When I was first learning defensive shooting, I was taught that you fight how you train, so you need to train how you’d like to fight, or you’ll develop training scars — habits that work in training but not in a real fight.
The canonical example of this is the California Highway Patrol officer who was found with spent brass casings in his pocket after a firefight, because officers were required to collect their brass at the range and dump it in a bucket. (They were shooting revolvers, which don’t eject the casing after each shot, so they could dump all six rounds into a pocket each time they reloaded.)
This example comes from the 1970 Newhall massacre, where four officers died — only the infamous training scar wasn’t in evidence:
Since the incident, it was said Officer James Pence was found with six spent casings in his trouser pocket, having been trained to pocket his brass before reloading. This would have slowed down his reloading process greatly, contributing to his inability to engage his killer before Twining shot him through the brain. This had already become accepted doctrine when I came into police training in 1972, and I, like so many others, dutifully accepted it as gospel.
By the time I researched this case and wrote it up for American Handgunner the first time however, it had become a subject of debate. As noted in Ayoob Files: The Book in 1995, “Though official sources deny it, some CHP officers insist Pence was found with spent casings in his pocket, a legacy of range training.” It would appear Mike Wood has resolved the debate through his research of LASD Homicide files.
In September 2011, Mike told me the LASD file included a scene photo of Pence’s six spent .357 casings lying on the asphalt where he fell. By third quarter 2012, he was able to show me that evidence photo. I can now accept Pence did indeed eject his empties in his desperate attempt to reload and get back in the fight.
Whence came this story? On May 9, 2012, Mark Schraer wrote in the electronic journal PoliceOne.com he thought it came from the fact the CHP, in changing its training after Newhall, also made it clear putting brass in the pocket was no longer doctrine. This apparently led to a generation of CHP officers believing this mistake must have been made at Newhall.
Not putting brass in the pocket is, of course, still a good idea, and if the point seems moot in the time of the semiautomatic service pistol, remember some auto pistol instructors still insist every reload must be a tactical reload, with every depleted magazine pocketed, even if it’s empty — and even if there’s nothing to refill it with.
In the classic 1980 police training text Street Survival, we find on Page 22 the statement, “Some officers have been killed because they took extra time to catch the ejected cases and put them in their pockets, as they’d done when shooting targets on the range.” We know this was a problem long before Newhall. Bill Jordan wrote in the 1960s of at least one Border Patrol gun battle in which officers found their pockets full of spent revolver brass when it was all over.
After the massacre, the CHP switched to speedloaders, by the way — which came up when I mentioned the fundamentals of double-action revolver shooting recently.
(Hat tip to gun-nut Caleb.)