Could some of these be through & throughs? I can see a ricochet happening easily, as the street is a canyon of stone and concrete there. I’m not saying that anybody was a bad shot. I’m just saying that I could see where bullets & fragments could easily pinball down 34th until their energy was spent.
The statistics are misleading. Clearly, zillions of crimes are being prevented simply by having guns in homes.
The great thing is that the prevention works so well that it helps keep Japan safe.
Because then he’d have the major breathing down his neck!
And he told those two loose cannons to wait for backup, God damn it!
A planter is not cover. Life is not an action movie. After about 3 rounds, your “cover” is reduced to broken bits of pottery on the ground, and a slowly collapsing pile of dirt.
It sucks, and the police officers in this situation were put in a bad situation. They are probably pretty messed up about it… the only officer I know says that other cops she has dealt with who have shot suspects are usually pretty torn up about it after the fact. They are, after all, human beings.
But at least we have folks clamoring to call them reckless and wish them in jail for doing their thankless job. That’s always nice.
I agree. But I wanted to point out that this wasn’t a mass shooting. It was one guy trying to get away with killing his coworker.
Don’t forget the cost of replacing the bulb in the Bat Signal. What is that, like a million-watt bulb?
Do you realize that firefighters often decide that running into a burning building is too dangerous? Pretty much the first thing they decide when they show up at a call.
BTW did not know that [list] feature. Thanks for that.
Obviously true. I mean, the fact that 90 minutes before his death, he dropped off the keys to his apartment saying “I’m not going to be back” suggests that he wasn’t going to do anything else with his day.
Maybe he was going to jump off the Brooklyn Bridge, or find a nice quiet corner to blow his brains out. Or, maybe he gets on a subway car and kills a bunch more people.
Oh please. He knew he was going to get caught. You can pretend he was a mass shooter, but no evidence shows that he was.
If a guy points a gun at a police officer, he should be shot. But let’s not pretend this was a terrorist attack. This was Law & Order, not 24.
I’m not entirely sure what you’re getting at.
He didn’t drop his gun and stick around to get caught. He hid his gun and walked away.
When confronted he didn’t give up, he drew his gun.
I’m not the one asserting anything about his post-murder plans, that’s exclusively you. He didn’t plan to go home, so I figure he’s planning one of 3 things. Give up and go to jail, that didn’t happen. Off himself somewhere quiet, this is a possibility. Die in a shootout, this may have been his plan, or just the way things worked out.
In any event, you can’t know that he didn’t plan on visiting his ex girlfriend, or his mother, or was just waiting to commit suicide by cop. When a guy murders someone in broad daylight on a Manhattan street, logical behavior is last thing you should depend on.
I saw this information presented elsewhere, but couldn’t find it again, so I did a search and came up with this.
Basically, the firearms they use are required to have a very large trigger pull weight, which makes accurate shooting more difficult. This was instituted after some poorly trained cops were not practicing proper safety (finger off trigger until you want to fire), so they modified the firearms to prevent accidental firings.
I had heard about “NY triggers” but I did not know they were required for the NYPD. Never looked into it. That is plain stupid. It is very difficult to be accurate with a 12.5 lbs trigger pull.
I think that even an off-the-cuff WAG is putting way too much effort into explaining an assertion that evidently has no actual evidence to back it up.
It obviously doesn’t always sense to run into a burning building. I’m talking about people who never want to run into a burning building even if it is full of children.
Do we honor the firefighters who ran the WTC or should we treat them as fools?
The planters were made out of concrete. Combined with the dirt they actually make excellent cover.
http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/08/27/us-usa-shooting-empirestate-police-idUSBRE87Q04X20120827
The shooter had five rounds in the magazine. As soon as he empties it, take an aimed shot to the head before he reloads instead of spraying the neighborhood with gunfire.
Aimed shots to the head are a terrible idea. Heads are small.
It’s my opinion that police get more target practice than the average guy, and are better trained than the average guy about how to avoid hitting innocent people. I’d much rather take my chances with a cop shooting a suspect than Joe Sixpack wearing an NRA t shirt. So if trained officers hit some innocent people in response to a gunman, my guess is there would have been many more innocent deaths if armed citizens had responded.
It’s just my opinion, but if you had 100 incidents like this with police response and 100 incidents with armed citizen response, I would wager that the police responses would result in less collateral deaths. Of course we’re not about to conduct a controlled experiment so we’ll never know.
And that’s just your opinion. As has been pointed out, police officers don’t really shoot that much as part of their training. The police that do shoot a lot do so on their own time because they are also gun enthusiasts. Most people who choose to carry a concealed firearm are also gun enthusiasts. So since we’re throwing out unsubstantiated opinions, it’s my opinion that the average non-gun enthusiast police officer has signifiantly less time shooting than the average ‘civilian’ gun enthusiast.
My opinion: the cops were reckless in their response; but then again, sometimes reckless is all you got. A cop spinning out a car in a high-speed chase is fairly reckless too (but not too often wreck-less).
However, I see this incident as proof-positive that the arguments in the Theater Shooter, thread, about, “I would have assessed the situation and calmly shot the guy in the head,” is so much bullshit bravado.
Cops end up wounding 9 people when firing at 1 guy who hadn’t started shooting at them yet, but some dork with an NRA membership and 40 hours at the range could handle the situation just fine. Yeah … I see that happening.
… you collapse to the ground from multiple gunshot wounds.
Okay. A double tap to the chest instead of spraying 16 rounds.