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Speaking of John Murphy's class, here is an interview with John and some of his recent students:

I was just in Nashville at the Royal Range teaching this past weekend. I'll be there next year but don't know the dates. You can follow my class announcements here. John Murphy will be there in November with his excellent traveling road show.

I have attended this presentation. It's well done.

Standing there with a gun in your hand is a bad plan.

Chris Cypert of Citizens Defense Research and I teamed up for this video on making the 911 call in the event of a range injury or accident.

Thanks for the explanation.

I can't speak to them, but right in Murfreesboro you have Citizens Safety Academy, and they are top shelf. Ryan McCann is also in the area, and I highly recommend him.

Please elaborate on having the revolver higher in your line of sight for reloads. What were you doing previously, and what are you doing now?

Link to YouTube Video Here's CJ, one of the students, running the 4+1 Transition Drill with a Tac14 in 20ga. I like this drill because it has many layers to it. The shooter starts at gunbox/cruiser ready and has to get the gun into action. Then they hit both outside targets (long transitions), both inside targets (more transitions), and ends with an emergency load to the center target. With only five rounds, we are practicing numerous skills. One issue with 20ga shotguns for defensive use is that there is not, in my opinion, a quality defensive buckshot load available for them. One must account for every pellet sent downrange, and quite frankly, I have yet to find a 20ga load with a good enough pattern beyond 7-10 yards to use with confidence. Here are pics of a Rio (I know) load I asked CJ to test in his gun. I didn't get pics of the Winchester Super X load he also tested, but it was worse. One round was fired at seven and 15 yards with three rounds fired at 25 yards. Note how many pellets are outside of the body of this large silhouette. For comparison, here is the same test shot with Federal 8-pellet reduced recoil FliteControl: I also ran the same test with some Federal "black pack" 9-pellet 00 buck. It held it's own out to 15 yards, but at 25 I had a pellet off of the body and several outside of the effective zones.

Roger that. That was a fun class. I'll actually be in Murfreesboro teaching this weekend

In the quote above, Cirillo isn't talking about unsighted fire. He's talking about covering a suspect and being able to view everything that the suspect is doing prior to having to shoot. In that sense, he is correct because the problem in the background is innocent people. In his descriptions of his actual shootings, he was clearly using sighted fire albeit he may not have had a true, hard, front sight focus in every instance. I'll try to look back through his written works for the exact wording, but he did describe a method of looking through the gun in some instances and being so aware of the silhouette of the gun that one could tell if it was misaligned. I have pressure tested, as much possible, the looking through the gun method in graded force on force sessions and found that it works extremely well within certain distances and with full torso targets. I've also found in those same scenarios that I can make a shot on a moving person at 17 yards with a hard front sight focus because... I looked for my sights. I know of one school out there that is a haven for poor shooters because their sensei tells them they won't be able to see their sights and that so long as they hit somewhere on the silhouette target all will be good... They might get by with that right up until they have to hit dude in the right eyeball because all that is sticking out from cover is the gun, hand, arm, and the right half of dude's face.

That's not what Cirillo himself wrote in his descriptions of the gunfights in which he was involved.

In numerous high stress situations, I have been able to see my sights, unless one doesn't consider things like taking down a murder suspect as high stress. There's a lot of wisdom in the words of Jim Cirillo.