So your a gun enthusiast and you consider yourself a real pistolero. You go to the range often and consider your self a real dead-eye. You also have considered what you would do if someone broke into your house and that you would not hesitate to defend your family and your property.

So you go to the range today and you have a pistol and you buy your two boxes of ammo and go inside and crank out the target to 15 yards and as you finish firing the 6th round all of a sudden from out of nowhere, from inside the range to the side some dude pops out with a gun in hand and starts firing at you.

So what are you going to do? He's already started firing at you so if he's a decent shot you've already been hit. How many seconds will you hesitate before firing? How many more rounds will you take? Will you have the presence of mind to immediately seek cover or just stand there? Will you just panic and do nothing or fire wildly and miss totally? What if you have a 6 shot revolver? Think you can unload and reload under that pressure?

You see you were part of an experiment.They weren't real bullets.

So now transpose that to an incident where your at home one dark winter night and your on your computer and you hear breaking glass and you just happen to have a gun in a locked box in that room. You hear footsteps, its dark in the hall. How long is it going to take you to retrieve the weapon under pressure? have you practiced doing that? You enter the hallway and you see a dark figure and can see he's holding something but you can't tell what it is but you think its a gun. How long will it take you to decide what to do. He's in the dark and is moving you came out out of a lit room and are framed by the light and stand out like a target at a shooting range. Your also standing still in total panic. He sees you and your gun and starts firing. Now its real bullets whizzing by. So how would you react and how long would it take you to react? Think you'd be a dead-eye now?

Just food for thought.

With the exception of the last paragraph I've been through training like that just that we used rubber bullets in a .357 propelled by the primer alone. If your hit within 10 yards or so it hurts like hell.

After some responses I'll tell you what highly trained Federal Agents did.