An excellent question was posed about Refining the Drawstroke. It’s worthy of repeating and answering in a post of its own because the answer seems counter-intuitive.

Shortest distance between two points is a straight line. He seems to catch with the support hand at the nipple line. We catch just a tad lower. Thoughts?

In this case, the line to follow is the eye-target line not the line from the holster to full extension. The sooner the gun gets into the eye-target line, at least peripherally, the sooner we can begin refining our visual reference of the gun to the target. If the gun is presented straight to extension, the visual refinement cannot begin until the gun reaches extension.

At this point, I am already achieving a coarse visual reference of the pistol to the target.

Presenting along the eye-target line seems counter-intuitive but is actually a faster method of acquiring a visual index than presenting straight to extension. The only time presenting straight out would be faster is at near contact distances. We don’t want to have the gun at full extension at those distances anyway.

Consider also if I needed to fire a shot at the moment captured in the above picture. Where would it hit my opponent? The bullet would strike in the thoracic cavity instead of the abdominal cavity. We need to keep in mind Tom Givens‘ dictum.

What do criminals do when you shoot them with a handgun below the diaphragm? [I.e., the abdominal cavity] Pretty much the same thing they were doing before you shot them.

Drawing from Wikipedia

The eye-target line is the line to keep in mind as much as possible when shooting a handgun. Handguns are inherently difficult to shoot. The more we keep them visually indexed, the better our shooting will be.