Why not more casualties in shooting sprees?

[Dinsdale]

In this (http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?t=388036) thread, an armed looney goes on a rampage at a college. Sounds like he injured around 20 people, with 3 or so dead as yet.

When I hear of such incidents (in addition to sadness, disgust, sympathy, etc) I'm always a mite surprised that the casualty rates are not higher than they are, and that the number of dead is so much lower than the number of wounded. I am not a gun person myself, but in my ignorance it seems to me that if a person went into a heavily populated area like a school or restaurant with automatic weapons and plenty of ammo, intending to kill as many people as possible, it really shouldn't be too difficult to ring up considerably more than 20 killed and wounded.

I imagine in many cases, like a disaffected employee, they really only want to take out a few specific victims. But in other cases is it that these gunmen don't really want a maximum casualty count? Is it simply harder to hit moving targets at close range? Are they stopped before they can shoot more? Do they experience equipment malfunctions? Do they not have a plan? Etc.

(Sorry if this is a kinda gruesome topic.)

[August West]

I'm guessing that it's harder to kill a person than people seem to think it is. On TV and in the movies if you shoot someone , they fall down, speak a few inspiring last words, and die.

Having shot more than a few deer in my life, which have about the same weight as a person and similar internal organs, I can tell you that unless you are shot in a really vital organ, you can live quite a while and people have the benefit of ambulances and doctors.

I don't know if this lunatic was using a handgun or not, but if he was, that could be part of it too. People that don't practice shooting handguns tend to be really bad shots and grossly overestimate the effective range of their weapon.

[FormerMarineGuy]

What August West said and:

A lot of these shooters just 'shoot'. Most of them (with the exception of snipers on rooftops) just shoot at anything, hoping they hit something. You have people moving and what the military would call the 'fog of war', so much going on at once.

My guess is also that some of the people who are injured from gunshot wounds receive their wounds from ricocheted bullets, where the trajectory from the bullet is not the original shooting point and the round has time to slow down.

A lot of the people in the shooters point of aim also are moving pretty quick the second they hear the gun shooting, making it harder for the targets to be, well, targeted.

Also, if the ammunition used are small caliber arms, it lowers the risk of 'serious' impact. This is not to say that a small .22 caliber round can not cause death, but it is minimized compared to a .556 round from an AK-47 or a M16 (AR15 for civilians).

[groman]

Most people can't hit a broad side of a barn under stress, even cops. Even when aiming.

If you just took a fully automatic assault rifle with a 30 round magazine, went into a crowded room and held down the trigger the magazine would be emptied in between 1 to 3 seconds. Most of those 30 rounds will be in walls/furniture/ceiling/your foot, but at least one is probably going to be in the person you aimed at first - somewhere. The likelihood of hitting something vital is not that high.

If you still have your doubts, go to your local pistol shooting range, rent a pistol (if available in your locality) and try to hit a target at 25ft with three shots. Note that you are not moving, it is not moving and you get ample time to aim. Now if your target is not already torso-shaped, picture it in front of a fictional assailant. How many of your 3 bullet holes would've hit a vital organ? I've read somewhere (but I can't find a cite) that people who are good shots, will on average perform about as well as an amateur who is holding a gun for the first time when under extreme stress.

I'm amazed people hit anything at all.

[Dinsdale]

Thanks for the responses.
I've never shot a handgun nor a long gun other than a .22 or a shotgun. And my only analogous experience is with paintball, where the accuracy/range is far less, and the setting is outside.
I guess - despite appearances, these sprees aren't exactly the well-thought out schemes I might suspect. I always kinda think of these shooters as obsessing over whatever, which includes picking the tools, becoming familiar with them, sellecting the setting and their approach, etc.
Hell, if they gave it as much thought and planning as I do an upcoming golf game, or my teenager son does to asking a girl out...

[Throatwarbler Mangrove]

Hell, if they gave it as much thought and planning as I do an upcoming golf game, or my teenager son does to asking a girl out...

You make plans for a shooting spree at every golf game? :eek:

*makes a mental note to decline golf games with Dinsdale, as well as dates with his son/daughter*

[Bippy the Beardless]

Golf is just a good massacre spoilt.

[Crafter_Man]

...the number of dead is so much lower than the number of wounded.When compared to what was available just 20 years ago, many gunshot victims are able to survive due to advanced medical procedures & technologies.

[Dinsdale]

You make plans for a shooting spree at every golf game? :eek:


I make a point of emphasizing the "cap" in handicap!

[groman]

When compared to what was available just 20 years ago, many gunshot victims are able to survive due to advanced medical procedures & technologies.

I'm not being snarky but I would really appreciate a cite on that. Specifically which techniques, is it surgical precision or what?

[Kevbo]

....if a person went into a heavily populated area like a school or restaurant with automatic weapons and plenty of ammo, intending to kill as many people as possible, it really shouldn't be too difficult to ring up considerably more than 20 killed and wounded....

An "automatic weapon" means a machine gun. AFAIK exactly NONE of the "looney on a rampage" scenerios involved an automatic weapon.

Ownership of such has has been heavilly regulated since 1934, and in that time there appear to have been exactly two homocides involving leagally owned machine guns:

One was a murder committed by a law enforcement officer (as opposed to a civilian). On September 15th, 1988, a 13-year veteran of the Dayton, Ohio police department, Patrolman Roger Waller, then 32, used his fully automatic MAC-11 .380 caliber submachine gun to kill a police informant, 52-year-old Lawrence Hileman. Patrolman Waller pleaded guilty in 1990, and he and an accomplice were sentenced to 18 years in prison. The 1986 'ban' on sales of new machine guns does not apply to purchases by law enforcement or government agencies. --- Thanks to the staff of the Columbus, Ohio Public Library for the details of the Waller case. Source: talk.politics.guns FAQ, part 2.

The other homicide, possibly involving a legally owned machine gun, occurred on September 14, 1992, also in Ohio (source).

source of above quote (http://www.guncite.com/gun_control_gcfullau.html)

As other respondants have noted, a loony on a bell tower with a bolt action rifle, firing slowly, and aiming carefully will probably kill more people than the loony with a high capacity semi-auto employing a "spray and pray" strategy.

[Kevbo]

....if a person went into a heavily populated area like a school or restaurant with automatic weapons and plenty of ammo, intending to kill as many people as possible, it really shouldn't be too difficult to ring up considerably more than 20 killed and wounded....

An "automatic weapon" means a machine gun. AFAIK exactly NONE of the "looney on a rampage" scenerios involved an automatic weapon.

Ownership of such has has been heavilly regulated since 1934, and in that time there appear to have been exactly two homocides involving leagally owned machine guns:

One was a murder committed by a law enforcement officer (as opposed to a civilian). On September 15th, 1988, a 13-year veteran of the Dayton, Ohio police department, Patrolman Roger Waller, then 32, used his fully automatic MAC-11 .380 caliber submachine gun to kill a police informant, 52-year-old Lawrence Hileman. Patrolman Waller pleaded guilty in 1990, and he and an accomplice were sentenced to 18 years in prison. The 1986 'ban' on sales of new machine guns does not apply to purchases by law enforcement or government agencies. --- Thanks to the staff of the Columbus, Ohio Public Library for the details of the Waller case. Source: talk.politics.guns FAQ, part 2.

The other homicide, possibly involving a legally owned machine gun, occurred on September 14, 1992, also in Ohio (source).

source of above quote (http://www.guncite.com/gun_control_gcfullau.html)

As other respondants have noted, a loony on a bell tower with a bolt action rifle, firing slowly, and only emtying a 5 shot magazine, while aiming carefully will probably kill more people than the loony with a high capacity semi-auto employing a "spray and pray" strategy.

[Askance]

I'm always a mite surprised that the casualty rates are not higher than they are, and that the number of dead is so much lower than the number of wounded.Does 35 dead and 37 wounded (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Port_Arthur_Massacre) satisfy you?

[boytyperanma]

Does 35 dead and 37 wounded (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Port_Arthur_Massacre) satisfy you?

Wow. Guy was one hell of a shot. 29 rounds fired 19 of them head shots. I would have never thought that was possible.

[groman]

Wow. Guy was one hell of a shot. 29 rounds fired 19 of them head shots. I would have never thought that was possible.

I am very disinclined to believe that. Do we have another cite for the number of rounds fired?

[Princhester]

From what little I know of Bryant, he is pretty dysfunctional. The perpetrator of the recent shootings in Montreal was probably normal, if angry and depressed, and no doubt the enormity of what he was doing would have effected his aim due to extreme stress as groman and others suggest. I suspect Bryant would have been (in comparison) cool as a cucumber, because he is a psychopath who is only really able to think about himself, and would have been quite disconnected from the enormity of what he was doing.

[slaphead]

I'm always a mite surprised that the casualty rates are not higher than they are, and that the number of dead is so much lower than the number of wounded.
In military engagements you typically also see far more wounded than injured, and very few of either for the rounds expended. Granted, people tend to be firing back in those situations but I think it's still down to the fact that shooting people is much more difficult than anyone would think who hasn't tried it. Soldiers spend a lot of time training, are very familiar with their weapons, and still often struggle to hit the broad side of a barn.

[Blake]

....you typically also see far more wounded than injured

:confused:

The wounded aren't injured?

[slaphead]

:confused:
The wounded aren't injured?
No, errr.... ummm... their feelings are hurt by offensive words or behaviour, that's it.

:smack: When constructing a sentence of the form "more [X or Y] than Z", remember to discard either X or Y, rather than substuting for Z.
more injured than killed
Apologies for my ineptitude.

[gabriela]

I'm not being snarky but I would really appreciate a cite on that. Specifically which techniques, is it surgical precision or what?

Groman, I don't have a cite, but I know he's right. Medical examiner homicide loads even twenty years ago were much heavier than they are today. Right now homicides make up about 130 of the 630 autopsies my office does a year. When I was a fellow twelve years ago, they made up a quarter. We hear all the time about people shot and down in our jurisdiction, who go to the local major trauma center, and never come to us. We bless them every day for it. Thank you trauma care people for lightening our workload!!!

I was also a surgical resident twenty years ago, and I remember the ceaseless effort of research by trauma surgeons and for trauma surgeons on new and better ways to save people. I remember the constant enrolling of sick ICU patients after trauma in studies that compared one antibiotic or wound dressing to another.

There have been two major changes in surgical technique in the last twenty years, one of which doesn't affect trauma much. That is laparoscopic surgery, which has revolutionized elective surgery. Most trauma is still slice'em open down the midline, though, so let's ignore that. The other major technique change has been stapling instead of sewing sutures. I don't just mean staples down the incision though those exist. I mean the complicated devices that, for instance, take two cut ends of bowel such as used to require twenty minutes of careful tiny stitching, and somehow suck both ends together and staple them inside and out with a hundred rows of tiny staples that never come apart. The less time you spend on the OR table, the more likely you are to get off it alive.

Technique aside, the major changes have come about in diagnosis through CT and MRI and many other techniques, and in administration of fluids, blood, antibiotics, and ways of measuring what's going on in the body to fine-tune care. What we do, and when and how we do it. Those have been huge. They have all come out of research such as I mentioned.

[Crafter_Man]

Groman:

If a researcher wants to analyze the murder rate over the time span of many decades, they must take into account the fact that advances in medical technology have decreased the murder rate over time. This is also true for fatality statistics in combat... many (most?) of the soldiers who died in WWII, for example, would have lived if they had access to today's medical technology.

A book I just finished reading - On Combat (http://www.amazon.com/On-Combat-Dave-Grossman/dp/0964920514) by Lt. Col. Dave Grossman (http://www.killology.com/) - talked quite a bit about this phenomenon. He said that, if a researcher wants to analyze violence in society over time, they must look at the attempted murder rate, and not the murder rate itself.

[groman]

A book I just finished reading - On Combat (http://www.amazon.com/On-Combat-Dave-Grossman/dp/0964920514) by Lt. Col. Dave Grossman (http://www.killology.com/) - talked quite a bit about this phenomenon. He said that, if a researcher wants to analyze violence in society over time, they must look at the attempted murder rate, and not the murder rate itself.

I was under the impression that while most professionals are getting better at their jobs (especially doctors) due to advances in their fields, the average person is getting worse and worse at everything and anything that isn't their field. I don't have a cite for that, but how does that book propose separating improvements in surgical techniques from the general decrease in the average person's ability to successfully murder somebody? Maybe people are just worse shots now?

That's why I'm asking about specific techniques. I know less and less people are dying from secondary open wound infections and the number of people who bleed to death is reduced due to advanced precision surgical techniques, but is it that we can do for people who get shot in the intestines, heart, brain, liver or stomach?
What medical advance allows us to repair massive internal damage done by a tumbling bullet inside somebodies abdominal cavity that is spreading intestinal contents everywhere?

I mean, I perfectly understand that getting shot in the shoulder or thigh or even lung is a much more survivable thing now than it was 60 years ago. However, do we have any stats showing that getting shot in the gut is statistically significantly more survivable?

[Anaamika]

I am very disinclined to believe that. Do we have another cite for the number of rounds fired?
Another cite for the Port Arthur murders:

Port Arthur (http://www.crimelibrary.com/notorious_murders/mass/bryant/index_1.html)
It doesn't have the exact number of rounds, but it does seem to imply he was pretty darn accurate:

In a period of just over nineteen hours, Martin Bryant, a man described by locals as being "a quiet lad and a bit of a loner," had killed thirty-five men, women and children and wounded another eighteen making him the most notorious spree killer of all time.
Before anyone had realized what was happening, he unzipped the larger bag and produced an AR15 semi-automatic rifle and shot the Asian man, Moh Yee Ng, in the neck, killing him instantly. Swinging the rifle from the hip he pointed it towards Soo Leng Chung, the man's companion, and shot her through the head. Turning his attention back to the first group he lifted the rifle to his shoulder and fired a shot at Mick Sargent, grazing his scalp and knocking him to the floor. Before Mick could shout a warning, the gunman fired a fourth shot that hit Mick's girlfriend in the back of the head. In a matter of seconds, the young man had claimed three victims.
Walking towards the front entrance of the café, the gunman fired methodically, shooting left and right as the terrified crowd scrambled for cover. Fifteen seconds later, a total of twenty people lay dead with fifteen more wounded, many of them seriously.

[Anaamika]

More:

Pulling to a stop, he fired two quick shots killing the woman and the child she was carrying. When the older child ran away to take refuge behind a tree, the gunman followed her and killed her with one shot. Returning to his vehicle, the gunman then drove a further two hundred yards towards the entrance gate where a gold coloured BMW was parked. Three shots were fired in rapid succession and the car's three male occupants lay dead.
The gunman then slammed the lid and returned to the front of the car and fired two shots through the driver's window killing the young woman instantly.


I'll keep looking, this is interesting.

[diggleblop]

Because once shots start ringing out, people start to scatter. Hitting moving targets with an automatic gun is rather difficult. It would take someone who is trained in sniping (such as the tower in Texas) to nail moving targets with great accuracy, unless the shooter is close to his targets and is a relatively good aim.

[Anaamika]

Wow, and then I found this website:

Lies Exposed Part I (http://www.biblebelievers.org.au/palies1.htm)

Martin Bryant, an intellectually impaired registered invalid with no training in the use of high powered assault weapons, could not under any circumstances have achieved or maintained the incredibly high and consistent killed-to-injured ratio and kill-rate which were bench marks of the Port Arthur massacre. Whoever was on the trigger that fateful day demonstrated professional skills equal to some of the best special forces shooters in the world. His critical error lay in killing too many people too quickly while injuring far too few, thereby exposing himself for what he was: a highly trained combat shooter probably ranked among the top twenty such specialists in the western world.

:rolleyes: but even they note that the kill rate was high.