Wyatt Earp Interview on GunFighting

Am Shooting Journal ^ | 9/25/2017 | S Lake

[w1n1]

Here is an interview that Wyatt Earp shares his views on "gunfighting". This was sometime in the 1910s he offered to give an interview about his thoughts on using a gun. In his own words, Wyatt is going to explain how he became one of the most feared and accurate gunslingers… even if he was about the slowest.

When asked how he became so proficient with a gun… here's his response: "The most important lesson I learned from those proficient gunfighters was the winner of a gunplay usually was the man who took his time. The second was that, if I hoped to live long on the frontier, I would shun flashy trick-shooting—grandstand play—as I would poison."

"Fast is fine, Accuracy is final." What Wyatt meant is practice makes perfect. It should be said that Wyatt would even take his time acquiring his targets even if they were only five feet away.

“When I say that I learned to take my time in a gunfight, I do not wish to be misunderstood, for the time to be taken was only that split fraction of a second that means the difference between deadly accuracy with a sixgun and a miss. It is hard to make this clear to a man who has never been in a gunfight. Perhaps I can best describe such time taking as going into action with the greatest speed of which a man’s muscles are capable, but mentally unflustered by an urge to hurry or the need for complicated nervous and muscular actions which trick-shooting involves. Mentally deliberate, but muscularly faster than thought, is what I mean.”

We typically hear people talk about making a split second decision when it comes to shooting. In Wyatt’s case he made the decision to shoot a long time before the trigger was pulled. Read the rest of the Wyatt Earp views on Gunfighting here.

[lonevoice]

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[Tainan]

Thank You for the article.

[KSCITYBOY]

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