Shooting from Cover — The Key to Gunfight Survival?

By GunSpot

In today’s article the author covers an important part of surviving a deadly force confrontation: the proper use of cover. Learning how to shoot from cover is an important part of defensive firearm training. This article will introduce you to concepts like cover and concealment and shooting around barricades. However, it is not a replacement for professional training. We encourage you to seek out quality training to effectively build your combat shooting skills.

Hollywood movies and video games often have exciting shootout scenes between the bad guys and the good guys. Situations involving shooting from cover almost always come up in these scenes and, as you can probably guess, they usually don’t do it correctly.

If you find yourself in an unavoidable conflict, do you have the skills to survive a gunfight?

Naturally, when bullets start flying your base human survival instinct is going to tell you to get behind something, if for no other reason than to hide. If you ever find yourself unavoidably in this situation, you want to use adequate cover and understand how to effectively return fire.

Seek Quality Firearms Instruction

To do this, I got with chief instructor Grant LaVelle from Maximum Life Expectancy to teach us some shooting from cover skills he acquired through a long career as a SWAT team member in a law enforcement agency. In the video, Grant used his Springfield XD-M Elite Tactical OSP semi-automatic pistol outfitted with a U.S. Optics DRS 2.0E red dot sight.

As shown in this image, shooting behind cover helps to protect your body, vital organs and head in a gunfight. Police officers are trained on the best use of cover and you should also use cover for protection and not accidentally expose yourself. — The proper or incorrect use of cover can mean the difference between life and death.

Admittedly, we will also briefly touch on the topic of room clearing in this as well, since they go hand in hand. In particular we will be talking about firing from cover with a handgun in both the video above and this article. In a later installment, we will also cover the particulars of using a rifle platform.

As Grant explains, one of the key fundamentals to shooting from cover is keeping a stand-off distance from the cover you are using. While this helps you to be light and quick, the big advantage is you will be able to return fire without revealing too much of your body to the threat.

One of the best gunfight tactics is to use cover as shown here. You want to minimize the danger of incoming rounds from enemy fire. Likewise you want to minimize the possibility of ricochet off of hard objects to enhance your likelihood of survival. — In the video, Grant touches on the importance of “slicing the pie” when emerging from cover.

With a stand-off distance, you can actually rotate just your top half out just enough to fire downrange. This will keep your femoral artery behind cover, which is good because obviously the more vitals we can keep behind cover the better our chances of survival.

How Do You Shoot from Behind Cover?

When our favorite action heroes fire from cover, they often hug the wall and flip out facing the room to deliver perfectly placed shots on the threat or threats. In the real world, that is not what you want to do to stay alive. You instead want to keep a stand-off distance and then use a clearing method called “Slicing The Pie.”

One of the most important rules of how to win a gun fight is to use cover to stop the bullets fired by an attacker. — Giving yourself space back from your cover area is an often overlooked — yet incredibly important — tactic.

In this method, you will methodically reveal yourself to just one sliver of the room at a time. This lets you focus on small portions of a room instead of busting in there like Rambo, because the chances are you don’t have a M60 as your sidearm (get Grant’s thoughts on shooting the M60 here). You will most likely have a smaller compact gun. So, it’s best to take it slow and safe as long as you have the element of surprise on your side.

If you keep your distance and only view into a room or around a corner by “slicing the pie,” your odds are much better at neutralizing a threat and walking away safely from the conflict.

In this photo, the author demonstrates the correct and incorrect way of using cover. Make sure you get your body behind cover and only expose the minimum amount of your body needed to accurately return fire. — Watch the video above to get Grant’s tips on how to properly use cover.

Final Thoughts on Shooting From Cover

Find a practice piece to use as cover in your training drills and give this a try. It’s almost a certainty that if you have to engage a target, you will be around real-world obstacles like doorways, cars, corners, etc. So, practice, practice and practice.

Editor’s Note: This article was written by Dylan Casey and Grant LaVelle and shared with us by GunSpot.com. Please be sure to check out The Armory Life Forum, where you can comment about our daily articles, as well as just talk guns and gear. Click the “Go To Forum Thread” link below to jump in and discuss this article and much more!