fastbolt
Member
... but I'm compelled to post for the benefit of civilian lurkers. All these hopefully well-meaning admonitions that I (and you) need "more training so we'll understand" are not necessarily useful, and though instruction is fine no one should feel inadequate just because they don't have "professional" training. Often LE and ex-LE see the world only through a police lens, and sincerely believe they have all the answers. They don't. ...
Compelled? For the benefit of 'civilians'? So nobody lacking formal training in a specific, highly dangerous and volatile subject matter will "feel inadequate"? What if lacking the training does make someone much less knowledgeable and less prepared to encounter an active shooter incident? You want them to have a false sense of confidence and just jump in?
If you're posting for the benefit of non-LE folks who haven't had the opportunity to learn how things can unfold in the chaos of a dynamic and rapidly evolving active shooter situation, you might give some consideration to whether your comments might cause some of the folks unfamiliar with professional preparation for such events, and knowledgeable of what can happen in them, to mistakenly gain an unjustified sense of self confidence. Caution may pull someone in one direction, but unjustified confidence may pull them in the opposite direction.
Sure, LE (whether active or retired) often tend to see the world through their training and experience, including their acquired experiential knowledge. The more time they have/had on the job, and the more varied and demanding their job responsibilities and experiences, the more opportunity they often have to gain insight from their OJT, too. The ones who leave the field early, for whatever reason (voluntary or involuntary), are obviously going to have less opportunity to develop that training knowledge base and acquired experiential knowledge than the ones who put in their 20 or more years. (Well, there's also a dismaying number of "20yr veterans" who stop learning and developing in their first year, and just keep repeating that first year over and over until they retire, but thyat's another subject.)
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My point is this: Armed citizens are significantly more successful at stopping an active shooter than police, and one might also note they killed NO innocent people. This same pattern holds true throughout all statistics involving citizens compared to LE in all armed encounters: civilians have a much higher hit/ammo expended ratio, and a much higher overall success ratio. ...
Cherry-picking 25 incidents doesn't exactly mean you've stumbled upon something that's suddenly (mistakenly) axiomatic, let alone 'predictive' for the next couple hundred incidents.
Also, consider that in some LE OIS incidents where more rounds have been expended that may have been because the incident involved more than 1 officer/shooter, meaning 2 or several. Some suspects may not be as quickly affected by GSW's and quickly stop their deadly force actions as soon as others might, too.
Unless you're also going to find incidents where more than one non-LE "good guy" shooters were involved in using deadly force in the same incident at the same time, it's somewhat of a different situation.
Besides, as has been said by subject matter experts in the field time and again, since the identical circumstances and people aren't going to be involved in repeating the same shooting incident time and again, each shooting incident is virtually a unique event.
We can train cops to perform weapon handling and shooting skills and tactics in a variety of situations that can be created for training and qualification scenarios, but ultimately we have to be able to rely upon their ability to draw upon varied skills and training experiences and apply them as may be necessary for any combination of events which they may encounter. Less variety of training, not sufficiently reinforced by recurrent training and practice, can make for "less" for them to try and draw upon in their moment of need.