Another example:
It's a good thing one of the last shots she fires convinces the guy to quit, else she would have been in serious trouble.
Turns out having your left thumb behind the slide when you shoot stops it from properly ejecting, causing a stoppage that will take some time to clear.
Last edited by TCinVA; 07-18-2023 at 06:55 PM.
3/15/2016
Hard to believe any officer would grip a pistol like that.
I was dumbfounded (wtf) when I saw her do that.
I wonder how long that officer has on the job. I have not seen a grip like that since the sixgun era.Originally Posted by TCinVA
Another example:
It's a good thing one of the last shots she fires convinces the guy to quit, else she would have been in serious trouble.
Turns out having your left thumb behind the slide when you shoot stops it from properly ejecting, causing a stoppage that will take some time to clear.
In my experience, for a non-gun-person type officer, the longer they've been on the job the worse their gun-handling skills. We had a 20+ year detective at the range one year that during a course of fire (wasn't really even stressful) shot his G17 to slide lock, putting maybe five hit inside the Q target 7 yards away. He began looking at the gun dumbfoundedly trying to figure out why it wasn't making loud noises anymore.
I watched for a few seconds, then began yelling, "Reload!". When he finally realized what the proper solution was to his problem, he began to pat himself down looking for his spare magazine...it was located in a mag carrier on his off-side but he pattted and dug into all four pockets on his pants, switching the gun to his off-hand in order to get in his right side pockets. I'm just watching in disbelief as I'd never observed that level of bufoonery during qualification before, even from detectives or admin. Just as I'm about to tell him, "It's on your belt...left side!", he reaches behind, finds his cuffs, removes them from the carrier and proceeds to attempt to insert them into the magazine well of the pistol. By this time, the Training Sgt. has noticed and calls a cease fire, while I'm standing there thinking, "I kinda wanted to see how this went...".
I don't think age or time-on has anything to do with it.
Stress (like a large drunk man charging you with a knife) makes people do weird things.
On a side note, while I know this practice happens elsewhere in the country, the very thought of sending (or even allowing) an officer to go to a domestic solo makes me cringe.
Domestics and, in fact, any disputes are back-up calls here. That said, unless things have changed since I was disavowed, the first arriving officer often approached and perhaps entered solo.
Proving I'm old, I'll remark that when I was teaching for the new "Domestic Violence Prosecution Program" in 1994, I recommended officers stage and wait for back-up on domestic calls. Seldom do we arrive in the nick of time to prevent of intervene in an actual assault. Police arrival often causes the situation or offender to escalate. Sadly, despite what the Washington Post, CNN, and the Democratic Party believe, de-escalation techniques by police require that the bad guy be willing to de-escalate.
Approach with a second officer might have allowed deployment of a second Taser, lethal cover while one officer deployed the Taser, control of other family members, greater intimidation of the suspect, and many better outcomes than this one.
Yo tambien.
That was a fucking mess. Police car as backstop, shooting from behind your own, and parking the car in the line of fire.
"Gunfighting is a thinking man's game. So we might want to bring thinking back into it."-MDFA
Beware of my temper, and the dog that I've found...
I don't think it's time on a revolver that produced that.
That's what it looks like when someone doesn't know how to grip a gun. She didn't learn it in the academy. She didn't discover an effective method by practicing on her own. She was "qualified" by the academy despite not having enough reps on gripping a handgun to do it effectively when her life was on the line. And because she was "qualified" by an institution that is super-duper official and shit, she likely saw no reason to practice on her own to get better.
"Qualification" in the institutions has a bad habit of making the person who "qualified" think they're skilled at whatever they are "qualified" at, which isn't remotely the case. Most people who go through the institutions don't realize that the purpose of the training they receive is to transfer liability from the institution to the person who received said training.
And "qualified", as low a standard as it can be, is really squishy because in some places they are so desperate for warm bodies...or for bodies of a particular configuration or color...that those who struggle to meet the minimum qualification standard get pencil whipped into being "qualified".
So this officer has likely never encountered a hard point of failure to tell her that she's genuinely not qualified to carry a handgun on duty. And I'd wager that even this event where she launched several rounds into close proximity to innocent people before finally landing one peripheral hit on an old, fat, slow guy with absolutely no muscle tone and about as minimal a capacity for violence as it is possible to have and still pose a threat while choking her gun into uselessness probably won't provide a sufficient failure point to realize she needs to actually do some work on this.
Using a sidearm is a small part of a police officer's job. But to quote Jack Leuba, it's the one part you absolutely cannot fuck up.
She could improve massively without even firing a shot. Just dryfiring practicing her draw to a good grip would solve practically every problem visible in that video. So it's not a question of resources.
People who regularly practice do not achieve a perfect grip under stress all the time either...but they do manage to achieve a good enough grip that the gun works and that their rounds fired at close range actually hit. This business of training to first understand what a good grip is and then working on building an effective draw to a good grip is tedious, repetitive, and time consuming. Most programs in the institutions and in the private sector don't spend enough time actually working on that core element of using a handgun. Most people when they leave training do not go and practice that core element of using a handgun much if at all.
The more work you do with it, the better the chances that a good enough draw will show up when you need one.
If the last time you even drew your gun was at a qualification 6 months or more ago, or at that class you took last year, what shows up when you see that threat you obviously were not taking remotely seriously won't be terribly useful.
Last edited by TCinVA; 07-19-2023 at 07:40 AM.
3/15/2016
Flying solo into a situation like this is a bad decision. IMHO, once the guy became combative, she should have backed way the hell off and waited for help. Instead, she kept yelling at the guy through the closed door, basically goading him into coming outside and forcing the shooting.
In addition to this video showing a criminal lack of training in basic firearms work, it shows, IMHO, a complete lack of training on sound tactics and basic decision making. Interesting to me, the officer didn't sound terribly stressed on radio comms, which makes the tactical decisions she made even more confusing to me. But hey, I'm just an old fat retired guy, and, luckily, I had almost zero opportunities to deal with situations like this.
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