[ExI] The Gunslinger Effect aka Bohr's Law

[BillK]

On Sat, 2 Jul 2022 at 21:54, Stuart LaForge via extropy-chat
<extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote:
>
> Apparently Hollywood westerns got something right. In a gunfight,
> there is an advantage in drawing second. This was discovered by Niels
> Bohr, of all people, and has been empirically verified numerous times.
> Neurologically, people react faster than they can initiate action
> proactively, but only for simple one-step actions. This becomes
> reversed for complex tasks or tasks where a decision needs to be made.
>
> https://link.springer.com/article/10.3758/s13414-010-0057-7
>
> Stuart LaForge
> _______________________________________________


The theory may be correct, but I would object to describing it as the
Gunslinger Effect.
In film, the good guy never draws first because it would ruin his
'good guy' image to shoot someone who hadn't drawn his own gun.

Also, I doubt that this theory applies to experienced gunslingers.
The Fast Draw competitions have competitors drawing and shooting
accurately at incredible speeds.
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fast_draw>
Quote:
Given that the average human reaction time is around 0.2 to 0.25
seconds, the round is over before most people can react. The reaction
times of the best fast draw shooters is 0.145 seconds, which means
that the gun is cocked, drawn, aimed (from the hip), and fired in just
over 0.06 seconds.
The exhibition shooter Bob Munden (1942-2012), proclaimed by the
Guinness Book of World Records as “the fastest man with a gun who ever
lived", could draw, fire, break a balloon target with a blank using a
standard weight single-action revolver and return his gun to his
holster faster than the blink of an eye. On his DVD "Outrageous
Shooting," Munden was filmed shooting .16 of a second in an event
called Walk and Draw Level.
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BillK