Recent content by mbok1947

Of the roughly 700 homicides I covered in my career, I would wager two-thirds at least were committed with handguns of .380 caliber and below, with .22 probably accounting for the most killings. But It remains a fact that it often took more (and well placed) rounds with smaller calibers, while...

Having witnessed three fatal officer involved shootings and covered several hundred homicides (and who knows how many more non-fatal shootings and stabbings) I can attest that even with wounds that ultimately proved fatal, lots of people can and do go on for some time after the initial wound(s)...

I witnessed an almost identical situation in the 1970s when I was a crime reporter. In that case the suspect was armed with a handgun and had abducted the female hostage during a convenience store robbery and wound up driving in her car to a park near a local lake, with ultimately a half dozen...

In the 70s when I was working as a crime reporter the police dispatcher assigned a patrol car to go to a convenience store late one night because the clerk was afraid a guy loitering outside was preparing to rob him. A detective unit came on and said they would surveil the place and to have the...

This was about two miles from my house. There is a cluster of several restaurants there, very busy on any evening, so had this lunatic been able to continue his shooting spree there might have been many more casualties. The two armed citizens are both in their 30s. They responded independently...

Back in the 70s when I was working at the cop shop we saw lots of cheap .25 autos and .22 and .32 revolvers, sometimes with broken or missing grips. I remember at one shooting watching an officer try to unload the remaining unfired rounds from an old revolver, and he had to pry them out with a...

Where legal yes, and I define legal as "where not specifically prohibited by statute" which does NOT include places with no-slash-gun stickers which can only result in a request to leave if detected, which I have never been.

In any situation like this one does the best one can with the tools and circumstances at hand. Sometimes things turn out fine, sometimes not, most times somewhere in between. The man was employed to do a job. He did it as best he could at the moment. Power to him and can the second guessing and...

During my years covering law enforcement I often accompanied patrol officers on calls, and it was quite common to encounter victims of burglary, prowling, even robbery who had not necessarily been hostile to firearms but essentially indifferent -- as in "it will never happen to me." Now it had...

I am not sure you can extrapolate a lot from that data except to say there is no clear trend either way. For example I am a little surprised by the data that points to daytime/midday time frames for officer attacks. Thinking back to the shootings of officers or shootings by them in gunfights I...

Well in my 10-plus year career as a crime reporter quite a few years back I was present 11 times when shots were fired by/at/both police in a variety of situations that ranged from immediate armed confrontations to hostage and barricaded suspects to pursuits. On two of those occasions police...

My primary self defense concern (and the most likely of potential scenarios) remains the "gimme your wallet /carjacking instance at a gas station or parking lot. For that I feel secure with a Ruger LCR .357; it is very unlikely that I would require more than the five rounds onboard, or even to...

Latest report is that shooter had an ongoing domestic grudge against his in-laws who attended that church but who were not present at the time of the attack. Hence it is highly likely that the threat of further violence existed as he left the church, since he may well have been heading to the...

There are several dozen cases each year of CCW holders shooting and/or killing armed robbers when they were not the direct victim but a customer in the store. I am unaware of any not ruled justified. With armed robbery. and certainly with an active shooter, the presumption is that an imminent...

Well one commonly cited statistic is that there are about 2.5 million instances each year where a citizen uses a firearm to prevent or stop a crime. The vast majority of those cases do not involve gunfire; they are of the "better get out of here, I have a gun" nature, or a simple display of the...