Buck Fever
Aug. 25th, 2012 11:36 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
pecuniumAs you may have heard there was a shooting in New York yesterday outside the Empire State Building. Ten people were shot, all of them, it seems, by the NYPD.
Yes, you read that correctly, the NYPD, trying to shoot one person managed to hit nine more. The cops fired 16 rounds... nine of which, it seems, hit bystanders. We are told they did things by the book, that since the days of Columbine the doctrine in places where there are lots of bystanders/potential victims is to not let the potential mass-killer start taking other people down.
That, it seems to me, is a questionable policy. Putting that question aside, the NYPD fucked up. Not just at the scene, but doctrinally. New York City is what, in the Army, we’d call a “target rich environment”. Mistakes in gunplay in a city which has a commuter population of 1.6 million people aren’t really acceptable, esp. when most of that population is below 59th Street.
I don’t really accept that it’s a good policy. Yes, if someone is shooting up the crowd, then the thing to do is take ‘em down . Yes, waiting until they start to shoot means you are taking a chance, and someone might get hurt. But firing into a crowd with 9mm Parabellum isn’t exactly a risk-free behavior. I’ve been shooting for 40 years. I am a pretty good shot, and I still manage to miss some of the time. The more pressure I have to hit the target (the 300m on a pop-up range is almost as hard as the 250m. I think that’s because the 250 is off to the right).
How much more is that likely to happen when one is in a situation like the one at the Empire State Building?
What happened, it seems, is the shooter had a long-standing beef with his previous boss. I heard he had been fired, so I figured it was the day before that he was let go. Nope, it was a year ago. That, however, is hindsight. What I do know is the cops were called by a pair of guys who had followed the shooter two blocks; from where he’d killed his former boss.
Someone pointed him out to them. They (I am making inference now), drew their pistols (9mm Glocks, with the “New York Trigger”, designed because the NYPD thought the standard trigger on the Glock was a little too easy to pull, and so they were prone to being fired unintentionally when cops were under stress), and hailed him. He, according to reports, produced his pistol, a 1911 Colt (eight round capacity; i.e. a full magazine, and “one up the spout”), and they started shooting.
I don’t know if the NYPD issues ball, or hollow point ammo. If it’s ball, that’s a problem; because 9mm ball goes through people. If it’s hollow point, then the NYPD needs to do something about it’s stress-fire training. I know there are good simulators out there. I’ve used some. When I was still in the Army I got to play with the LAPD. They have a city street they use to practice. They use “simunitions” . The nice thing about simunitions is they use a modified cartridge which fires from a duty firearm, and stings while leaving a chalkdust mark. Not only does the person who was shot know when they were hit, the shooter knows where all his misses ended up (they have lots of colors, so everyone in the exercise can have a relatively unique indicator).
It also means they can (and do) train to shoot at people when there are "don't shoot" actors in play. They can (and do) practice just the sort of thing that went down in New York on Friday.
LA isn’t as densely trafficked as New York. If New York (or anyplace) is going to have a “shoot on sight” policy to firearms (or weapons, actually, someone was shot recently in New York for having a knife, as I recall. I saw it in a paper on the subway), then it’s incumbent to have a really high standard of fire control.
If they don’t, there is going to be collateral damage. This time seems to have been pretty mild (for a really fucked up sense of “mild”) in that no one was killed as a result of the pathetic actions of the NYPD. There is a humorous shirt, popular in the circles of firearms users. “Gun control is being able to hit your target”. It’s a political jab, but it’s got a large kernel of truth to it. The officers who were at the scene didn’t have that sort of control.
It’s trainable. I could design a regimen to train it (I know, because I did work on that very thing when I was still in the Army). It won’t be perfect (nothing of that sort is, because the real world is a lot messier than the range), but it would be better, because a collateral damage rate of almost 60 percent (9:16) isn’t acceptable.
Yes, you read that correctly, the NYPD, trying to shoot one person managed to hit nine more. The cops fired 16 rounds... nine of which, it seems, hit bystanders. We are told they did things by the book, that since the days of Columbine the doctrine in places where there are lots of bystanders/potential victims is to not let the potential mass-killer start taking other people down.
That, it seems to me, is a questionable policy. Putting that question aside, the NYPD fucked up. Not just at the scene, but doctrinally. New York City is what, in the Army, we’d call a “target rich environment”. Mistakes in gunplay in a city which has a commuter population of 1.6 million people aren’t really acceptable, esp. when most of that population is below 59th Street.
I don’t really accept that it’s a good policy. Yes, if someone is shooting up the crowd, then the thing to do is take ‘em down . Yes, waiting until they start to shoot means you are taking a chance, and someone might get hurt. But firing into a crowd with 9mm Parabellum isn’t exactly a risk-free behavior. I’ve been shooting for 40 years. I am a pretty good shot, and I still manage to miss some of the time. The more pressure I have to hit the target (the 300m on a pop-up range is almost as hard as the 250m. I think that’s because the 250 is off to the right).
How much more is that likely to happen when one is in a situation like the one at the Empire State Building?
What happened, it seems, is the shooter had a long-standing beef with his previous boss. I heard he had been fired, so I figured it was the day before that he was let go. Nope, it was a year ago. That, however, is hindsight. What I do know is the cops were called by a pair of guys who had followed the shooter two blocks; from where he’d killed his former boss.
Someone pointed him out to them. They (I am making inference now), drew their pistols (9mm Glocks, with the “New York Trigger”, designed because the NYPD thought the standard trigger on the Glock was a little too easy to pull, and so they were prone to being fired unintentionally when cops were under stress), and hailed him. He, according to reports, produced his pistol, a 1911 Colt (eight round capacity; i.e. a full magazine, and “one up the spout”), and they started shooting.
I don’t know if the NYPD issues ball, or hollow point ammo. If it’s ball, that’s a problem; because 9mm ball goes through people. If it’s hollow point, then the NYPD needs to do something about it’s stress-fire training. I know there are good simulators out there. I’ve used some. When I was still in the Army I got to play with the LAPD. They have a city street they use to practice. They use “simunitions” . The nice thing about simunitions is they use a modified cartridge which fires from a duty firearm, and stings while leaving a chalkdust mark. Not only does the person who was shot know when they were hit, the shooter knows where all his misses ended up (they have lots of colors, so everyone in the exercise can have a relatively unique indicator).
It also means they can (and do) train to shoot at people when there are "don't shoot" actors in play. They can (and do) practice just the sort of thing that went down in New York on Friday.
LA isn’t as densely trafficked as New York. If New York (or anyplace) is going to have a “shoot on sight” policy to firearms (or weapons, actually, someone was shot recently in New York for having a knife, as I recall. I saw it in a paper on the subway), then it’s incumbent to have a really high standard of fire control.
If they don’t, there is going to be collateral damage. This time seems to have been pretty mild (for a really fucked up sense of “mild”) in that no one was killed as a result of the pathetic actions of the NYPD. There is a humorous shirt, popular in the circles of firearms users. “Gun control is being able to hit your target”. It’s a political jab, but it’s got a large kernel of truth to it. The officers who were at the scene didn’t have that sort of control.
It’s trainable. I could design a regimen to train it (I know, because I did work on that very thing when I was still in the Army). It won’t be perfect (nothing of that sort is, because the real world is a lot messier than the range), but it would be better, because a collateral damage rate of almost 60 percent (9:16) isn’t acceptable.
