Official News page 5

REAL LIFE NEWS: WHO WINS IN A SHOOT-OUT?

by Hazed

It's a stand-off in a western town. Two gunfighters face each other in a deserted street, their hands poised to draw their Colt 45s and shoot. Twanging guitars provide the tense music.

One fighter goes for his gun. The other sees him make his move, and reacts, drawing his pistol too. But who wins? Who fires first? Who lags behind and dies?

In Hollywood movies, it is always the bad guy that draws first, thus forfeiting the moral victory, but the good guy who manages to beat him to the draw anyway and shoot him dead. But what about in real life - would that happen? Surely the one who draws first has the advantage and would normally come out the winner.

Professor Andrew Weichman of the University of Birmingham decided to put this to the test. He set up a series of "laboratory gunfights", replacing the Colt 45s with electronic pressure pads, and measured what happened when people fought it out.

Surprisingly, the result is that Hollywood gets it right for once. It turns out that if you react to someone else's move, you will be significantly faster than the conscious decision-making process involved in choosing to draw your gun - 21 milliseconds faster on the draw, in fact. That's enough to make a life or death difference.

The Prof puts this result down to the "quick and dirty" nature of instinctive responses, which have evolved to help us survive. "In our everyday lives some of the movements we make come about because we decide to make them, while others are forced upon us by reacting to events," he says.

Interesting stuff - but not ground-breaking, because it turns out that the physicist and Nobel laureate Niels Bohr was an avid watcher of westerns in his spare time, and he too was intrigued by the question of whether it was best to draw first or not in a shoot-out. He staged a series of mock gunfights using toy cap guns bought from a Copenhagen toyshop and, by always drawing second, he always won.

His conclusion was that the logical strategy was a negotiated settlement, since neither protagonist would have wanted to draw first so there would be nothing to do but talk! That would be much more sensible, but it wouldn't make such a good film.

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