this post was submitted on 05 Apr 2025
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Fire quicker than your opponent is the essence of the duel. There's no way to "fire early" because they are watching for you to reach for your gun.
Although I always found the genre contrived. If they were an actual threat, you'd shoot them in their sleep.
You’re entirely correct. Showdowns are a trope of westerns, anyway. If I remember correctly, there’s only historical evidence of one in the old west.
The 'conventional' wisdom is to wait for the other duelist to reach for their gun because reflex is faster than conscious action.
Well it's not. Not even close. Action beats reaction every time.
https://www.nbcnews.com/health/health-news/reactions-faster-actions-study-finds-flna1C9442417
"Rarely" is not "never", reaction is faster than conscious action by the study's conclusions (just not fast enough to offset acting first), and, furthermore, in an actual shooting situation, the important thing is not to actually be the second to draw, but to provoke your own reaction regardless of whether the signal you react to (ie an errant twitch of the opponent's fingers) is genuine or a false alarm.
Bunch of armchair duelists in here lol
You didn't have to draw on me like that
Yes rarely means not never but are you going to risk your life on something that rarely works?
Which means like the study showed, you should make the decision and then do it first. Because their reflex being faster will rarely make up for the lost time of you consciously deciding to shoot first.
But like... You can just trigger your reaction yourself. It's like when you sit there trying to learn to wiggle your ears or shake your eyes... You just have to try flexing muscles you don't have in the right area until you get it right
I guess I've never really talked to anyone about it, but you can program your own reactions. Then you can tell your body to do it - not move, but tell your body to do the sequence.
I have an airsoft gun I use to practice it sometimes even, holding it at my side I tell my body to pick one of a few cans, snap it up and fire. I look down the sights, but not consciously - i get a flash frame of the view down the sights, but I've already heard the hit before i can process it
It's like when a martial artist breaks a board - they line it up and run through the motion, but sometimes they pause for whatever amount of time... You don't move your arm, you execute a punch, and not even you know exactly when you're going to move
Honor is dead
But I'll see what I can do.
Maybe the poster thought there was a countdown. Not this one though, so you're absolutely right.
It works better when both gunners care about innocents. Imagine the ranger couldn't find hits hideout, a big enough place it wasn't easy, and Texas red didn't wanna shoot up the place he was living.
The ranger might get a message saying a time and place, so they can meet without causing a bunch of damage or risking innocents.
Of course, the moustache-twirling sort of villains wouldn't work with that at all. Just can't trust them. But there's plenty of room for this to make sense sometimes.
These were the "good old days" when fighting had rules. National armies would literally line up facing each other in uniforms with literal X-marks-the-spot targets.
The reason for armies meeting up like that, and in bright colors, is to avoid friendly fire, not because of honor or anything like that. When you have a bunch of peasants dragged from their homes and shove a musket in their hands, anything more complex than "Holy shit, holy fucking shit, do NOT shoot or stab the guys in BRIGHT RED, only those in BRIGHT BLUE" tends to get lost in the chaos of battle.