Gunslinger Logic
Update: One of the reasons I wrote this is Jack’s post at Grumpy Forester, The Handgun Phallacy.
There’s a police shooting and someone asks why they didn’t just wound the suspect, why was it necessary to kill him/her. The honest answer is that the officer was lucky to hit the individual, and when s/he pulled the trigger, unless they were a sniper, the shot was probably not “aimed.”
I have two incidents that I am personally aware of that occurred when I was in law enforcement. I won’t give identifying details because the incidents are professionally embarrassing.
A uniformed officer enters a bank to deposit his paycheck and interrupts an armed robbery in progress. The robber confronts the officer and gunfire ensues.
Eighteen rounds are fired in the bank, and a distance of perhaps 5 yards and no one is hit. All of the rounds ended up in the ceiling, walls and furniture. Both were using six-shot revolvers, and the officer re-loaded once. The robber actually gave up after he had fired all six rounds in his weapon but the officer fired three rounds after the robber had dropped his gun. [verified by the cameras in the bank]
A police firearms instructor entered a tavern after work for a beer. Just as his beer arrived two men came out of the men’s room behind him. One of them had what appeared to be a revolver and declared their intention of robbing the tavern. The officer drew his auto-loading pistol and proceeded to fire 14 rounds into the wall behind the robbers.
The robbers dropped what turned out to be a pellet pistol and hit the floor well before the firing ended. [verified by the bartender]
On the range I have seen both men put all of their shots inside a 4-inch circle at those distances while firing for qualification and within the specified time.
To understand you need to look at the physiology of the officer in a stress situation. The body changes a great deal when faced with a threat.
If you have ever watched one of those “real” cops shows you may have noticed that the cops are all screaming at people and each other. The reason they do it is that they are deaf from the adrenalin and blood pressure spike. The body reduces hearing to deal with other things.
The other “wonderful thing” that occurs for the same reason, is you lose your peripheral vision. You are in a firefight and you can only see things that are directly in front of your eyes, you have tunnel vision. That’s why neither officer noticed when the bad guys surrendered.
The stress shifts control to the “lizard brain” and all of the wonderful insights and judgments you learned in the academy are not available. Your body is ready for a massive physical battle, or to run like hell, and you are trying to aim a weapon and determine what’s going on around you.
Training is supposed to overcome these problems, and it probably helps to some extent, but in both the cases cited the officers were not given the opportunity to “ease” into combat, it was thrust upon them. All they remembered was to pull their guns and fire.
I would hope this explains why I think having a half dozen armed civilians in the classrooms at Virginia Tech not only might not have prevented the massacre, but might have made it worse.
The killer was firing at point blank range and still did not kill everyone he fired at, and he reportedly fired approximately 200 rounds. Only 100 rounds were recovered from the victims.
Inside locks and solid doors would have saved more people than extra guns.
22 comments
And this is why when those fools say “I’m gonna get me a Glock” I have to laugh because in all likelihood they’ll just end up shooting themselves while trying to get the gun out and aimed. More often than not, they think a gun automatically gives them super hero protection which simply isn’t the case.
When I was living in my crackhouse neighborhood, I had an 80 year old neighbor who had a shotgun (for the same reasons you mentioned in comments to a previous post). This was down South where owning a gun was akin to breathing, but she had finally given up her handgun after her second hip operation. She told me that she just didn’t feel steady enough to aim it accurately. Now her, I’d fear.
Good points Bryan. I was on the U.S. Navy Pistol team and was quite good. High scores and repeatable performance on the range. I was offered a chance to run through a computer generated simulation used to train swat teams for close quarters combat. I failed miserably. Even though you know it is only a simulation the body shifts into “flight or flee’ mode and you are no longer the studied professional marksman shooting at a paper target. Judgment is bypassed and the lizard brain kicks in. If I remember correctly I shot innocent bystanders including children and several of my fellow swat team while doing minimal damage to the ‘perps’. It was a valuable lesson.
My concern is not so much for the fools that haul guns around, it’s for the people they’ll accidentally kill. In police firearms training they hammer constantly on looking beyond your intended target to see what would be hit if you miss. The best thing about a shotgun, Alice, is even if it isn’t loaded it makes a great club.
We had the “Shoot, Don’t Shoot” course, Fallenmonk, that we had to pass every six months. There were a lot of tricky scenarios, but the key was not shooting in any scenario wouldn’t be an automatic failure, but if you shot the wrong person, you had to go through again. They were driving home the point that there was a reason for the big bucks spent on body armor, because sometimes you just had to take a round to protect civilians.
I think maybe I might be living in Alice’s former neighborhood. She’s right about the little old lady who lives down the street from me anyway.
Like Fallenmonk, I’m pretty good at target shooting, and have also had the chance to go through the shoot/don’t shoot simulator training [I’m a mere civilian]. Holy cow! I think even my lizard brain abandoned me.
I’d agree with you on the doors and locks.
If a few of these people had had the enriching experience of going through a “controlled” live-fire obstacle course with things blowing up all around them and bullets whizzing overhead they be be of a different mind about what they would do.
The first time you shoot a civilian in the “Shoot/Don’t Shoot” course takes you down a notch or two, especially after you realize that you shooting isn’t very targeted.
It works for airplanes, Hipparchia, why not schools?
Growing up, I heard adults occasionally attribute a gun wisdom to Slapsie Maxie Rosenbloom, who when it came to bon mots was, I take it, something like the Yogi Berra of an earlier era. Can’t find it in the Internet pipes, but it went something like this:
…when I wrote what I wrote, I thought about but didn’t mention the running jokes about the Portland police department, which has an unfortunate history of firing thirty or forty or fifty rounds at a bad guy who ends up expiring of one or two bullet wounds. Given that, the idea of a bunch of citizen heroes whose training consists of an 8-hour course required for their concealed-carry permits being the first line of defense is simply absurd…
The training can only do so much to overcome the handicaps the body imposes on you in stress situations. For whatever reason, cops tend to shoot high, possibly the failure to recover from the recoil, but most people just pull the trigger without aiming. In a building full of people, there are going to be bystanders hit. If you are trying to decrease the number of killed and injured, you don’t increase the potential number of bullets fired.
The Lone Ranger needed silver bullets to hit his target.
To the extent that the point is that people have unrealistic beliefs about how effectively they could use a firearm in such situations, then I agree whole-heartedly.
To the extent that the point is that the VA Tech situation would probably have been worse if one or more of the victims had been armed, then I don’t see how anyone could possibly agree with it.
Although there is always the chance of friendly fire incidents, in general, you’re better off if you’re armed when the homocidal maniac attacks than if you’re not.
Now, such incidents are so rare that it doesn’t seem, to me, anyway, to make sense to carry a gun around specifically for that contingency…but that’s a different point.
I didn’t say “would”, I said “might”, and I’m not of fan of people without training deciding they know enough to start firing a weapon in a crowded environment.
If the classrooms were standard sheetrock over studs construction, rounds that did not hit their target would pass into adjoining rooms with unknown results.
If you have received training in the military or police you are always “armed” whether you are carrying a gun or not. As a former college professor I think of a half dozen things off the top of my head in a classroom that I could use to kill someone if I chose not to simply attack bare-handed. The first problem is the “flight-fight reflex.” You have an amazing amount of strength available if you chose to fight, but you must make that choice immediately.
But… but… that’s not how it is in television and movies! And everybody knows that television and movies don’t, like, lie, right? There IS a Santa Claus! There IS! Why, the evening news last Christmas Eve even showed us Santa’s sleigh on NORAD’s radar scope!
– Badtux the Snarky Penguin
I know, Roy Rogers [a long time ago] always shot the gun out of the bad guy’s hand. I was really depressed when I found out I couldn’t do it.
Bryan, please do me a huge favor and forward this post and all of the comments to Jack Cafferty at CNN’s “The Situation Room”. cnn.com/Cafferty File, I think. Not too hard to find, if you look under Situation Room.
I had always admired Jack, ’cause he seemed like the last journalist standing in this talking-heads-and-bimbos-and-all-of-’em-think-that-they’re FUCKING *RAMBO* world, but after V-Tech’s massacre, he was the first one to start all of that “ARM THE STUDENTS AND THE TEACHERS AND THEY’LL STOP THIS SHIT RIGHT AT THE GET-GO!!!” rabid NRA bullshit. Virginia has some of the most lax gun laws this side of Poyner, Texas, and he’s bitching because the COLLEGE was a WEAPON-FREE ZONE?!?!?!??! They do that ’cause they’re trying to keep DRUG DEALERS, GANGS, AND MOBSTERS OUT OF THE DORMS AND OFF OF THE CAMPUS, dumbass, it’s not to INFRINGE on anybody’s SECOND AMENDMENT RIGHTS.
Please, Bryan, please send this insightful and interesting post and all of the comments to Cafferty. Maybe you can bring him back to reality.
And if we all tried to be the matinee western idols of the ’50s, then my “mother” (aka “The Fallen Uterus”) really WOULD be running around with a 6-foot bullwhip, trying to be LASH LARUE!!!
(Again, not a great concept for the world at large.)
Yep. Perhaps it’s because there are more pilots than shooters in my family, but I was thinking about airplane cockpits too. Seems to work for them.
I suppose the drawback is that a gunman could lock himself in a classroom with his chosen victims-to-be and outside help couldn’t break in in time to stop the fish-in-a-barrel massacre.
I’ll see what I can do, Annti.
OT: I’m really sorry to hear about Smudge, Annti, but Blogger hates me at the moment and I can’t comment at your place.
Hipparchia, he chained the outside doors shut and the entire incident took under ten minutes according to the Virginia State Police, actually they said he fired 170 rounds in 9 minutes. Nothing is fool-proof but the doors and locks are quick and doable. It will also give people a visible sign of security, and let them know the university is doing something.
Solid doors with heavy-duty hardware, correctly installed, aren’t cheap, but it would certainly be doable, and I’d venture to guess that it would be cheaper than hiring the classroom equivalent of sky marshals.
This is Virginia Tech. Involve the students in finding a solution. Is backfilling the doors with foam enough? What about a metal sheet inside? Use it to teach.
As for hardware, how about an inside bolt or one of those rubber footed things that holds doors open. Again, involve the students, let the solutions come from them.
That’s what I was thinking, Bryan. The rubber door-stoppers would work for doors that open inward, though the schools I’ve been in in California often have two lockable doors to each classroom which open outward.
But then you have the killer who goes to class and blocks the doors so people can’t get out….
We just need to pass a law demanding that each person live in a very large bullet-proof hamster ball from birth. It would take care of a host of problems..
Well, I would think standing by the door with a couple of guns would block the door.
It has got to be something that allows people on the inside unlock it as it’s a fire exit, while at least delaying entry.
In general, doors don’t open outward into corridors, but open outward to the exterior, for safety reasons. The University of West Florida got around that by building entry alcoves, so the doors could all open outward, but not intrude into the hall.
If the authorities start arming students, teachers will quit in droves. Nothing in the qualifications for that honorable profession includes dealing with armed, frightened youths.
My late father disarmed students on two occasions in his career:
* once, in the classroom, a student grew angry and pulled a knife. Dad positioned himself between the student and his intended victim, quietly spoke the attacker’s name, said “give me the knife,” and put out his hand. After a few moments, the attacker gave him the knife, handle first.
* another time, a girl interrupted Dad’s meeting with the principal. Dad recognized the image of a gun in the girl’s coat pocket. Using his Navy training, he seized her in a way that pinned her arms, and relieved her of the gun. The girl, known to have been seriously troubled, was sent to professionals for psychological help.
In both cases, the student with a weapon intended to do harm, not to defend himself or herself. In both cases, it was fortunate that my father was trained to deal with people wielding weapons in close quarters… and with people not quite “right in the head.” Had Dad faced the VT gunman, Dad would have died; no amount of training would have helped. Outside of that unusual circumstance, and probably even in that circumstance, I see students bearing weapons as increasing, not decreasing, the likelihood that someone will be seriously injured or killed.
This thread seems dead, but what the heck.
That reply simply doesn’t work, Bryan.
*Of course* things *might* have been worse if the victims had been armed–no one would deny that. The point, however, is that they were almost certain to have been better. We can’t live life nor make policy on the basis of distant possibilities rather than probabilities.
And, *of course*, there are other things in a classroom you could use to kill an assailant, but none of them is even remotely as effective as a gun. That’s why we give the Marines M-4s instead of erasers.
Seriously, making arguments like those is just going to confuse the argument. Run a VA Tech-style simulation a million times…I’d be surprised if you’d get more than one or two results in which things are made worse if you arm some of the victims.
“The point, however, is that they were almost certain to have been better.”
Excuse me, but I have been shot at, shot up, and shot down, and amateurs with guns have never made the situation better. Do you have any idea how many innocent people have been shot by people who thought they were defending their home? How about the number of innocent people lynched by mobs who thought they were doing the right thing?
One project has exonerated over 200 people who were on death row for crimes they didn’t commit, because there was DNA evidence. People selected for death by a slow and reasoned process.
At Ruby Ridge a trained FBI sniper shot the wrong person. The trained military in Iraq and Afghanistan are shooting innocent people every week. A trained New York State trooper shot and killed another officer during a gun fight this week. Pat Tillman was shot and killed by members in his own platoon. Whether you call them “collateral damage” or “friendly fire” it amounts to innocent people dying, killed by trained people.
You all that in mind, I would be interested in the facts behind your claim “were almost certain to have been better.” I didn’t see that in any of the “hostage situation” papers that came across my desk, or the firearms incident reports, or in the reports from grand juries.
In my experience people panic when gunfire breaks out, even a lot of people who have been through basic training in the military and police.