Saw this posted elsewhere:
There have been several gunfighting quotes about Wyatt Earp going around for the last few months. If you haven’t seen them, you need to:
“When I say that I learned to take my time in a gunfight, I do not wish to be misunderstood, for the time to be taken was only that split fraction of a second that means the difference between deadly accuracy with a sixgun and a miss. It is hard to make this clear to a man who has never been in a gunfight. Perhaps I can best describe such time taking as going into action with the greatest speed of which a man’s muscles are capable, but mentally unflustered by an urge to hurry or the need for complicated nervous and muscular actions which trick-shooting involves. Mentally deliberate, but muscularly faster than thought, is what I mean.”
-Wyatt Earp
“No wise man ever took a handgun to a gun fight.”
-Wyatt Earp
“Fast is fine, but accuracy is everything. You need to take your time in a hurry in a gunfight.”
-Wyatt Earp
“The most important lesson I learned was that the winner of a gunplay usually was the one who took his time. The second was that, if I hoped to live on the frontier, I would shun flashy trick-shooting. Grandstand play. as I would poison. In all my life as a frontier peace officer, I did not know a really proficient gunfighter who had anything but contempt for the gunfanner or the man who literally shot from the hip.”
-Wyatt Earp
“From personal experience and numerous six-gun battles which I witnessed, I can only support the opinion advanced by the men who gave me my most valuable instruction in fast and accurate shooting, which was that the gun-fanner and hip-shooter stood small chance to live against a man who, as old Jack Gallagher always put it, took his time and pulled the trigger once.”
-Wyatt Earp