Tactical Anatomy: What Shot Placement Actually Means (Article by Kat Ainsworth Stevens)
The words “shot placement is king” have been uttered so much they’ve become a cliché. It’s not that the phrase is incorrect, but more that it’s gone the meaningless rote way of “slow is smooth, smooth is fast.” In some ways it doesn’t matter anyway because — in a somewhat humorous twist — it turns out we were all taught incorrectly about shot placement.
Hundreds and even thousands of training hours shooting center mass on various targets haven’t exactly been a waste, but they might have formed bad habits when it comes to self-defense. This is why a solid grasp of tactical anatomy matters.
Tactical Anatomy: What Shot Placement Actually Means | RECOIL
Go read.
That is all, carry on.
Some years ago I read about an instructor named Paris Theodore, who had a system based on the notion that certain parts of the torso, when hit, far more quickly and surely disable an attacker than others. He created and patented (US 4,508,508, 1983) targets using that system. Those are interesting: you see a picture of a human, typically not straight on, and the target zones are marked on the back. So shot placement is done with a picture of an attacker shown, but evaluated against the scoring areas you can't see that are on the back of the target.