I have not personally been in a gunfight (thankfully) but a couple different people I know have. It went something like this: "Oh shit" followed by the gun being drawn and fired in very close quarters with no aiming whatsoever because the person/people was/were knife distance away. I know that's not how all encounters go down, but my takeaway from these stories is that contact distance is the norm and you should expect to fire a lot of rounds and not achieve very good hits if any. Bad day indeed.
IIRC the statistics, according to cop teaching my CCW class:
90% of handgun shootings are < 3 feet
Takes 7-15 seconds to bleed out from a direct shot to the heart (i.e. drugged up people are still dangerous after multiple shots to chest). The only instant stop is a 2" band around the head.
15% of handgun shootings are fatal (mostly due to quick medical response these days).
In the one second you have to draw, the bad guy can cover 18 feet from a standstill; have done this drill.
At 18 feet, a trained attacker with a sharp knife can take one down before the gun is drawn and shot. With a machete, they'll just start with the gun arm. Self-defense law takes this into account.
I vaguely recall reading somewhere about some study where they found out that when the police fire their pistols, at a range of 5 meters they hit about 50% of the time.
Having spent a fair amount of time in my youth shooting with a BB pistol in my parents garage, I find the above statistic entirely believable. Shooting a pistol accurately is much more difficult than it looks, so I can certainly imagine that in a high stress situation where your own life may be on the line you'll make simple mistakes that cause you to miss..
Over here moose hunting is quite popular; to keep their moose hunting license every hunter needs to pass a test (every year, IIRC) that involves hitting a moving target.
Most hunters pass this test without much difficulty. Of course, on the range the distance is known (100m, IIRC), and the target moves at a constant and known speed, so one knows how much lead is needed. Still, AFAIU in the wild the results are decent.
Most of those officers can do pretty well on the range, too. Problem is, adrenaline plays hell with fine motor skills - there are even specific techniques for reloading that I've been taught that require only gross motor skills, because that's all you'll have in an emergency situation.
