Joseph Wambaugh is a retired LAPD detective who write crime novels. Many/most of his funny little anecdotes come from real situations, told to him by former colleagues. In one of his books (I don’t recall which one, Delta Star,or Hollywood Station maybe) he talks about an armed suspect holed up in the room at the end of an apartment hall. Several cops are crouched in the hallway. One of them realizes that the light bulb in the hallway makes them a perfect target. All five or six cops shot at the light bulb and due to stress they all miss. :eek:
After every one empties their gun, one detective goes over and uses the switch to turn the light off.
No real reason for this comment except you might find that under stress, your marksmanship goes to shit.
There is a reason that cops and others are taught to shoot for the center of mass.
OP: “Would you shoot another person to save your/your loved ones’ life/lives?” Czarcasm: Sorry honey, I just can’t drop the hammer on another human being. Not to be indelicate but you have a bit of blood dripping from the corner of your mouth.
Yes, for my family I would do it in a heartbeat and not give it another thought.
In defensive pistol training, one of the exercises we did was a stress test; sprint 200m at top speed, pick up your pistol and put it in battery, and double tap three targets in rapid succession. Even students that were fit and good stationary pistol marksmen often had difficulty keeping rounds on the black on a 3/4 scale B27-type target at 20 or 25 feet. Mind you, that target area is about 18" wide and about 30" high. In real combat pistol situations, it is quite common for law enforcement personnel (admittedly whose training standards vary widely between organizations) often empty an entire high capacity magazine (13-17 rounds) and strike the suspect only once or twice. Jason Bourne may be able to “run a quarter mile flat out before my hands start shaking,” but a real person is going to find that stress and adrenaline tend to negatively impact nominal accuracy, especially with pistol.
I’m sure this could be just another facet of being a gun-shy nerk, but there’s something disturbing about the idea of killing someone real good and dead specifically to prevent him becoming your opponent in a possible future legal case.
Is anyone actually serious about that? I completely recognise the logic of taking someone down to neutralise them as an immediate threat, with their death as a very likely consequence of that action (and I’m on record in this thread as saying I think that’s probably reasonable), but it’s the other bit - the idea of going further and making sure to kill, because of legal consequences - that is weirding me out.
If you are serious about it, in what other circumstances would you consider similar action supportable? For example: you’re driving along the road; a guy steps out in front of you and you can’t avoid hitting and injuring him. You screech to a halt and get out of the car and from his prone position on the road, he screams “I’m gonna sue your frickin’ ass off for that”. You were not in any way to blame for the accident, but it’s clear he’s going to make trouble for you by lying about it in court. Shouldn’t you just back the car up over him again to stop this happening?
I own a gun and have some training that a cop friend supplied. He taught me to shoot to kill, and to shoot until my gun was empty. His reasoning (as far as emptying my gun) was that I am not an expert in threat assessment. Would I reload my weapon, look the intruder in the eye, then put one into that eye? No. But I would fire into the CM until my gun was empty.
Anyone here been in such a situation? Five years ago I came close. I was in my apartment (the upper floor of a house). Somebody came to my front door - the only entry/exit to my place - and began ringing the bell and yelling. I was not expecting anyone, so I initially ignored the person.
The noise became louder, and I looked down my stairs. A disturbed looking stranger was trying to get through my locked screen door. I called 911 on my cell phone, got my gun, and went to the bottom of my stairs. He continued to scream and wrench at the door. I raised my gun and told him that if he came through the door I would fire.
His attitude changed immediately. He said he was looking for (some woman’s name). The police arrived, I put my gun back at my side, and the guy was arrested. The person he was looking for had lived downstairs, but had moved months before. I was shaking, but felt like I had handled things well.
Oh I’m not saying you should do this. What I’m saying is that whether you kill him or not, you still face potential severe legal consequences. If you do kill him, you could be tried in civil court for wrongful death and spend the rest of your life working to pay off the criminal’s family; if you cripple him, similarly you could be paying his medical bills for the rest of his life. If the shooting isn’t found to be in self defense by the court (even if it was) then you face manslaughter, reckless endangerment, or other charges. No matter what the outcome of the shooting is, it’s going to be bad news.
This is why I really, really, really hope that I never have to do it - and I’m very thankful that I live in a safe, small town.
One hopes not, and if they were, that they would be sufficiently cognizent of the criminal and civil reprocussions not to state so in a public forum. (To that end, I’m assuming–strictly for my own peace of mind–that many of the statements being made here are hyperbole.)
The proper attitude is to refrain from shooting unless you legitimately feel that your life is under threat or are otherwise legally entitled to use lethal force to prevent an attack such as arson, and that if discharging a firearm is called for, to do so with the maximum degree of effectiveness to end the threat, i.e. firing into the target center of mass or (if range and accuracy permit) the head until the perpetrator is no longer a threat. There is in combat, again, no “shoot to would” or “shoot to kill”; you shoot to hit, period, and you continue to fire until the threat is neutralized, i.e. has retreated or fallen and nonthreatening. Any monkey business with emptying a gun into a prone suspect, or moving a body postmortem to justify a shooting, or whatnot, is just very, very likely to cause more problems in the end. And while one cannot make the blanket statement that a legitimate shoot will be protected from criminal prosecution or will prevail in a civil action, it is certainly much easier to explain that than why forensic evidence that the suspect was shot in the front yard but somehow managed to come throught he front door despite having a shattered pelvis and a sucking chest wound.
A firearm is a tool, and one of last resort for defense, with good reason. One should make every reasonable effort to avert an attack short of using armed force, and should that fail, use force in proportion to the threat to the end of ending the threat at hand, period. Let your lawyer and insurance company worry about what it is going to cost (and regardless whether you kill the individual in question, his estate or family can still sue you for wrongful death, et cetera).
Strong emotions or bombast and firearms go together like gasoline and matches.
Exactly. Neutralize the threat and stop. Moving a body or shooting someone that’s obviously not a threat is, even in states like Colorado, a good way to lose your claim of self defense. Tampering with evidence is probably the lightest charge you’ll face. I suspect it’s a lot easier to explain why you shot someone in your front yard than to explain why you shot someone in the front yard and then dragging the body around.
There’s also a matter of your conscience - I’m not really one to get worked up about taking a life in defense, but deliberately killing someone who’s wounded and unconscious might give pause even to me. Even without the legal considerations.
I’d shoot.
I’d shoot to kill.
I’d shoot for the centre of the mass.
Anecdote- The head of my construction crew in the 80’s, in North Carolina, was called “Yankee”. He was involved with a woman who was separated from her husband. It was, as far as he knew, all cool and squared away, they were separated with no hard feelings, divorce in the future, gone their separate ways, just friends now.
Anyway, one day the husband show up on the doorstep, p.o.'ed and in a jealous, possibly drunken rage, toting a rifle, uttering threats. Yankee grapples with the guy, wrestles the weapon away from him and shoots him. The husband falls, Yankee shoots him again when he’s down, killing him.
Upshot after the trial is manslaughter, and Yankee goes up the river for a while. It was, of course, the second shot when the husband was down that made the difference.
My strategy now is shoot them until they fall, then call 911.
That said, I live in Canada, so I’ll probably have to hit them with my anti-zombie kukri instead.
*Would you shoot another person to save your/your loved ones’ life/lives?
I have no idea. I’d like to think I would, but I’d like to think a lot of things that aren’t necessarily true. I sincerely hope never to find out.
*If you would shoot another person, would you shoot to kill or only to disable?
Shoot to stop the threat, if I did it at all.
*If shooting to kill, where would you aim and why?
Center of mass; I’ve always heard that even people with good aim are terrible shots under pressure. As someone who’s only shot a gun a couple of times, I wouldn’t expect to have very good accuracy in a threatening situation.
If you must kill it, why not shoot the dog in the head and kill it instantly? “Less than a minute” sounds like a fair amount of unnecessary suffering to me.
I’d just hold down the trigger of my wheelgun for ten seconds and wiggle the barrel about a little. If that first thousand rounds didn’t get him, I’d repeat the process.
Did I mention that my wheelgun has six barrels and is electricly powered?
Small question: If you are carting around that kind of armament why the hell would anybody be threatening you or your family, unless they carried something even bigger and badder?
First of all, nobody owns a minigun. I challenge anybody to demonstrate that they own a real, fully-functional minigun.
Second, even if he had said minigun, a 10-second burst at a cyclic rate of 6,000 rounds per minute equates to 1,000 rounds of 20mm. Go ahead and look up how much that would cost.
Last, a minigun cannot be carried, Terminator 2 and Predator notwithstanding. Therefore, he would not be “carting that around” unless he mounted it on a vehicle, something the police would frown upon and the BATFE would like to talk to him about.
This is exactly the type of hyperbole that does gun owners a disservice, mostly because people don’t realize that you’re being hyperbolic when you state the impossible.
Indeed. If you use a firearm, you must know that you may kill the person with it. That should be an unstated premise, which is the point I was trying to make with my earlier post. What you assert above rightly points out that stating that is somewhat ghoulish. If the assailant dies, that’s an understood potential outcome. “Finishing the job” is simply a criminal act, an act so repellent that it shames me to see advocates for that position that say it with sincerity. I would rather protect my family and take my chances with the legal system than live the rest of my life as someone no better than the person who was attacking. How can someone live like that, maybe living for another 50 years knowing that they are a murderer? I couldn’t.
My bad, I meant no 'disservice to anyone. ‘Czarcasm’s’ point is good as well. I was just commenting on the ‘My gun’s bigger and badder than your’s’. If you get shot (I have) it really doesn’t matter if it was from the newest thing or a flintlock.