Massad Ayoob: The necessity of high capacity magazines.

[TheNewbie]

From memory, FrankB has usually made quality posts, but the last couple of pages are way out there, and they show an enormous amount of ignorance. Not because he critiqued the officer, though I think the officer did way more good than bad, but it is the content of the critique of LE that is so absurd.


Here is a question. If you had to face the exact same situation, would you prefer a six shot revolver or a seventeen round polymer pistol? How confident are you in your ability to reload a revolver while some crazed dude with a knife is chasing you?

[WobblyPossum]

That’s not at all the case here. The guy may seem to some as struggling to get up, but I saw a man struggling to stay alive. He never cut anyone, especially not the woman he was on top of. As a college freshman, I worked as a security guard in a hospital ER. There were plenty of good times to be had between 11pm and 7am. I worked security in other places as well, including fast food joints on weekend nights...in the wrong part of town…armed only with a sense of determination.

The assailant doesn’t have to have successfully cut the victim for lethal force to be justified to stop them. That’s not how our system works. The officer needs to be able to articulate that the assailant had the Ability to cause death or serious bodily injury, the Opportunity to do so, and manifested a sense of Jeopardy/Intent to do so (AOJ). That was clear in the beginning of the video which justified beginning to use deadly force to stop him. He’s still considered a deadly force threat until he’s either incapacitated or completely compliant. The female victim is within striking range of the assailant the entire time in that video. If the assailant maintains control of the knife and continues attempting to get up, he continues to be a deadly force threat to the victim so the officer is justified in continuing to employ deadly force to stop him. Would a hypothetical reasonable officer with the same training and experience as the officer in the video possibly take the same actions as this officer? If so, then his actions were reasonable.

[Sammy1]

Here is an example of subject with a knife having been shot and getting back up and attacking. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0kHVe1OtD4o

[Glenn E. Meyer]

Here is a question. If you had to face the exact same situation, would you prefer a six shot revolver or a seventeen round polymer pistol? How confident are you in your ability to reload a revolver while some crazed dude with a knife is chasing you?

Facetiously, I quote a Goodyear blimp of a store clerk in Austin. I overhead this conversation when Blimpy was selling a revolver to a good ol' boy. This was in a good ol' boy store. Blimpy was answering the question of capacity when the dude was questioning a J frame. He said: If you can't get it done in 5, you ain't doing your job.

Never liked that clerk but I've seen the same quote from old Fudds in the ever popular capacity threads elsewhere.

That being said, getting back to the video, my opinion is worth what you paid for it as if this was to go to trial, it will be taken apart millisecond by millisecond and frame by frame. My opinion, again worth spit is that the stream of shots seems justified due to the threat to the woman and possibly getting up. If I were to assign risk to the officer, it is to the last shot. There is a noticeable pause in the firing stream. In other cases, that pause has been used against a shooter as it indicates time to evaluate if the threat is over. Folks have been prosecuted for a few second delay of shots. Not just a slow pause execution shot like that pharmacist fool but a pause in a stream of fire for just a few seconds.

Counter to that is the research showing that it is hard to inhibit the stream of fire motor program even when perceiving a stop signal. But a pause may be evaluated differently. So, this is not to assign blame, implying execution but to analyze. Would a prosecutor claim that the bad guy was clearly disabled enough to evaluate the last shot. Could it be determined what the effect of the last shot was?

Personally, I think it is ridiculous to prosecute the officer on such a millisecond implication of motive. Determining in a second that someone still holding the knife is not a threat - certainly grounds for reasonable doubt.

So what's happening on this incident? Civic uproar, lawyers?

[AMC]

From memory, FrankB has usually made quality posts, but the last couple of pages are way out there, and they show an enormous amount of ignorance. Not because he critiqued the officer, though I think the officer did way more good than bad, but it is the content of the critique of LE that is so absurd.

This is the point I was attempting to make. My critique was aimed at the comments, not the commenter. Hence my "not worthy of you" and "you can do better" remarks. We all make dumb comments or arguments occasionally, especially in complex areas that may be outside of our experience or expertise. Hell, I've made dumb comments inside my area of expertise in the past! Apparently he didn't take it that way.

I stand by my critique of the comments. Perhaps I'm a little less patient with such arguments now that I'm no longer employed as a public servant, and no longer have a 'professionalizing filter' on my responses. But dude CAN do better.

[ViniVidivici]

I disagree, gun, bat, knife, all the same justification when deadly force is warranted

Amen.

Anyone who'd shoot a knife wielding suspect multiple times, THEN go "hands on" to finish things, WHILE the attacker is still acting in a violent, aggressive way, is a complete idiot, not a "man".

That would be incredibly stupid. If the decision has been made to shoot, in the face of deadly force, shoot to stop the threat.

Sufficient ammunition doesn't make someone a "pussy", it makes them more capable.

Blasting an unarmed man from 25 yards away 15 times might qualify for the "pussy" statement, but that's not what we're seeing here.

[TGS]

Oh watch out guys, the unarmed fast food security guard with zero training or experience in the use of force is telling us how to do our jobs.

Sweet.

[feudist]

The use of body cams only provides the viewer with a point of view known as Third Person Objective, meaning that the viewer has no access to the thoughts or intentions of the participants.
But the viewer almost inevitably assumes that they are viewing from Third Person Omniscient, and that they know the internal dialogue of the participants. They have infinite replay of split second frame by frame review. They are free to research every precedent of law and popular opinion untouched by the consequences of getting a splitsecond decision wrong(or even not optimal, coulda woulda shoulda) in the middle of a psycho-physical-emotional event few people ever experience or even have a frame of reference for.
What motives the viewer attributes to the participants quite predictably reflects their experiences, as has been shown time and again in studies on perceptions of different races, sexes, education levels and religions.
And it reflects their ignorance of the limits of reaction time, cognition, visual tracking and focus, attentional blindness and simply operating at the limits of Human function in a no do-overs situation with actual stakes.
What is the delta between your cold "The Test" and the 10th repetition? In this cognitively trivial rote task which would you prefer to be judged on? Or stake 1000 bucks on? But which reflects, if even in the most minor way, the "Come as you are" nature of combat?

"Detached reflection cannot be demanded in the presence of an uplifted knife." Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes.

But it is being demanded more and more by radical leftists and liberaltarians as they seek to "reign in Police abuses".
For those interested in self defense this trend doesn't bode at all well. Any restriction or punitive prosecutions taken against cops will inevitably be extended to CCW defense, only magnified.
Because while we all know the reality of the selection and training that cops receive is far short of good, the public and the courts still attribute cops with being carefully selected and receiving superior training.
If the cops fuck it up(by the standards of Angels)...what business do you, Mr. CCW, have in defending yourself with a gun? Time to make an example out of you.

[TCinVA]

Let’s take this situation back to 1980. The officer has a 6 shot revolver, and the psycho has a butcher knife. Raise your hand if you think the officer would have reloaded, or would have been a man and gone hands on.

A typical police officer in the revolver days was using sub-optimal reload methods because things like speed loaders were heavily resisted until fairly late in the course for revolvers. Even if the officer had a speed loader, reloading a revolver with a speed loader is a time consuming and fairly delicate process.

In the revolver days what an officer most likely would have done when he'd had his six was produce a backup revolver.

If he didn't have a backup revolver, he'd pull out a blackjack or a sap and maybe crack the dude's skull.

Point being going hands on because you're out of other options isn't "being a man", it's eating a shit sandwich. The real world isn't rock, paper, scissors.

Thats one of the most bizarre statements I've ever seen on PF.

And I'd submit that unless you have extensive experience going hands on with people armed with edged weapons then maybe you should bite your tongue.

[Cecil Burch]

Anyone who voluntarily goes hands on with a knife armed attacker when he has other options is a dipshit. And this is from someone who has spent 40+ years working that exact problem under true pressure.