[quote]FrozenNinja wrote:
[quote]Cephalic_Carnage wrote:
Something that has come up in the past in other threads and also the recent trayvon martin thing (relating to a different case though) was the amount of rounds fired by police officers in many cases… I think professor X brought up some case where a guy who pulled out his wallet for ID in the dark was assumed to have a gun and 4 police officers fired 41 times in total (19 hits).
Why this happens is somewhat answered in the links provided etc, at least from a terminal ballistics standpoint… But let’s discuss training and psychological factors some relating to this… I’ve repeatedly noticed people critizising or expressing disbelief over the volume of fire in such cases…
So clearing up some of the factors involved might help future discussions of other cases (That’s me, ever the optimist in the face of insurmountable odds hahaha).
Especially interested in Jim’s view of course, as LE/former LE.
FWIW I think those of us who have commented in this thread previously are likely all on the same page on this anyway, but for other people reading it might be an interesting discussion to follow.[/quote]
Well lets get it on then[/quote]
Right… I’m currently only awake because of a a felt kilogram of caffeine (and because I have to be haha), so forgive me for being something of a scatterbrain and all…
Let’s see.
First off, you should know about terminal ballistics (read the links linked in the OP, inform yourself about the 1986 miami shootout (FBI) ) as that is a critical factor usually.
But basically… You can pump someone full of bullets and he may well continue to do whatever it is he was just busy doing… Or simply not go down… Not just in a situation where he is the aggressor, but in pretty much any situation… Provided no CNS or psychological stop occurs.
Anyway…
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Remember the police officers stated that one of them stumbled and fell, causing them to think he’d been hit… During what they thought was a firefight… Plus before then, they started shooting because they mistook the purse for a gun… Now I’m arguing this from the assumed standpoint that they were not lying. If they were lying, then this all goes out the window and they were simply wrong to shoot.)
Supposedly he also ran from them at first before stopping and then pulling out what they thought was his gun (but was a purse). I believe it was also dark?
Secondly… You want to stop the threat as quickly as possible. Having the guy faint half a minute or several minutes later from blood loss doesn’t help much if he’s been shooting at you in the meantime.
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- Training.
1a) Poor training (most often the case): People usually think you shoot someone with a gun and they just sort of fall down and die or whatever. It’s a shock to many (even soldiers using rifles) to find out that this is rarely how it works.
In other words, you are under stress thinking the guy is pointing a gun at you or pulling one out, you shoot as you should in that case, but the guy does not go down as you expect and suddenly your colleague goes down instead. OH shit, why won’t the bad guy go down? So you keep pulling the trigger in sort of a fog/panic until the mag is empty or the guy goes down.
Even if he does go down, it can take a while for this to even register… You might see it but reflexively keep pulling the trigger.
Apart from this, handguns have a very short sight radius and are thus difficult to fire accurately compared to shoulder-fired weapons, same for their trigger issues (easy to throw a shot) and so on. Getting accurate hits on the guys’ critical areas (CNS is pretty much the only reliable way of stopping him via physical damage IMMEDIATELY) or hits at all is thus quite difficult especially under stress and when you can’t stand at the range with plenty of time to aim and stationary targets.
1b)
Ironically, similar stuff is still true in the case of well-trained shooters… Usually one shoots center visible mass. In many cases, there is not much there to cause an immediate physiological stop/what is there is incredibly unlikely to be hit and damaged (spine… Heart shots do not usually cause immediate incapacitation, you just bleed out and pain is not something to rely on in such circumstances).
I.e. you can be the best shooter in the world and especially with handguns (which are all crap for the purpose of quickly stopping a threat regardless of caliber to put it bluntly) you can still hit the guy 5 or 10 or howevermany times center visible mass and he will still be standing there and or shooting you or whatever.
Nothing you can do apart from continuing to engage. In fact, most often one is taught to keep shooting until the threat is stopped/no longer a threat. The whole “2 in the chest, 1 in the head” thing is often just pure fantasy in actual gunfights… Many pistol firefights invole a crazy amount of dodging around desks/cars/whatever cover is available getting off snapshots one-handed, reloading in a panic, missing half the time or more and only few critical hits on the target that are even capable of stopping it quickly.
Of course that does not seem to be the case in this incident so much, but the point is as long as the guy didn’t go down, they would not have stopped shooting (and should not have, provided they did really think he had a gun), and even once he was down it’s possible they continued like many other people, trained or not, would have due to psychological factors.
- Terminal ballistics, discussed in the OP etc, important to know about. Reason why targets often don’t go down, depending on where they were hit, whether there was a psychological stop or not…
I don’t know what load the officers were firing/issued… Many agencies use ammo which does not meet the FBI standards and is thus less likely to, even with good shot placement, be able to immediately incapacitate the target or cause enough bleeding to incapacitate relatively fast (the latter being irrelevant as any kind of bleeding incapacitation takes longer than it takes to fire those 10 shots by a long shot, no pun intended)… If that was the case, it may be one more reason for the number of shots fired.
Bullets also do not actually knock people down. The person’s reaction to the bullet does (i.e. fainting, from sudden psychological shock/surprise or being incapacitated from a CNS hit or some such and thus collapsing and so on), so unless one of those things happens, the guy is likely to remain upright until incapacitated somehow, which in turn means he still appears as a threat which in turn means that the officers will/should continue to fire.
- Psychological factors affecting the shooters already discussed partially… Anyway… Under stress and even with great training (which they were unlikely to have received… Most soldiers don’t either), the number of shots fired (also consider the number of misses… Which actually weren’t too bad, but highly unlikely if this was some sort of execution rather than a panic response by the officers to a guy apparently pulling a gun) is pretty much what one would expect and does not in itself indicate great hatred for the victim or whatever, nor is it ludicrous (even though it naturally seems so to those who are not familiar with this stuff).
