A knife can cover twenty-one feet before a gun draws

A person can sprint across a room and land a strike before an officer can even clear their holster. This biomechanical reality, known as the Tueller Drill, was first quantified in 1983 by Sergeant Dennis Tueller. He discovered that a healthy adult can cover twenty-one feet in roughly 1.5 seconds. During that same window, the average defender is still battling their own biology; it takes about 250 milliseconds for the eyes to register a threat and another 150 milliseconds for the brain to tell the muscles to move.