They are taught to shoot center mass (chest) in order to rupture the heart or other major blood vessel. This causes a drop in blood pressure leading to the person shot passing out or dying thus rendering him a threat no longer. Many times after a person is shot and falls down their blood pressure will stabilize thus allowing them to get back up and into the fight. The more “leaks” they have the less the chance of this happening. This nonsense about someone falling forward or backward depending on where they were shot is sheer stupidity. The energy transfer of a bullet fired from a typical duty sidearm does not have enough force to physically “push” an average sized human around.
Shooting someone in the heart or lungs often does not do any more short-term damage than shooting them anywhere in the abdomen, so your causing serious damage to internal organs theory goes out the window. You’re right that a round that hits precisely the right place on the spine or brain is about the only way to guaranty the person is stopped immediately. We can agree that is a tough shot to make on a moving target. In that situation, I doubt the cops were worried about trying to get the guy to go down or die in 20 minutes or even 20 seconds. I think it’s safe to assume they wanted him to drop immediately.
I’m pretty sure we should be talking about stopping the threat, not killing the threat. I never even joked about shooting to wound. I agree, shooting to wound is stupid. Two rounds to the chest and 1 to the head is also stupid because that might kill the person later, but it may not stop them from being a threat now. This guy was by himself and he had an ax. I believe there were 3 cops with their weapons drawn and a dog. In other words, they had the numbers and the weapons to stop the threat. If the threat dies, that’s the way it goes, but I don’t think that should be the goal in police work. They aren’t fighting a war. I have no idea if this guy hurt or killed someone in the store before he came out. All I know is he was angry, he broke a bunch of things with an ax, he had the potential to hurt or kill someone, and he wasn’t trying to hurt the cops until the cop behind him tried to hit him with the taser. Even then, I can’t tell if he was just faking that he was going to hit the cop, but that’s not something a person who might get hit by an ax wants to wait around and find out whether or not it was a fake. When the odds are 3 or 4 to 1 in your favor and 3 of you have guns and the bad guy is holding an ax, I don’t see why the goal would NOT be to stop the threat.
The job of the police is to protect the general public. Part of protecting the general public is trying to avoid shooting an innocent person. Aiming the weapon a little lower on a person such as somewhere between the belly button and the xiphoid process decreases the chances of hitting someone with a stray round who is 40 meters away and who doesn’t even know there’s a dangerous situation going on.
Do you really think this guy was surprised by the noise and pain of being shot? He was so ticked off, I doubt it. If I could, I’d be willing to bet he didn’t even feel like he’d been shot when the first 3 or 4 rounds went into him. I doubt he felt more pain than he would if someone could have punched him square in the chest that many times that quickly. It doesn’t take much of a hit to knock someone off balance who is standing up straight and who is thinking about something else besides taking a hit. Haven’t you ever given one of your buddies a quick push or jabbed them in the chest when they weren’t expecting it? I’m not referring to an all-out shove or punch, just one thing that does a little more than get their attention. They don’t fall over, but they take a step or 2 to regain their balance. Several 9 mm rounds from a meter or 2 away will knock someone off balance if they are not thinking about it. The guy with the ax was thinking about the cop who hit him with the taser, not the first cop who shot him. If he braced himself and was prepared to take a hit, I agree getting shot by a pistol, even from that close would not knock him off balance or move him in a direction you wanted them to go based on where they were shot.
Agreed, the M16 is a shitty weapon. The 5.56 mm is a shitty round for shooting people. Any weapon on full auto will not be very accurate even if it’s shooting a puny 5.56 round and it hardly kicks.
I must admit, you took the Ronnie Coleman reference a little more seriously than I thought you would. Ha ha.
[quote]cwill1973 wrote:
They are taught to shoot center mass (chest) in order to rupture the heart or other major blood vessel. This causes a drop in blood pressure leading to the person shot passing out or dying thus rendering him a threat no longer. Many times after a person is shot and falls down their blood pressure will stabilize thus allowing them to get back up and into the fight. The more “leaks” they have the less the chance of this happening. This nonsense about someone falling forward or backward depending on where they were shot is sheer stupidity. The energy transfer of a bullet fired from a typical duty sidearm does not have enough force to physically “push” an average sized human around. [/quote]
Yup. As others have said, people often don’t even notice when they’re hit and immediate reactions are often to the sound/psychological effect rather than the actual physiological trauma of the shot(s).
This is part of what makes a shotgun such an devastating weapon, the instantaneous psychological impact of the sound (of course the shots themselves are more damaging as well). He who makes the biggest bang usually wins, to paraphrase Grossman.
Part of what makes firearms so effective is our deep seated cultural belief in their nigh magical capacity to stop/kill instantly. There are well documented cases of colonial troops facing endogenous populations who had no prior knowledge of firearms. In their highly excited state going into battle the natives would often not react in any immediate way to multiple fatal shots. Unconciousness due to blood loss an take an awfully long time (literally minutes) to set in. Even if the heart is completely destroyed, oxygenated bloop already in the brain and extremities can allow someone to continue fighting for an astonishing amount of time.
Soldiers who don’t realize that they have been hit in combat often experience no immediate effect.
Same with deer who have no idea they’ve been fatally shot.
This same phenomenon often renders centre mass shots ineffective on people who are crazy, high, or extremely goal oriented (i.e. the people who police generally need to shoot).
Ideally, in my understanding, one may want to shoot, move laterally and assess the effect of the shots before shooting again. In reality, outside the ranks of tactical officers, once the shooting starts most people either plant their feet or advance straight in and continue until the threat drops. This is where the arm chair quarterbacking often starts.
This is a hardwired, biological response that is exceedingly difficult to overcome when the shit hits the fan.
Sorry for wall text response.
This thread couldn’t be more over. You’ve got to give Andy1977 an ‘A’ for sticking around when everyone else realized they were being idiots and left. Glad to see some quality posts from others, however, I’m not glad to find out Nards is Canadian. I should have known something was up when I saw those dogs of his.
I did some digging and the suspect walked into Carl’s Jr. axe in hand and started smashing windows out with it. That’s why the cops were called and why they confronted axe man in a car park full of people (wisely, they vacated the building when a maniac appeared with an axe).
[quote]forkknifespoon wrote:
This thread couldn’t be more over. You’ve got to give Andy1977 an ‘A’ for sticking around when everyone else realized they were being idiots and left. Glad to see some quality posts from others, however, I’m not glad to find out Nards is Canadian. I should have known something was up when I saw those dogs of his. [/quote]
Aw jeez eh.