded lion won’t just crawl off into the brush and die; it will turn on you and attack. In this case, the hunter’s need to stop the animal in its tracks isn’t just because he fears losing the meat; he fears losing his own life to the slashing fangs and ripping claws of a 400-pound killing machine!
The defensive shooter is more like a lion hunter than a deer hunter, because the consequences of failing to stop a violent felon are akin to those of failing to stop a charging lion. We don’t want the attacking lion or felon to stop hurting us eventually; we want him to stop hurting us now.
So if you are faced with a violent, attacking, predatory felon, how do you make sure you stop him before he can cause you grave bodily harm, or even death?
The simple answer is that you have to shoot him where it counts. And the common ideas of where it counts are often wrong.
To incapacitate a human being — to make him incapable of violent action — by gunshot wound (GSW) your bullets have to do serious damage to his vital organs. In my very extensive experience (and this is backed up by the medical literature, by the way) there are only two reliable ways to incapacitate a man by gunshot: either shut down the Central Nervous System (CNS, brain and high spinal cord), or shut off the supply of oxygen to the CNS.
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The only two reliable target zones, then, are: first, the CNS itself, and second, the pumping system that supplies oxygen to the CNS, the heart and the plexus of Great Vessels above the heart.
Funnily enough, these are the same anatomic targets the hunter uses, whether deer or lion.