A couple people had expressed interest in this topic, and I have a bit of extra time for a couple days, so here goes:
Bona fides: I am a former infantry NCO and sniper, hunter, competitive shooter, reloader, hobby gunsmith, sometimes firearms trainer and currently work in a gun shop, mostly on the paperwork/compliance side. Back in the day, was a qualified expert with every standard small arm in the US inventory circa 2003 (M2, 4, 9, 16, 19, 249, 240B, 21, 24, 82 etc.), and today hang around the 75th percentile of USPSA classifications. I've shot Cap-and-Ball, Trap and Sporting Clays badly; Bullseye and PRS somewhat better and IDPA/USPSA/UML/Two-gun with some local success. Been active in the 2A community since the mid-90s, got my first instructor cert in high school, and have held a CPL for almost twenty years now.
I certainly don't claim to be an expert in every aspect of firearms, there's huge areas that escape my knowledge base, but if you've got questions I'll do my best to answer.
Technical questions
Gun control proposals for feasibility
Industry
Training
Wacky opinions
General geekery
Some competition links (not my own) just for the interested.
https://youtube.com/watch?v=U5IhsWamaLY&t=173
https://youtube.com/watch?v=93nEEINflXE
https://youtube.com/watch?v=utcky0zq10E
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Notes -
How effective can you be in 1 v. n situations if you are a better shot?
For example, Let's say you have around 1000 hours of practice shooting in the range. Your home got invaded by 3 armed gangsters who know how to use a gun but have maybe around 50-100 hours of actual training each. In a physical fight, even the best fighters will lose 1v2 average guys with intent to kill. How true is this for guns?
I would assume the range is a factor here; the closer, the worse, for obvious reasons. How far do you have to be till you can reliably win a 1 v n firefight?
What about cover? How much would that help? How would the situation play out in an open field vs. lets say 50-100m distance, everyone using glocks, with road barriers and e-boxes for cover?
This would be wildly unrealistic, most criminals have no training at all. If they actually had military or a hundred hours of training, and were serious, willing to risk their lives for each other and dedicated, one person doesn't stand a chance. Luckily, criminals rarely meet these criteria.
Every extra armed combatant increases the odds against a lone defender exponentially. But I think it is extremely doable, if very risky. To put numbers to it, my Blake Drill is low two seconds (~2.2), which is a draw followed by two shots on each of three targets at seven yards. Given a two-second opening, I'm fairly confident rolling those dice. From the drop? Maybe not.
Here's a very good shooter with a race rig for comparison:
https://youtube.com/watch?v=Np__DNfPE08
The most likely scenario is the defender shoots it out with the first guy, and if he wins that round, the rest run. If he doesn't, he's fucked.
Here's a 3 on 1 that goes something like that:
https://youtube.com/watch?v=SE0TckyzojI
Here's a vid of an armed pot store employee shooting it out with four armed dudes from the drop, he survived, but was shot twice, one attacker died.
https://youtube.com/watch?v=ehf5Zr3gn8w
That channel is really interesting, and surprisingly non-political somehow.
Well, if you watch a lot of them, it's not really a secret that most gun people lean right, but that can mean a lot of different things. The main guy is a former pastor as well, so there's some relatively vague religious references sometimes.
The ASP channel is truly a great resource for anyone interested in what real-world self defense actually looks like. I've never seen anything like it, there's thousands of videos and tons of data there. Part of gun culture 2.0 was an increased interest in applying the scientific method to civilian defensive encounters and using that data to structure training for best effectiveness.
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I've no idea what the answer to your question is in general and I'd also be very curious to hear it. But as a digression,
It depends on the details of that 1000 hours and on what they've been learning ("on the job", I'm guessing?) for 50-100, but in this scenario it's not impossible that the gangsters are better trained.
"The element reported as the single most important factor in the officer's survival during an armed confrontation was cover. Because of this determination, use of cover is included in firing line exercises and is stressed by the firearms instructors. As has been pointed out, in a stress situation an officer is likely to react as he was trained to react.
There is almost always some type of cover available but it may not be recognized as such without training."
If you're twice as good a shot, but their instincts make them give you much less than half the target sizes to shoot at, they might be getting the first hits in.
It's tempting to think "I wouldn't do anything as dumb as ignoring cover in a real fight, just because I never take cover at the range", but adrenaline doesn't make you smarter at making decisions, it just makes you access your trained decisions faster. The Station Nightclub Fire bouncer wouldn't let anyone through the backstage exit because it was supposed to be an absolute rule that that was for the band only. Agents trained to holster their gun in between each shot at the range would find themselves automatically holstering their guns in the middle of firefights. The craziest story I've heard is that some disarmament drills disallow directly passing weapons back and forth when repeating a drill, because after being thoroughly inadvertently trained in how to "disarm the attacker, then pass the knife back for another go", that was what someone did in an actual attack.
Yup. My old dojo taught us not to hand weapons back during drills for exactly this reason.
Muscle memory is a hell of a thing. Another (possibly apocryphal) story we were told is of a police officer who was gunned down during a shootout because adrenaline kicked in and he started picking up spent shell casings, exactly as they'd been made to do at the range.
heard that one as well, and I'd like to believe it's one of those myths that just gets passed around. Unpleasantly plausible, given the consequences.
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Seems very plausible. My old MMA gym prohibited helping your sparring partner get up after knocking them down in training after during an actual competition a member threw an opponent to the mat then reflexively bent over and reached out a hand to help him up. The opponent took advantage of it and ended up winning.
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