“TASER TASER TASER”: How a Police Officer Shot a Man She Meant to Merely Shock

This is a training failure. The reason you train is so that under duress the training takes over and muscle memory carries you through adrenalization to the other side of the event. Which is what happened here, the problem is that some failure in the training allowed the officer to draw, present and discharge the wrong weapon.

I can see how that can happen. You train people under stress, shouting at them, trying to piss them off, etc. You can’t do an actual mortal threat scenario but you try to come as close as you can when instructing people to use weapons in gravest extreme. Many times I’ve seen someone draw and train a sidearm on target but forget to release the safety. You can tell because you see them pointing the weapon while clutching it and nothing happens. I even got to the point where I would watch for trigger finger movement because if this happens it’s a habit that must be broken before it becomes ingrained.

This phenomena with the failure to release a safety is why Glock developed the trigger face safety, where the safety is actually a small lever embedded in the finger side of the trigger. It’s that much of a common problem that a handgun manufacturer designed a pistol to overcome it.

Of course that new system came with a whole new set of training problems. You have to train yourself to keep your FINGER OFF THE TRIGGER until you determine that you’re going to fire. Not that you’re ready to fire but that you have gotten to the point where you are certain you must discharge your weapon. Because otherwise there’s nothing between you and a shot being fired once you place a finger on the trigger.

Obviously you should keep your finger off the trigger until you’re ready to fire anyway and there’s a lot more to this — I’m not going to give a handgun class here on the forum. The point is that things happen very fast and with enough variation and uncertainty that training is crucial. Any of you who might CCW should be aware of this kind of thing and train yourselves, or get training, so that you don’t point that sidearm at a bad guy futilely pressing a trigger that’s locked by a safety, or accidentally shoot someone with your Glock. Don’t laugh, I’ve known multiple instances of people highly familiar with handguns and having years, even decades of experience — Who blew a hole in their bathroom floor taking a Glock handgun off to sit on the porcelain throne.

I agree with Bill, it would be very handy to have some sort of statistical analysis to see if this thing with grabbing a sidearm when the intention was to grab a Taser is actually an issue or if this instance was just a sad fluke. It might be beneficial to train to aim a Taser at a lesser potentially lethal part of the body, like an upper shoulder or groin, rather than the center-of-mass chest that contains the cardio-pulmonary system. I’m not nearly as familiar with Tasers as I am sidearms so this might not be effective, I don’t know.

What I do know, or am at least fairly confident I know, is that there was some fault in training somewhere along the line that allowed this officer’s brain to say “Taser” but her muscles to say “Firearm” and that has led to a tragedy. It’s either that or this officer is some sort of idiot and her record does not indicate that to be the case.