In a recent Police shooting in Houston, one officer was killed and another wounded while serving a drug warrant.
Both officers were standing in front of an open door to an apartment when the shooting began.
Tactically speaking you want to avoid standing in front of doors, open or closed.
Open doors silhouette your profile while closed doors give your position away to the bad guy.
It may sound basic but in a bad guy’s mind they have a 50/50 shot of hitting you if they shoot through the door after you knock on it and announce yourself! Which is why even today after knocking on a door I stand to the side of it, regardless how nice a neighborhood!
Although it is beyond the scope of this article to dive into the modern fallacies of some modern CQB dogma, the main issue for the armed citizen to remember with the fatal funnel is the following, taken from this article:
The original meaning of the ‘fatal funnel’ was a warning to ensure that you did not pause or remain in doorways or windows. It was to prevent silhouetting yourself there. Of course, when readying to prevent a room entry, the ‘bad guy’ will naturally set up to shoot towards natural entry points. So, rather than over-defining the ‘fatal funnel’, as the video says, it is more about enemy lines of fire, corners, and avoiding silhouetting yourself there. Don’t try and define the ‘funnel ‘ geographically and over complicate it, creating a whole bunch of stylized drills based on over-complicated assumptions about the fatal funnel.
