In Philadelphia, police responded to a domestic violence call and found a man armed with a knife. He refused police instruction to drop the knife, and was shot when he got within ten feet.
A hysterical bystander screamed in agony that the police didn’t try to shoot him in the leg.
you know, like Roger Murtaugh (Danny Glover) said in Lethal Weapon. And Neil Kinnock (Joe Biden), on some MSM show recently.
sorry, I’m a Luddite. Haven’t figured out how to attach files and such. ABC6, Philly news
5 replies on ““They shoot ‘em in the leg or something””
To follow up, apparently it is racist for televisions to remain in Walmart while people are mostly peacefully demonstrating against a police shooting where the underlying circumstances have changed from a domestic violence event to a mental health episode, with edged weaponry, that the family now claims that all they wanted from 911 was an ambulance. As if emergency dispatchers would be required to send only what the caller asked for after the knives were mentioned.
Things which appear to develop slowly on an iPhone video develop much more quickly when trying to fix a moving target over open sights, even at point blank range.
330 million, minus one, didn’t do any thing to get shot for today.
I am nowhere near as verbose as other commenters — mostly because I don’t have as engaging stories to tell. However, my proposal is if an assailant must be shot it in the leg, then do so only after he is no longer able to attack.
LOL, that works too, and with a lot fewer words 🙂
Actually there was a component in some military training I once undertook that involved how to stop a person with my handgun or rifle while attempting not to kill him. This is something that might be applied in a situation where it was vital to interrogate that person as a prisoner rather than render him into an inanimate pile of water supported proteins, lipids, calcium and trace elements.
I say “attempting” because lethal force is lethal force. Humans are pretty fragile, even the very toughest of them, when it comes to high velocity chunks of spin-stabilized metal flying around. A hit anywhere can have dire consequences.
What we were taught was to shoot for their hip joint. It’s a large target about the size of an apple (like the heart) made of bone and disrupting it with gunfire in any part of it will drop someone to the ground and immediately immobilize them. I said “immobilize” not “stop”. While they can no longer stroll towards you casually emptying their Kalashnikov in your general direction, they can still do all of that minus the strolling part.
My instructor* in this training was very practical. He said it was entirely up to us in the moment if we wanted to take that chance with an armed enemy and if not, no one is going to make a fuss about it. If the bad guy goes down and doesn’t drop his weapon in the process he was still distracted enough that now no longer being a moving target should allow for an easy and instantly fatal second shot.
So … Imagine having your hip shattered by a high velocity round and maybe being lucky enough that the angle of the shot didn’t destroy the femoral artery which also happens to be in that immediate area. If that happens blood pressure goes to zero in about 10 seconds. Doesn’t sound like a lot of fun to me, but that’s just me I suppose.
The people in this training with me were there because we had demonstrated the highest grades of marksmanship. Unless you’re a crack shot and KNOW you can execute a perfect shot under extreme duress, you shouldn’t even be considering this kind of thing. I never had an opportunity to apply it so I can’t say it’s a good idea even then.
Considering all that brings us to the practical considerations involved in a police officer, never notorious for top-level marksmanship as a group, being faced with this prospect on a street full of people and immediately under threat from an armed assailant of any sort, knives included. Doesn’t seem to me like a very good idea but then again, that might just be me.
I think the odds are excellent that the cop’s gonna miss and get stabbed, miss and hit a bystander then get stabbed, miss and hit a bystander then get stabbed and have his gun appropriated by the bad guy … Or any number of unpleasant permutations on that general theme.
So … Professionally speaking I’d say requiring cops to shoot people in the legs is a very silly idea.
In this sort of training mentioned above I also learned that an assailant armed with a blade within 12 feet was every bit as lethal as one armed with a firearm. We learned about this because we might be the guy with the blade, or we might be the guy the guy with the blade is after. So either way the urgency of the situation was made clear. I think the cop was negligent in letting him get to 10 feet before dropping him and just gave the bad guy those extra two feet in an abundance of good will I myself would not be able to muster. The cop chose to go to work that day, the bad guy chose to attack a guy holding a handgun with a knife. It’s not hard to see which of those choices was the most unreasonable nor predict the outcome of the latter.
(*The same instructor gave my first class on anti-armor training. He began thusly — “If you are contemplating attacking a tank wearing nothing denser than a flack jacket and your issue, first go out and get yourself the biggest pair of brass balls you can find, then clang them together really, really hard …”)