There’s a lot of valuable experience and skill to be gained from time at the range. We all need regular range time to maintain our shooting skills, because they are ‘perishable’. Unlike riding a bike – something you learn once and remember always – if you don’t keep practicing your shooting skills, they fade away.
However, there’s another sort of learning and experience we can, we should, we must gain as well; and this is the knowledge and understanding we can get without ever leaving home and without even touching a firearm. This learning comes from studying real world events and encounters, and learning the lessons to be gleaned from them.
Here’s an interesting example of a real world encounter, which leads to two important self-defense lessons.
To quickly summarize the situation, a ‘troubled’ Muslim youth with prior convictions who seemed to have some sort of police fixation lead Los Angeles police on a chase around Los Angeles, driving a former police car. While doing this, he phoned 911 and uttered various threats of violence against the pursuing police, and said that if they drew and pointed their guns at him, he’d do the same to them.
Eventually the strange chase came to an end on the 101 freeway. The youth jumped out of his car after the police had rammed and immobilized it, and many police in turn rushed out of their cars and towards the youth. A strange sort of semi chase then occurred across the freeway lanes, with the youth alternating between running away, dancing around, and turning to the police while adopting shooting stances, hands outstretched with some sort of object in them.
It was night, the distances were short, and several of the police were out in the open rather than behind cover. Add to that the youth’s threats to 911 which had of course been passed on to the pursuing officers, and his past arrests/convictions, so of course, and completely understandably, when the youth did this the police switched from pursuing the youth to defending themselves against what likely was a crazed madman with a gun, about to make good on his threat and shoot at the officers.
It is unclear how many police were present at this point, but at least eight officers fired more than 90 shots at the youth before he collapsed and subsequently died. The shooting went on for at least ten and probably 15 seconds. There’s a good video linked at the bottom of this page that provides helicopter filmed coverage of the final parts of the chase and then the fatal encounter after the youth’s car was stopped.
There are two lessons to be gleaned from this scenario.
1. Number of Shots Fired
We don’t know exactly how many shots were fired, all we know is that the total was more than 90, which of course could be any number greater than this. We don’t know how many of the shots were fired after the youth collapsed, but it is probable that most of the shots were fired prior to that point. We also don’t know how many of the rounds hit the youth prior to his collapsing.
If you look at the video you’ll see more or less when the police start shooting, and you’ll notice the youth remains active and seemingly unimpaired, even though on at least a couple of occasions he seems to pause as a result of being hit before then resuming his crazy behavior.
Now put yourself into this picture – not as the crazy youth, of course. But perhaps imagine that you’re in a situation where some crazy person gives chase to you in your car, perhaps as a result of some imagined discourtesy you exhibited while driving. Your attacker eventually forces your car off the road, and you are forced to respond to his aggression with lethal force.
How many rounds will you have to fire at him to end his attack on you?
Most of us, when we mentally role play scenarios like this, usually envision shooting two or three or four times maximum. We also, truth be told, probably cherish a major hope (fantasy?) that the simple presentation and brandishing of our handgun will scare the bad guy away, and as a backup to that first level of optimism, we hope that as soon as we fire a single shot at the bad guy, he’ll surrender or run away.
Let’s think about this. Do you see any sign of rational behavior or submission/surrender on the part of the youth in this scenario? And he has at least eight police officers, first all chasing him, then secondly all shooting at him. He doesn’t at any point surrender or stop. He stays ‘in the fight’ in his strange way all the way through until being fatally stopped.
We all of us have to plan for worst case, not best case scenarios. If we want to live our lives based on the hope of exclusively enjoying best case scenarios, we don’t need a gun at all, we don’t need locks on our doors, and so on. But if we are willing to plan for worst case scenarios, we need to plan all the way, not stop half way. It is a bit like insuring your house. You either fully insure it or you don’t insure it at all, but it makes no sense to half insure it.
So, back to the question. How many shots will it take to stop your own crazy guy/attacker?
Let’s think about one more thing as well. In the encounter we are talking about, you have at least eight professional trained policemen, who go to work every day in the knowledge they might end up needing to use their weapons, and who practice regularly. Each of the eight was supported by the rest of the eight, and probably they all had body armor on. The confrontation was clearly one that they would win, and even if one or two officers had the misfortune to be hit (and as it turned out, the youth had no gun, and so obviously never returned fire) they knew their brother officers would support them, and that paramedics would be on the way there in short order.
This is not to say it wasn’t a high stress situation. Of course it was. But as high as the stress level might have been, imagine how much higher your stress would be, as a single person, forced to respond to an unreasoning attack by a crazy person. You have no backup, no body armor, and have probably never shot at a person before. Your shooting will be much more panicky and less well controlled than that of the eight (or more) police officers.
So, and here’s the point : If it takes eight police officers at least 90 shots to get this crazy youth out of the fight, how many shots will it take you in a similar situation?
It would seem reasonable to assume that you would need at least as many shots, but let’s give you the benefit of the doubt and say that you only missed half as many shots as did the LA police officers, and let’s also say that the rounds you did get on target were better placed. So perhaps you ‘only’ need at least 45 rounds to stop your own crazy attacker from continuing his threat.
Sure, there are cases where the mere sight of a gun will stop an attack, and other cases where a single shot fired will stop an attack. Sometimes a bad guy will collapse from a ‘lucky’ first shot. But look at the video again – you are looking at a case where it took eight police officers more than 90 shots to get this guy down. Don’t reject the evidence in front of you – accept it and incorporate it into your training and your preparedness.
Now for some implications of this calculation.
- Do you have at least 45 rounds with you at all times? Sure, you have however many rounds are in your pistol to start with, but how many extra magazines (for semi-autos) or speed loaders (for revolvers) do you also have with you?
- What say your attacker had a second (or third, possibly even fourth) person with him. How many rounds would you need to stop two, three or four people? Do the math – you won’t like the answer.
- Look at the distances in this encounter. The crazy guy was never more than one or at the most two seconds from the officers. So consider this : You’ve emptied your gun at your attacker, and he’s still pressing the fight. You need to reload. How long will it take you to reload? Clearly you’ve got no more than perhaps 1.5 seconds to get your gun running again. Can you get your gun reloaded – not on the range where you’re standing calm and still, with spare magazines in pouches on your belt, but in the real world where you’re having to move, to defend yourself, and to retrieve spare magazines from wherever you keep them on your person?
2. Aftermath of a Justified Use of Deadly Force
The first of the two linked articles does a reasonably good job of reporting on how the dead youth’s relatives instantly make him out to be a saint rather than a sinner, while also providing some rebuttals to the claims of the relatives.
Some of these claims are so ridiculous as to almost be amusing – he didn’t hate police, he wanted to be a police officer himself and was slain by the very people he admired and wanted to join. He wasn’t pretending to point a gun at the police, he was extending his arms in peaceful prayer. And so on.
While it could be argued that 90+ rounds was perhaps a few more than needed, watch the video, understand the background, and you’ll agree this was a fully justified use of lethal force. But not in the minds of the now grieving relatives – and potentially not in the mind of the public at large (who seldom understand the ugly realities of self-defense) and potentially not in the mind of prosecutors and jurors, either.
Every crazy attacker is probably also some mother’s son, maybe some wife’s husband, some children’s father, and so on. Even the worst of people have friends. And the certain truth is that if any news media has to choose between a sobbing grieving relative talking about how the loss of her son/husband/father is now destroying her own future life and how ‘he didn’t deserve to die’ on the one hand; and on the other hand to show a happy laughing cheering mother/wife/child rejoicing in how their son/husband/father survived a deadly encounter and was coming home safe, which do you think they’ll feature in their story?
Happy survivors are not news – if anything, they strike a discordant note. Unhappy grieving ‘victims’ make for good stories and compelling viewing.
Even in the most extreme and justified situations where you have validly used deadly force to defend yourself, you’ll find a lot of negativity focused on you.
In other words, no matter what the situation, any time you can, your best strategy is always to avoid the fight. To run away, not as a coward, but as a wise person choosing to win the broader battle for the quality of the rest of your life. The most essential skill to develop is how to avoid fights – how to anticipate and get out of potentially dangerous situations before they become fully dangerous, and how to happily run away rather than stick around.
But if you do run out of options, and have to fight for your safety, make sure you don’t also run out of ammunition!