I recently had a colleague report on some firearms training he received and it surprised me to hear that his instructor heavily emphasized counting the number of rounds that had been fired and keeping a running tally of how many rounds remained in the magazine.

I thought this concept had finally disappeared from defensive firearms training, but apparently there are still remnants of it which have survived, so perhaps another look is in order.

From Five Beans to the Wonder Nine

The genesis of this idea undoubtedly dates back to the introduction of the repeating revolver, which was the first widely-used battlefield weapon that contained enough charges to make it difficult to keep track of what was left in the gun in the din of battle. These six-chamber revolvers were loaded and carried with five rounds, which represented an impressive amount of firepower when they made their debut in the 1830s, but still didn’t offer enough of a reserve to allow the shooter to be wasteful. Fortunately, a century-plus of well-developed, single-shot habits helped to keep such sloppiness in check.

One hundred and fifty years later, most American cops were still carrying six-chamber revolvers into combat, and their trainers had been teaching them to count their rounds for decades already. With only six rounds on tap before a slow reload from the pouch, it paid to exercise fire discipline and make every shot count so that you didn’t hear the “loudest sound in the world” in the middle of a fight: “click.”

When the high-capacity autoloader replaced the double action revolver in American law enforcement, the basic duty ammo load out went from 18 rounds to upwards of 45 rounds. Rapid reloads could be accomplished in a fraction of the time and officers were now being taught to fire multi-round bursts — “hammers,” “controlled pairs,” “Mozambique drills,” and the like — as a matter of routine. The hardcore emphasis on ammunition conservation largely disappeared from LE training, as did the emphasis on counting shots.

A Body of Evidence

This was just as well, because the vast majority of cops had never been able to keep track of their shots anyhow in the middle of a fight. We routinely saw LE gunfight participants inaccurately report the number of rounds they had fired in combat, and run their weapons dry in the middle of a fight because they didn’t know they were getting down to that last cartridge. It took a while for the science to catch up and explain the reasons why, but by the ascendancy of the auto-pistol in the late 1980s and early 1990s, the majority of self-defense and law enforcement trainers increasingly realized that counting shots was a losing game.

Not everybody agreed, of course. A rapidly growing body of sport shooters who participated in highly demanding matches that pushed shooters to the limits of accuracy and time gave voice to a crowd of naysayers who felt it was possible to count shots under intense pressure. Additionally, there was an odd military veteran now and then who would relay tales of counting shots during combat.

Their observations were valid for their unique circumstances. The problem is that the level and type of stress experienced by these shooters was different from that encountered in the typical self-defense or law enforcement shooting. The sport shooter certainly encounters high levels of stress during competition — resulting in all kinds of emotional and physical responses — but even the highest level of competition-induced stress fails to trigger the high levels of emotional arousal (and the associated cognitive and physiological responses) common to life-threatening situations.

Even life-threatening situations can provoke a wide range of responses. Some military combat is proactive, with carefully planned ambushes and attacks on an unsuspecting and surprised enemy. In these situations, the attackers have the benefit of being able to mentally prepare for the violence that they are going to initiate and control. This allows many of them to operate in a much lower state of emotional arousal — a cool, hunter/predator state — which doesn’t trigger the same emotional, mental, and physical responses as we see in people who are the sudden target of surprise violence. A police sniper or SWAT officer typically works in this kind of environment.

By contrast, the fast-developing, defensive/reactive nature of most LE shootings means that many officers experience a degree of surprise, fear, confusion, time pressure, and even panic as they are attacked. When the danger is sudden and the distance to the threat is short — as it almost always is in LE confrontations — emotions like these typically trigger high levels of Sympathetic Nervous System (SNS) arousal, resulting in many uncontrollable cognitive and physiological changes.

During SNS activation, cognitive abilities decrease rapidly, leaving an officer less capable of performing precision operations like counting shots accurately, or memory operations like storing the number for recall. Additionally, involuntary physiological changes result in sensory disruptions like tunnel vision and auditory exclusion, which make it harder to see and hear how many times the weapon has been fired. As a result, even if he wanted to, an officer experiencing SNS activation would be physically and mentally hindered from counting his shots accurately.

This is why we see officers like Darren Wilson report they have fired nine times when they actually fired 12 times. It has nothing to do with their integrity or training, only with the effects of survival stress on their memory.

I thought that we were all on this same page by now, but apparently there are still a few trainers out there who think their students can keep count of how many cartridges are left in their weapon in the middle of a fast-breaking, defensive encounter. It’s an unrealistic expectation, and we owe it to our students to be better than that.