Stopping Threat With Pistol and Reluctance To Fire

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Ok the cop fired 8 shots.

He should have had 8 to 10 rounds left.

Another 8 rounds would have put the guy down again. (at least for a while)

The cop thought he was done and almost looked to holster his gun? He did everything right (or "ok") until he didn't react to the second attack.

I admit the second attack was a total surprise! I was not expecting it and not saying I would have done better.

As said, handguns are not death rays.
 
Doesn't matter.

What DOES matter is that this social worker with a gun (love that phrase) nearly got himself killed because he was afraid to do what needed to be done.
 
Doesn't matter.

What DOES matter is that this social worker with a gun (love that phrase) nearly got himself killed because he was afraid to do what needed to be done.

Idk. I really think he thought he was done after his 8 shots. He thought he would be performing first aid and he also didn't think the guy was capable of another attack.
 
Idk. I really think he thought he was done after his 8 shots. He thought he would be performing first aid and he also didn't think the guy was capable of another attack.
I agree with this^^^^

Maybe he did not have enough experience to realize that sometimes a shooting victim gets back up in the fight. He did act like he was totally caught off guard.
 
Not sure about decisiveness issue or that the two situations are not directly comparable. A person with a knife at distance or no weapon is not the same threat immediacy as a person with a shotgun pointed at a victim. If you watch those mere private citizens, the first had a 4 second draw on the bad guy that was already threatening to kill him and that was too slow and he was killed. The hero of White Settlement is current firearms instructor, former cop, got his hand on his gun at the same time as the guy who was killed and FAILED to draw his gun until AFTER two people had been shot and didn't fire until the gunman made his third shot. He either could not get his gun out of his own holster or was so reluctant to draw. Either way, it took two people getting killed before he entered the battle.

Or maybe he was mindful of his background and couldn't get a clean shot.
 
Is there reason to believe that he was afraid?

He really didn't want to shoot the guy, actually pleads with him. I think that there's no way he's going to get in trouble with shooting the guy and maybe that's where his mindset was.
Maybe another thing to learn is never reholster until the aggressor is in cuffs.

I knew a SWAT officer that shot a violent felon, felon was playing possum, officer approached, felon stuck a knife in his heart, officer blasted the guy, end result, both dead. (Officer was off-duty and not wearing his vest).
 
Situations like this (although not this particular one) where many shots are needed is how John Correia (Active Self Protection) convinced me to upgrade from 5-shot .38 snubby to a double stack 9mm.
 
Armchair quarterback here, and with all respect to LEO's.

There is no way I would approach that dude after he went down the first time, I would maintain a safe distance away and gun trained on him and this time the sights would be pinned on the head. That was a near fatal mistake.

At which point it is determined to approach the perp on the ground you bet it would be with two cops with hands free or with a tazer and cuffs available with an additional cop with a gun trained on the guy.
 
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It is a dicey judgement call that makes police work so difficult and many times thankless.

Last summer in a town near where I live a patrolman (Weymouth MA) pursued and stopped an unarmed individual wanted on suspicion of leaving the scene of an accident and behaving erratically. When the officer (Michael Chesna) approached this person, he was attacked with a rock, knocked to the ground then shot approximately 10 times with his own pistol in the head and chest, killing him.

The fleeing perp then randomly began firing at arriving officers and killed a resident who was sitting on her porch at the time. He was eventually shot by other officers (not fatally) and taken into custody.

But I have to wonder if this officer, fearful of the headlines "Another officer shooting of unarmed persson", withheld his fire until it was too late. There are people on the streets that are just as deadly unarmed as they would be holding a pistol.
 
I was a drag racer for over 15 years (big fish in a small pond). I took it seriously and because of that I routinely watched fatal racing accidents on YouTube. Always looking at the entire situation and looking for the cause and what tricky situations resulted in somebody’s death. Learning from history.

This sort of thinking, theorizing and making judgments on a forum can make us better. It’s not necessarily fair to the officers but that’s how it goes with technology now.
 
Well clearly some errors and lack of hand to hand skills. IF you're not going to use your pistol or taser...then you at least need to know how to FIGHT.
 
"It is very easy to judge in leisure what people have had to do in haste...." Very wise words, some of you should heed them.
The point of discussing real-world scenarios is to learn lessons. What was done right, what was done wrong, what could have been done better, etc. NOT for the purpose of excoriating defenders, nor to exalt them, but to learn.

We lose the ability to learn important lessons if we restrict ourselves to only making positive observations about real-world scenarios.

DNS is correct. Wilson put his hand on his gun at the same time that White began to react--he reacted as soon as the shooter produced his weapon. But he didn't actually begin his draw for another couple of seconds or so. It wasn't until the shooter actually fired the shot that killed White that Wilson began to actually pull his gun. I don't know why he hesitated to draw after putting his hand on his gun. It could be that he felt that his field of fire was obstructed, but as pointed out, that wouldn't have prevented him from drawing although it might have prevented him from shooting. Maybe because he had a personal threshold for actually drawing his weapon that involved shots being fired. Maybe something else--we may never know. What we do know is that it appears that he could have had his gun out sooner than he did and potentially could have fired sooner than he did which could have had a beneficial effect on the outcome.

The point isn't that he screwed up, the point is that we can look at the video of the shooting, and other shooting videos and see that it is not unusual to observe what appears to be a reluctance to draw and fire. It's reasonable to assume that we, being human like the defenders in the video may find a similar reluctance on our part if we are ever put into a similar situation. Which might then prompt us to think about the benefits and disadvantages of forbearance, to explore ways in which we might overcome that reluctance when warranted, to try to set personal thresholds that we can use to prompt immediate action if an attacker crosses them, etc. To save lives.

Or we can just look at the video as a cool vignette, applaud the defender and go on our way having learned little or nothing from our brief foray into violence-oriented voyeurism.

Dave Grossman has written an interesting book ("On Killing") in which he delves into (among other things) the normal reticence of most humans to engage in violence, even when the circumstances seem to warrant it.
 
There was a time that a situation like this, that went public, would have sparked a caliber war. My how times have changed.
 
These are no win situations for cops. If he shoots sooner and kills the bad guy the cop is going to be cleared by the LE and court system, but may well be crucified by the public.

Several years ago we had a young man break into his ex-girlfriends home and was threatening to kill her. The 1st cop on the scene took a huge risk to save the girls life and went in alone. When the guy pointed his gun at the cop he fired 2 shots and the bad guy hit the floor dead. The death was ruled suicide by cop.

The young mans father understood, but mom wouldn't let it go. For several years she never missed a chance to call the cop a murderer in public and on social media. She gained sympathy from at least some in the community. After a point our hero cop reached his limit and eventually put a gun to his head and took his life.
 
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