Shooting at Empire state building in NYC.

[Sera]

shooter got a the only headshot and the second was in the guy's heart, based on those pics they got him a lot in the abdomen... so yeah. I was making a joke initially, but he did score the only headshot

[Nephlite]

Correct me if I'm wrong, cops, but you always shoot for center mass right? Not at the head (with a handgun anyway) and especially in this type of populated area?

The federal standard is center mass or double-tap. A lot of agencies haven't moved away from the old standard, which is two to chest and one to head. The federal standard changed about 2 years ago or so and they changed it because the head is a very very hard target to hit.

man, your time must have been way before mine.

usually, one of two things happen. it can stay and not exit, or it can exit, but the skin on the face will go kinda soft and it'll look like he's wearing a skin mask like a serial killer dude, or it can straight split the head down the middle like a canoe. I'm assuming there's a certain area that causes that kind of pressure to rupture the skull like that.

It depends on the ammo and the distance. Target rounds and standard ammo don't tend to penetrate. Higher the caliber means less penetration sometimes. I've seen a video where a suspect was in an interrogation room and pulled out a DE Magnum from his waist band and shot himself in the head. You'd think a high caliber gun like that would easily pop the head like a zit but you didn't see anything except a small trickle of blood run out of his nose. And that was at point blank range.

Law Enforcement and military ammo on the other hand is designed for maximum penetration/maximum damage. Federal rounds are hollow points with a small exposed ring of wax in the tip. It goes in like normal, and the wax flattens the head in to a mushroom/star shape that exits taking large chunks of flesh from the target upon exit. It also tends to fragment a lot if it strikes bone or angles weird, that's why you get a lot of shrapnel and exit wounds. The energy diverted from the round tends to be spread over a larger target area to create maximum stopping power and the most damage to the bodies organs.

Now high-powered rounds like from the AR (5.56) I have are designed to concentrate the kinetic energy over a smaller amount of surface area for maximum penetration, without the need for the stopping power. An exit wound from a 5.56 despite traveling through the body will have little to no deterioration to the round, which allows it to penetrate all the way through. A shotgun (buck-shot) round supposedly works similarly where the pellets will breach a small surface area in the beginning (probably not much more than a slug round) and the shot scatters after entering the body, tossing the energy in multiple different directions which causes the "chunking" of the body like you see all too often.

The real problem here is cops aren't held to a higher standard then 300 out of 500 shots...

It's disturbing for sure. I always figured that police had to be expert marksmen.

Even "expert" marksmen won't shoot more than about 75%. What exactly makes you an expert though? There's only one person in the world that hits 500/500 regularly but that's at the cost of thousands upon thousands of retries where they hit 499 or lower. And that's at a range where you stand still and don't move or don't have someone yelling at you to create an SNS activation. When I say 300/500, I mean 300 of those shots need to be center mass, about a 4 by 4 inch square in the center of the target. All 500 shots must hit the target's body somewhere.

In my department, they will disqualify you immediately if one bullet misses the target completely. But you also have to do other shit to qualify. Pop out from behind the rail wall and shoot at 10/15/25, on one knee, prone, sitting at 5 yards, sitting at 10 yards, while holstered without missing anything on the draw, while walking, while running, jump out targets, backlit targets, and even more crazy shit as the instructors think of it. You think 300/500 is lazy, lax, or a shame? Well you try to hit 300/500 like most of these rookies who never shot a gun before in their life, some who don't have great vision or reflex skills. Try it without distractions and do it right the first time (i'll give you the standard 2 weeks to practice). Then try it at an obstacle range.

Hell Special Forces require you to be accurate but their standards aren't any better. You just have a tighter grouping then a regular guy, but it's still 60% or greater accuracy. Hit box is only 2x2 instead of a 4x4.

[Jer]

We aren't allowed to use the words double-tap. Controlled pairs, son!

[Churchill]

fuck that noise, double tap

[jmc]

fuck that noise, double tap

^

[Sera]

Oh great now I have a mental picture of a police officer telling a rookie 'its just like call of duty, man. Exact same thing.'

Perhaps you're right. My perspective on this is a bit distorted... I've also never had to shoot while running. I'm speaking from a perspective of someone who was made to shoot beer cans off a log from 10 adult paces at 9 years old. (Oh, Virginia, where people (crackers) still let their kids play with guns in the early 90s)

[FNH]

I'm speaking from a perspective of someone who was made to shoot beer cans off a log from 10 adult paces at 9 years old. (Oh, Virginia, where people (crackers) still let their kids play with guns in the early 90s)

because that's analogous to shooting another person?

[Sera]

because that's analogous to shooting another person?

no -- that was my point... I don't have enough experience with shooting living things that move around.

[Nephlite]

Well the worst part about being in that sort of situation is the activation of the SNS. All that stress you have, all those problems, worries and whatnot all come together at that one moment you don't want it to happen. Especially for people who have never killed someone before. You could be one of those few police officers who come in to the job and say "I will never kill anyone."

Then you're at the receiving end of the barrel, looking at your own mortality and thinking to yourself "What will my wife do? What about my kids? What about this guy who's going to kill me? Will someone catch him, or will I be another cold case sitting in the freezer for 20 years?" then shit like "Oh man I totally forgot to pay that bill today" or "Who's gonna pick up my kid from school today? I should call my wife... Oh wait, I can't because this asshole is trying to kill me."

Then you get a real brilliant idea and think "Oh yeah, wasn't I supposed to do something?" Then you draw out, breathe all your air out of your lungs, and hit that trigger just like you were trained. Reflection is always post-event. Don't have time to think about all that stuff before you do it. Just do it and get it over with and think about it later. All of that happens in about .000005 seconds. Hesitation and slow processing = dead cop. It's that training that helps bypass some of that hesitation factor and allows you to survive.

So on average, every police officer has about a 60% accuracy rating when shooting normal or in a state of "Homeostasis". You're trained to shoot in this state because the philosophy is you should be able to bring yourself to normalcy for shooting. If there's anger in your mind, if there's some type of emotion other than the will to survive in your mind, you shouldn't be shooting at all (should never even pick up a gun).

But then you have to also bring in that SNS factor for the close proximity threat. You experience about a 70% reduction in peripheral vision, tunnel vision, loss of night vision, loss of monocular vision, loss of neo-cortex accessing, the lens of the eye changes shape due to pupil dilation to allow more light to come in so you can see better, which can cause your contacts to pop off, among other things like vasoconstriction, muscle tremors, etc. So imagine hitting 60% accuracy while all of that is happening. That's the type of training that you have to go through to be an officer.

It could be something simple too to mess with your mind. I remember my first FLETC course, they stuck us in a simulator with earphones in and you started walking down a dark hallway. I was always taught to fire with a flashlight next to the gun (where the light points, the shot goes). So the hallway was dark and there was a noise to my back. I swung around and the simulation laser target was attracted to light (which I didn't know) and it shot me right in my shooting hand with a paintball. I was having such a bad SNS activation, I had to quit for a while and smoke like half a pack of cigarettes to calm myself, and that was just a simulation!

So after that, I learned from that experience and fixed my shooting, and that type of experience doesn't scare me anymore. Fighting in Afghanistan and Iraq also tuned my nerves quite a bit, so basically any situation I get in to that doesn't involve the exploding of IED's or similar doesn't really bother me. Vet's of most departments and vets of the military tend to develop those kinds of stoic reactions and I can give you some exercises you can do to tune some of it.

Sorry for such long posts. It's harder to explain these things in words rather than just showing people how it's done.

[Churchill]

Imagining up ridiculous stress shoots was actually one of my favorite things to do.

Creating a mini-crossfit workout with Ammo cans and stuff like that worked a lot better than doing the typical run+obstacle course. Created the response we wanted better than just being tired.

[Salodin]

I figured this would be the right spot, since making a new thread for every gun shooting right now would create a new subforum, but one of my colleges campuses had an "armed suspect" in it. I haven't looked up the details, but its broward college if any one wants to take a gander.