Isegoria

Who “needs” more than 10 rounds? Ordinary people defending themselves:

Defending oneself against criminal violence is a very different phenomenon from an active shooter situation. Any review of security cam footage or dashcam footage that shows gunfights will make this abundantly clear, but just for the sake of clarity let’s look at this video.

In the video we see two attackers attempting to rob a jewelry store. One is armed with a handgun, the other with a crowbar. The intended victim was also armed, apparently with a handgun. In the thirty one seconds of video you see a firefight from beginning to end. Despite the fact that the jewelry store owner was armed and actually fired at the bad guys multiple times, they both stuck around and fought! They didn’t wet their pants and run away immediately like bad guys are rumored to do when presented with a gun, instead they hung around for as long as the robber armed with a handgun had bullets. (Also note how many times the handgun-armed robber actually pointed his gun at his accomplice in the process of trying to murder the good guy) In the video you can clearly see the robber armed with a handgun fire his revolver until it’s empty in the effort to kill his victim.

The intended victim fires his weapon at the robber… how many times is hard to tell from the video footage. It’s important to note how the robber responds to the shots fired at him. Watch his movement. Watch how the robbers duck and move and try to avoid the incoming fire using obstacles for whatever cover they will provide. This is not trained behavior, either; it’s instinctual. If you were ten feet from me and I started throwing rocks at your face, you’d instinctively begin to dodge and weave to avoid getting hit. Surprise, surprise, people do the same thing when bullets are being fired.

Facing multiple determined attackers who were moving and using cover to try and kill him, the owner of this jewelry store needed to outlast the bad guy’s ability to shoot to have a hope of surviving. If you’re the first one to run out of ammo in a gunfight against multiple armed opponents, it’s generally not good for your health. Even if the good guy here was an exceptionally good shot with clear lanes of fire, the number of documented instances of police having to shoot someone multiple times to get them to cease threatening actions is legion. In real life, bad guys do not fall down and die if they are hit once, and as you can see from the video, hitting a threat even in a tight enclosed space is not the easy task some believe it to be. I could post any one of hundreds of videos online that demonstrate these same principles or break down any one of literally thousands of lethal force incidents that have the same lessons in them. The chosen video is literally the first one I clicked on when I searched for “gunfight” and “camera” on youtube.

Now all of those statements concern a gunfight. Gunfights bear exactly zero resemblance to a slaughter of innocents. The key factor is that in your typical active shooter scenario the victims cannot shoot back. This renders capacity meaningless. The key predictor of body count in every active shooter scenario we’ve seen is how long it took for a good guy to show up with a gun. This isn’t really surprising when you think about how active shooters work.

Posted in Policy, Weapons | 2 Comments »