Gah, dear God. I prefer The Drinker's take on the final episode, or if you have the time, Mauler's much longer dissection. This was a walking pile of steaming hot dog shit.
"Down" is not a good place to be. It should be along the left side of the gun pointed generally towards the targets. This gets the meat of your grip higher on the gun closer to the level of the bore axis which increases your mechanical advantage. There is also zero risk of the slide cutting the shit out of your thumb.
My first preference is a 5 inch barrel, a 4 inch barrel is fine. I wouldn't use a 3 inch barrel unless I had literally no choice. In general when it comes to pistols you will find the heavier ones to be easier to shoot quickly and more friendly to shoot in general. There are lots of good options nowadays. Glocks are fine, CZ sp01 is good, Tanfoglio stock 2 is good, walthers are good. M&Ps are ok. What you get is less important than the work you put into getting good with it.
It's just like any other skill, you gotta put the work in. I highly recommend you go to USPSA.org to find your nearest affiliated club, contact the match director, and say you are brand new and interested in shooting. Don't be intimidated by the fact that it's "competition", there are people of all skill levels there from absolute novice to highly skilled who you are likely to find extremely helpful, not to mention the shooting itself is incredibly fun. There's no better way to force yourself to improve in the highest stress environment outside of being shot at.
The "sport" aspect about it is basically the answer to the question of how far can this go? I totally get how it looks like "oh wow who's the best exerciser" but if you actually delve into the thought process you may find that the reasoning is pretty compelling.
Briefly the idea is that there is a fitness that lends itself generally well to anything you could ask it to do and that he who does best on average across all of those tasks has the highest general physical preparedness or fitness. You can define this mathematically as well by calculating average power output over the duration of the tasks, so I feel tying the claim of "fittest" to the person who generated the highest average power output over many tasks has some solid foundations. The sport aspect is the attempt to apply a grueling test to the general physical preparedness program that each competitor used to prepare in order to garner information about how to get better.
As for the opinion of whether or not it's a sport, most people think track and field is a sport. Most people also think competitive lifting is a sport. The Decathalon is another great example. I don't see why combining those and adding other things that may or may not be sports in themselves would make crossfit not able to be a sport. You've got people out there competing at accomplishing athletic tasks that are incredibly challenging, seems to fit the bill of sport to me, but to each their own I suppose.
Welcome. I posted something today you may be interested in checking out even though it unfortunately did not get much traction.
It's going to be hard to change the dominance of your eye. With pistol shooting being cross eye dominant isn't too big of a deal because it only requires shifting the gun an inch or two towards the dominant eye. I haven't found cross eye dominance to be the same problem in a rifle primarily because you have more points of contact on the gun (notably your cheek and shoulder) to ensure the relationship between your head and the gun is the same every time you bring it to target. The goal is to develop the skill to bring the gun onto a target and have the sights be aligned on the target in front of your eye with no adjustment needed. This obviously requires work to achieve.
If you are especially having trouble an option if you're right handed can be to put a tiny piece of scotch tape on the left lens of your shooting glasses exactly at the point where it obstructs that eye's vision of the sights. This can also be useful as a training aid that leaves the majority of your vision unobstructed. You can take a similar approach with corrective lenses where you would correct your right eye's vision to sight length while having your left lens focused mid to far, although some people find that disorienting so your mileage may vary.
Pretty sure you got that conversion backwards? conversion chart
I already addressed this in the previous post you responded to. Partial obstruction of 1 of 2 carotids is not going to put anyone to sleep. Even full obstruction, if the knee were on the front side of the neck instead of the back side of the neck, of just 1 of 2 carotids is not going to put anyone to sleep. There's a reason a good blood choke constricts the neck from ALL sides.
Hey that’s the back of the neck. Nerves go through that area and it is incredibly dangerous to push there when the head is facing the ground.
It can be, but dangerous in that it can cause injury, not that it's likely to cause death. Floyd was not being choked definitively. Anyone that thinks he was either knows nothing about choking or has fallen under the spell of peer pressure. And that's correct about preconditions of the person, that's partially why I do think it was abuse of force. I still don't think Chauvin's actions were the cause of death, but he still shouldn't have had his knee on the man for 8 minutes and he still should have tried to get him medical attention earlier. Which is why I think manslaughter is the correct charge.
If you put an otherwise healthy man in the position Floyd was in, he does not die and likely never even goes unconscious. He clearly did not have his airway obstructed, the knee could partially obstruct one carotid (only partially due to the place the knee was applying pressure which is far from ideal for blood choking), but the other side carotid had no obstruction at all which means no blood choke either. Cops still should be tried for manslaughter as the man died due to gross negligence.
Based hero of canton.