So, the Mexican Standoff, for those that don’t know, is something we often see in the movies involving guns. Basically, you either have a bunch of guys pointing guns at each other (each apparently afraid to shoot first because it means everyone will die) or you have a hostage taker with a gun pointed at a victim and some protagonist with his gun trained on the villain, but he’s afraid to fire because the victim might be shot by the badguy.
My question is this:
How realistic is this situation? My thinking is that whoever fires first, “wins”, because the initial target will be dead or incapacitated before they are even able to pull their own trigger. In the hostage situation, given that the protagonist has perfect aim, for the head, by the time the villain can react the bullet should have already impacted his head, making it impossible to return fire.
Likewise with a hostage situation and the numerous “sniper” situations. By the time the villain hears the report of the gun-shot, he’s dead, no time to kill the hostages.
What am I missing here?
Person A aims a gun at Person B, who is aiming a gun back at Person A.
Risks A runs if he shoots B:
[ul][li]Missing, allowing B to retaliate.[/li][li]Wounding B, but not fatally, allowing B to retaliate.[/li][li]Wounding B fatally, but not causing death immediately, allowing B to retaliate.[/li][li]Killing B instantly, but having the impact of the bullet or some convulsion in B’s body cause B’s gun to go off, possibly wounding or killing A.[/ul][/li]I think that would cover it.
What you are missing is that guns do not often cause instant death. Short of a direct shot to the head, which is a small target, there is a good chance that the victim will have at least enough time to return fire.
I thought a Mexican standoff was more like the situation at the end of “The Good, The Bad, And The Ugly”. There is a bunch of guys who all want to shoot each other. The person who shoots first is actually at a disadvantage to the person who actually gets to shoot second:
Persons A,B,and C all want to be the only one alive. If A shoots B then C can shoot A. It’s in the interest of B and C to shoot at A if he tries to shoot first.
Whatever happens there’s going to be lots of crossfire.
First, and perhaps most important is that just because you fire first doesn’t mean your opponent won’t fire as a reaction to your fire. The human brain, especially when experiencing the effects of combat stress, can react very quickly because of instinct, although this ultimately ends up being good and bad, but that’s a whole other story.
Second, gunmanship is not all that accurate under combat stress. Consider that a trained police officer will only hit 4/10 shots when under a stressful situation at ranges of 15’ or less. These same police officers can hit the “bowling pin” on a target 9/10 times at the firing range at 15’. An untrained shooter will hit 1/10 shots under combat stress.
Third, the difference between a sniper taking out a hostage taker and the face off pistol vs pistol is that the sniper cannot be seen by the hostage taker making it hard for him to instinctively react. Even then there is always the purely random chance that he will fire a round and still have the gun pointing in the direction of an innocent.
Fourth, guns do not instantly stop their targets. In order to reliably stop an assailant immediately you need to: a) Score a kill shot on the nervous system . This is virtually impossible to do with a pistol under adrenal stress, it would be akin to shooting the gun out of somebodies hand b) score two hits to the center of mass. Lower/center torso is best, high torso is probably okay.
All of that being said, speaking from a self defense perspective, and not a policing perspective, the wisest course of action if ever placed in such a situation is to fire immediately. A drawn threat must be see as being desired to be used and so must be neutralized immediately. The only exception would be if you had a immediately, highly plausible reason to believe that wasn’t the case (the person was already fleeing for example). In such a case, your course of action would be to flee/seek cover yourself.
When Quentin Tarantino wrote “True Romance,” he said he was tired of Mexican standoffs where everyone’s got guns pointed at each other, but someone runs in and defuses the situation. He wanted a situation where EVERYBODY shoots EVERYBODY else.
samclem: I tried to find something on the internet for you to see but couldn’t find anything. From a book perspective, you can find it in StressFire: Gun Fighting for Police by Massad Ayoob, iirc. Unfortunately, as is usually the case most of my books are out on loan to various students of mine, but I’ll try to get the exact quote if I can. I’m pretty sure he’s mentioned the stat in his articles as well. I know for sure he mentioned it in his firearm course I took a couple of years ago.
The ultimate source is police statistical reports and crime statistics reports which aren’t usually available to the public. My best guess would be that the fact comes from a compilation of knowledge, i.e. after looking at enough of these things you see the same trend. I’ve seen a couple and the statistics in those were reasonably close, although here in Canada there are much less shootings so you have the effect of statistics of small numbers at play.
Those statisical reports, btw, are a compilation of police shooting reports. Whenever a police officer fires his weapon there is an investigation and report created. Then what they do is take a sampling of them, or in Canada I think they just use them all because there are so few and analyze the statistics.
