PART I - Self Protection and
Magazines: Hollywood vs. Reality
(I got a lot of help
from thejustnation.org)
I am going to do this in two parts. First I will get detailed about what a self
protection situation is really like.
What you can expect to happen.
You will be amazed at how inadequate you will feel at the end with your
simple hand gun… In part two I will go
into detail about why people feel the need to own what they own (to the best of
my ability) and tell you why people are "rushing" to arm themselves…
First let's examine a realistic "self defense" situation.
Let's first look at what folks like to call
"assault" weapons. As I said
in my post on FB (I have one essay I might post and then I am done with this on
FB) civilians cannot legally own assault rifles. What people mis-label as assault weapons are
really semi-automatic weapons. An
assault weapons has a fully automatic option which means you pull the trigger
and hold it down ONCE and it keeps firing.
A semi-means for every bullet fired you MUST pull the trigger -- but you
do not need to chamber a bullet. When
the weapon is fired it chambers the next bullet for you. It is also called a "double action"
weapon -- meaning with ONE action from you the weapon does TWO actions -- it
fires a bullet and chambers a new bullet.
The AR-15 "asshole" had in Aurora was a semi-automatic weapon
(I won't type his name so pardon the profanity -- it is cleaner than his
name). What I think freaks folks out is
that something like an AR-15 has a "magazine" which can hold a lot of
ammunition. It freaks them out because they don't know a thing about reality --
they know Hollywood.
My personal protection weapon is a revolver, a snub-nosed
(short barrel) Tarus .38. It holds five
bullets. That sounds like
"plenty" -- it is NOT. When faced with a situation where I need to
fire it -- I had better be a good shot because 1) a sub-nosed gun is not very
accurate 2) a moving target, even moving toward you is VERY hard to hit and 3)
the fear of the situation affects accuracy immensely. We are taught to put two bullets in center
mass/thoracic cavity and one to the head in our concealed-carry classes. My revolver is a .38 and if I put one bullet
out of those three into an attacker he can easily keep coming -- I can put all
five in him and he can keep coming. A
.38 will NOT knock a man down. I MUST be
accurate. I will empty my gun into any
attacker if he is still coming and when my five bullets are gone -- they are
GONE and if he is still coming I am up shit creek. There is a chance that after firing five
bullets he is either not even hit or not wounded enough to be stopped -- that
is why I PRACTICE. Why do I carry such a
weapon? First it is small and easier to
conceal and the law actually requires that I conceal it so I don't cause public
panic and fear. Second, a revolver needs
very little care and maintenance. I can
neglect it, I can mistreat it and it will still fire; they are kind of
fail-safe. A semi-automatic is MUCH more
demanding and much more "fragile" if you will. I am considering a second sidearm that is a
semi but need to shop carefully and practice even more. My hands with my RA make pulling the slide on
a semi-automatic sidearm tough and if I get "stuck" then it is shit
creek again. There are a lot of things
that can go "wrong" when using a semi that leaves the shooter very
vulnerable -- I like the idea of having more bullets though (for the reasons I
just listed).
To just to set the scene realistically, most gun fights
occur at a range that is much too close for comfort, and with insufficient or
NO warning. You’re starting off at a
MAJOR tactical disadvantage (he knows he is going to attack you but you don't
know he is going to attack you).
The ‘rule of threes’ is often quoted. This suggests that most gun fights occur at a
distance of about 3 yards (or less), last about 3 seconds (or less), and
involve about three shots fired (or more).
So you think -- How many shots will it take?
As always (almost always), the movies get it wrong. Forget everything you’ve ever seen in the
movies, and on TV. When you shoot a bad
guy with a pistol or revolver, almost certainly, there are three things which
you might expect to happen (based on the movies) but which will not happen.
1) The person isn’t going to immediately collapse, all
movement stopped, instantly dead. Quite
the opposite. He may likely not react at
all to the first shot hitting him.
Indeed, some people go all the way through a gun fight and only
subsequently discover they’ve been shot.
Good trainers teach their students at the end of an encounter to check
themselves all over for wounds, because in the heat of the moment, they might
not even realize they’ve been shot.
2) The person isn’t going to fly through the air ten feet
backwards. He probably won’t be knocked
about much at all HE IS STILL COMING – the ‘best case’ scenario is that the
bullet is hitting him with no more momentum than the recoil you experienced
when you fired your pistol milliseconds before.
The recoil didn’t force you off your feet, and it will have the same or
less effect on the person the bullet hits.
The force of the bullet leaving your hands is the same force that the
bullet has hitting your attacker -- some force is actually lost in the air
during travel.
3) Blood isn’t going to suddenly and dramatically start
spurting out of the person every which way.
Indeed, assuming the person is wearing a couple of layers of clothing,
you might not notice any evidence of the bullet having hit them at all – no
blood, no big hole, nothing.
So put these three things together. The person doesn’t collapse or move at all,
and you don’t even notice a bullet hole or blood after firing your bullet. Goodbye, Hollywood, welcome to the real
world! In other words, you probably
can’t tell if you hit the person or not – and even at very short ranges, you’re
as likely to miss as hit (there’s a classic situation of a gun fight in an
elevator between a law enforcement officer and a bad guy, with over ten rounds
fired and neither person being hit by any of the rounds).
Even in the very unlikely event that all your rounds are
landing on target, the sad truth is that pistol rounds, no matter what their
caliber, or what the bullet type, are woefully inadequate and are most unlikely
to solve your problem with a single generic hit to the center of the thoracic
cavity. Think about that -- you have hit him in the center mass and he is still
coming at you…
This is why you don't stop shooting… five bullets is really
nothing when you consider all of this…
But what next? That
depends on the bad guy.
If the immediate threat has stopped, you must stop shooting
-- the law states you must stop when the threat has stopped. You no longer have any legal justification to
shoot at the person now they are no longer an immediate imminent threat. But if
the person is still coming at you, then you need to keep on solving the problem
-- you keep shooting until the threat has stopped.
Continued Shooting at the center mass/thoracic cavity?
If the bad guy is still some distance from you (but not too
far, of course, or else they may not be sufficiently a threat to justify
shooting in the first place unless they have a weapon) then you probably have
time to fire a few more shots into their thoracic cavity. Notice now we are talking about "a few
more shots"? At this point with my
little five-shot revolver, I am out of bullets…
Maybe either or both of your first shots failed to hit him
entirely, in which case maybe some additional shots will actually land on
target.
Unless your bullet travels through the thoracic cavity and
severs the bad guy’s spine, it will not immediately incapacitate your attacker -
that high velocity rifle rounds more commonly have a very much greater
immediate effect. But who carries a .270
around? An AR-15 is a small lightweight,
low caliber rifle that can be kept in a truck and can be swung around
easily. A long range "hunting
rifle" cannot.
Even if the bullet goes through the bad guy’s heart, it will
take some measurable time for the guy to lose enough blood pressure and bleed
sufficiently out to cease to be ‘in the fight’ -- he has adrenaline too. How long?
Best case scenario – perhaps 30 seconds. A LOT can happen in 30 seconds. Worst case scenario – many minutes.
Some people – especially if on drugs – will not be slowed AT
ALL, even by hits that will cause their certain death in only a few minutes -
they are still coming (how many bullets do I have left? NONE. I had better
start running. The drugs have in essence
disconnected their brain from their body, and their brain doesn’t even realize
they’ve been hit, so their body keeps responding to the brain commands as best
it can.
Lastly, and probably the least likely scenario, maybe the
bad guy is wearing some type of body armor.
Bullet proof vests can be legally purchased by civilians, and do a very
good job of preventing pistol bullets from penetrating through the vest and
into the person wearing them.
Don’t forget, of course, that all these reasons why your
shots aren’t stopping the bad guy from continuing with his attack are also
assuming that your rounds are landing on target. Chances are some/many/most of them are misses
– even trained police typically miss MORE OFTEN than they hit when in a
gunfight. That’s why you shoot at least
twice into the center of mass.
I can go on and on and on about this -- but I think you get
the picture. You never, NOT EVER, shoot
to wound. That is probably all you are
doing anyway when you shoot to STOP. You
never, NOT EVER shoot a "warning shot". That shot goes somewhere and hits
something. It can hit an innocent
person. It can ricochet and come back and hit you. You always shoot to STOP your attacker and
you keep shooting UNTIL he stops. Continue repeating until your gun runs dry or
the bad guy stops.
One of the great things about the Internet is that we now
get a chance to see how many people react and respond to news of a shooting -
we see the real deal now and not just Hollywood. We can now post comments alongside the news
stories and whenever there’s a story of a shooting you’ll see plenty of
comments (most commonly from ‘armchair experts’ who have never held a gun in
their lives) suggesting that the police should have shot to ‘shoot the gun out
of his hand’ or in the foot, ankle, or knee, so as to cause the guy to collapse
and no longer be able to move towards the policeman. They, having no knowledge of how it all
really works make all sorts of judgments and "suggestions" of how the
shooter (often the cops) SHOULD have done it.
How they should have been less aggressive and/or more humane. As I have
outlined -- humane is the LAST thing you should be thinking about -- your
attacker it Inhuman if he is attacking you.
These are well intentioned people or just plain folks who
are ignorant, "know-it-alls" who really know nothing. The crux? Many may well become jurors, so it
is important to understand how uninvolved people react to shooting situations; their
suggestions are dangerously naive, impractical and wrong.
Your struggle with your "bad guy" will be at a too
close range, in a position where you probably do not have any sort of strategic
advantage or time buffer, and you are confronting the imminent probability of
the bad guy attacking you, grievously wounding you, and possibly killing you.
You don’t have the time or skill to try for some trick
Hollywood-style feats of marksmanship – your accuracy when target shooting on a
calm day with no time, fear or stress acting on you at a range with a static
target at the range will be a dream. You
are now alone in a dark alley late at night with the bad guy rushing towards
you.
If the situation has got to the point where you need to use
lethal force to stop a threat, and that is a lawful thing for you to do, then
you need to do just that. Your prime
concern is stopping the threat and saving yourself or your family. The ONLY effective way of doing that is shots
to the center of mass, possibly followed by shots to the head. Anything else is
giving the bad guy the advantage -- he already has the advantage -- don't give
him more… And there’s no law or moral
justification for making it easier for him to win and you to lose.
