After the Mumbai attacks, I read something odd that Sebastian D’Souza had said about the killers he’d seen and photographed: “They were firing from their hips. Very professional. Very cool.”
My first thought was, firing from the hip isn’t professional at all.
Richard Fernandez received this e-mail from a Marine officer on the Mumbai tactics, which looks at the whole thing in much more detail:
A photographer noted how “cool” and “professional” they looked as they sprayed from the hip. Shooting from the hip is not extremely professional, but this only is if one wants to take well-aimed shots. Perhaps shooting from the hip is very professional if one wants to spray in across a broad angle while maintaining a wider field of view than if behind the sights of your weapon. In other words, if facing no armed opposition, you have the luxury of spraying broadly, and the most dangerous thing to you is an armed threat that comes from outside your narrowed peripheral vision while using your iron sights.
Read the whole thing.
D’Souza also expressed his anger that the police did nothing to stop the terrorists:
“There were armed policemen hiding all around the station but none of them did anything,” he said. “At one point, I ran up to them and told them to use their weapons. I said, ‘Shoot them, they’re sitting ducks!’ but they just didn’t shoot back.”
My understanding is the most Indian police carry only bamboo sticks, or lathis, with a smaller fraction carrying handguns. I would be in no hurry to start shooting a pistol at a guy with an assault rifle.
Richard Fernandez has similar sympathies:
Most people will naturally flee from danger. Only time, training and conditioning — a form of brainwashing — can reliably forge bodies of men who will instinctively do the unnatural. Re-read the embedded journalist’s accounts of events in Iraq and note the descriptions of soldiers or Marines who deliberately move toward the sound of firing or as it was more quaintly put in the old days, “to march to the sound of the guns”. During the First World War thousands of men would rise out the trenches to walk into machine-gun fire. The ordinary crowd at a shopping mall simply can’t be expected to do that. Maybe the most important effect of the Second Amendment is that it it implants the germ of the idea that resistance is a viable option. It’s a germ which must be nurtured by a little training. The gun is an easy thing to find. It’s is the making of a shooter which is harder.