Teaches:
Lethal Force Stoppage

Requires:
two shot timers

Principle:
This is a defensive drill (also known as the Mozambique) to prepare for the possibility that an aggressor will not be stopped by shots to the chest. This could be for a variety of reasons, from body armor to narcotic intoxication to just bad luck. In the turmoil of an armed conflict the shooter will probably not be able to tell why. The best defensive response is not to diagnose the failure but to quickly remedy it with a followup shot to the head.

Drill:
The standard failure-to-stop drill is two shots to the chest; assess; one shot to the head if needed.

It is important that the head shot be a response to the aggressor's continued threat, not just a rehearsed triple-tap. Taking a moment for assessment also serves the purpose of changing pace from two quick center-of-mass shots to a very deliberate and accurate single shot to stop.

Any shooting drill on a silouette or IPSC target can be adapted as a failure drill. The most common method is to have an instructor shout "FAILURE" after the shooter has fired two shots to the chest. The shooter understands this means the chest shots were ineffective and the aggressor is still a threat. If the instructor is silent, the shots are presumed to have stopped the threat.

You can perform this drill on your own with two shot-timers (if timers are available to you at a club). Start both timers on a five-second random delay, and when either goes off, draw and fire two shots to the center of a target. If the second timer goes off during the assessment phase, perform the failure drill. If the timer beeps overlap, or are so close that you are still shooting when the second timer goes off, your first shots were effective. This is a good method, because the pacing of the "failure" cue is unpredictable--it might come immediately after your chest shots, or up to two seconds later.

More elaborate setups are possible with reactive target arrays. Thunder Ranch uses targets that can be configured to only fall from certain shot placements, depending on the instructor's preference (documentation here.) These are excellent for drilling the failure response. Other instructors use balloons with some colored dye as the center-of-mass target. Depending on the color of the dye, the student will have to perform a failure drill or not.

Variations:
After shooting any kind of defensive scenario, a shooter should go to combat ready, assess all targets, and scan the area for further threats. This is also a prime time to drill a failure to stop.