The shooting community has been relatively peaceful as of late. While brush fires from the Great Caliber Wars still still pop up from time to time and the debate over whether or not sport shooting will get you killed on “the street” has yet to be definitively decided there hasn’t been a good community-wide blow. Until now! Yes, somebody has decided to challenge the central dogma of firearms handling. Say hello to the temple index.
The temple index is the new hotness in firearms handling. When you want to operate like an operator in areas of operations you simply need to bring your handgun to the side of your head and point the muzzle to the sky. From this position you can… do things… and stuff.
I knew I heard about this technique somewhere then it hit me, Rory Miller wrote about temple indexing and, more importantly, it’s origins in Meditations on Violence. As it turns out temple index has a very specific purpose:
Rookie officers come to the academy believing that the right way to make a fast entry is with their weapons next to their heads, pointing at the sky. A technique that only existed so that a cameraman could get the star’s face and a gun in the same picture has become something that people who know better try to do. In real life, it is a matter of an instant for a bad guy to grab the barrel and shove it under the officer’s chin. A messy death.
Sgt. Rory Miller (2014-07-18). Meditations on Violence: A Comparison of Martial Arts Training & Real World Violence (p. 29). YMAA Publication Center. Kindle Edition.
So remember when you need to look cool and have a picture of your face with a gun in it to prove you’re operating just temple index that hot rod handgun.
Funny that you post this right after I read this article:
http://monderno.com/training/temple-index-real-world-versus-range/
As stated in that article, it has it’s uses, but too often it’s taken out of context by people who don’t know why they’re doing it and just do it to look “cool.”
The problem is when the uninformed “Tactical” community takes an idea and it becomes a caricature of itself.