PART I - Self Protection and Magazines: Hollywood vs. Reality

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.