Keith
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Posts: 23
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« Reply #5 on: June 01, 2012, 07:25:23 PM » |
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Mas and I talked about this recently and, while Miami PD uses the Glock 22 as an issue sidearm, neither of us knows the exact load they're using. That varies depending on availability and bid pricing, so it's hard to keep up on. The .40 S&W is a pretty darn good slugger, even in its middle-of-the-pack loadings, and can be counted on to do about all you can expect a defensive handgun to do. The photos I saw seemed to indicate the officer hit the suspect in the upper chest.
For my part, I'd want to at least see the police and medical examiner's report, rather than rely on what the news media reports, regarding where the suspect was shot and his actions (or lack of) immediately afterward. I suspect we all have known instances where the news media people failed to check their facts before publishing a report. I can't imagine a reporter was allowed to interview the officer involved, and I tend to take everything with a grain of salt until I've heard what the officer himself has to say. We'd have to expect it was pretty shattering for him to experience something as crazy as that.
If the suspect stayed on his feet for a brief period after being hit, even with well-placed handgun fire, I don't think any of us would be surprized. The old timers used to tell me that "every dead man has ten seconds" on his feet after sustaining a fatal wound. That's not a hard and fast rule, as we all know, but the point is valid. Dangerous felons often stay upright for what seems, at the moment, to be a frightful amount of time before collapsing from a GSW. But it usually turns out to be only a matter of a few seconds. We have to make allowances for that. It's part of learning to "fight" well with a handgun, instead of simply learning to "shoot" well with it.
The object of the exercise is to shave off as many of that "dead man's ten seconds" as we can. If we can cut it down to three or four seconds instead of ten or more, that often ends up being that "survival edge" that most of us are trying to get. A lot of that is shot placement, as we all know. When I started out in LE nearly four decades ago, the "old" cops told me to "take his air, or take his feet", meaning hit the air intake, the trachea, right there at the top of the heart...or shoot for the pelvis since it is the load-bearing center of a bi-pedal target. Trouble is, even that can be diminished when a suspect's brain has been shielded from his central nervous system by the effect of drugs or adrenalin.
The officers on my agency routinely kept a 12 gauge handy that was loaded with plain-jane Foster-style rifled slugs. The guys referred to it as a "crackhead gun" because it was the one tool readily available that could be counted on to take the starch of out someone who was really crazy. I keep one loaded in my home, and often stash it behind the front seat of my pick-up when I go somewhere.
Since often all we have is a handgun, I make it a point to install an easy-to-acquire front sight on my EDC guns. If you're going to try to defend yourself with a pistol, you might have to make a brain-stem shot, and for me that means the front sight needs to be easy to find and hard to lose. Shooting to "clip the chip" on a hyper-violent felon like that is something to be avoided at nearly all costs, but sometimes shutting down his electrical system is the only option. Crazy people out there...
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