Originally Posted by
BehindBlueI's
I've posted longer versions, but here's my Reader's Digest version:
1) Overall stats are useless because they encompass such a wide variety of situations as to be meaningless.
2) Defense against violent crime can largely be broken down in to three categories: Occupational, Random, Targeted. If you aren't a cop, armored car guard, etc., the first metric is useless to you. If you don't have a crazy ex, aren't dealing drugs, don't owe a seedy biker gang dope money, etc. then the third category is useless to you. What you are concerned with is Random.
3) Random crime very much falls in to that trope of less than 3s, but there are outliers. I kept my own stats solely on cases I could identify as non-criminal actors defending themselves against random crimes. No domestic homicides, no drug dealers defending their turf, no police actions, etc. If I couldn't verify it was a real 'good guy vs bad guy' situation, it was chucked. I ended up with about one hundred cases to pull data from.
Results:
Distances tended to be within double arms length when outside the house.
Shots to resolution was often zero or one. Two or three was reasonably common. More than that was a fairly extreme outlier.
Total shots (what UCR would have) was sometimes higher. This confused some people, but let's say there's a video of the shooting. The bad guy starts to run as the draw stroke is being completed and the good guy fires two misses at the bad guy full sprint across the parking lot. Shots to resolution: Zero. Bad guy was already in flight. Total shots: Two. The two "extra" shots had no effect on the outcome of the fight. If you mag dump but miss every time and the guy is in full flight by shot 3, 3 shots to resolution but much more fired.
People who lost ran out of time before ammo. They got put out of the fight before they could empty their gun, the bad guy was down or in full flight before they emptied their gun, etc.
More shots *generally* equated to more misses. As people move, seek cover, spread out, etc. hit rates go down.
So, from my stats, if random crime is your main concern than 3/3/3 is a pretty solid idea, even if not an exact concrete number.