The primary purpose of this course was not to turn America's police officers into a bunch of gunfighters, but instead to give them the confidence of knowing that if they were caught off-guard by armed criminals, such as when stopping a car with a defective taillight for the umpteenth time, but this time the driver has stolen the car and he thinks he has been nailed, and he sticks a pistol out of his window and starts shooting, those cops still had a good chance to defend themselves successfully. To put the numbers into perspective, half a second is about the maximum amount of time that an armed man has to respond to an attack by another armed man. For example, it takes an agile man with a knife who is 21 feet away from you about half a second to rush you and put his knife into you.