I was thinking more along the lines of “white dot, black dot” theory.
That is, that when you are shooting at a target, you focus on the center, or small “white dot” of the target, and tend to ignore everything else around it, the big “black dot”. However, if in a case like this, you are shooting at a person, you want them to be the small “black dot”, and to pay attention to the big “white dot”, or everything else your bullets *may* hit, if you miss, or the bullets go through the person.
And I will be the first one to say this is hard as heck to do. It is also a police “nightmare scenario”.
An officer is across the street, watching a playground full of children, when a perp walks between the cop and the playground, then pulls a gun and starts shooting at the cop. What does the cop do?
Universally, they want to duck for cover, while drawing their gun and returning fire. Then they remember that playground...
Ideally, repetitive training under conditions that try to simulate reality, their actions become instinctive to the point that cops just put the front sight on the center of the mass they see and squeeze twice, looking for effect, and go from there.
Good cops know about the playground before reacting because they’re trying to think a step or two ahead.
You’re right about it being hard. Somewhere in a nearby city, there is a bathtub with a hole in it, the result of my own effort to hit the center of the perp’s mass under stress.
Stats show that the “typical” shooting occurs in low light conditions, at a distance of about seven yards. That’s a formula for stress.