The Responsibility of Police Officers

Parent Cafe
101

“My understanding is that AR-15s don’t take much skill to use. Given the firepower, the velocity, the sheer number of bullets it can pump out in a limited amount of time, little recoil, etc., if your goal is to kill a lot of people, it is very efficient at that. With a handgun, it seems there is a lot more skill involved to aim and kill.”

I’m not sure I’d agree with this. My husband is a range safety officer and board member of several local shooting ranges/gun clubs; he participates in and officiates at several different type of shooting competitions including something called “Three Gun” where competitors complete different target shooting scenarios using a handgun, rifle and shotgun. None of this is something I especially seek out (if DH weren’t in my life I wouldn’t even own a gun), but for the sake of being supportive, I’ve participated in the various trainings and even a few competitions.

If you have a stationary position upon which to steady the weapon, a rifle (and an AR is just an example of a rifle) is very easy and efficient once you’ve zeroed in on a target. But that’s not my understanding of how the school shooting happened. If a shooter is wandering through rooms and shooting from a standing position, it can get tiring quickly to aim and steady a rifle. Walking into a classroom, for example, it would probably be easier to aim and accurately fire a handgun than a rifle. And after several minutes of wandering around and shooting, unless the shooter has done quite a bit of practice, that rifle gets heavy and accuracy decreases quickly.

And with a very small amount of practice, it takes someone around one second to drop an empty magazine, insert a new one and be ready to fire a handgun again. After watching just a few of the competitions, I quickly became disillusioned with the idea that banning large capacity magazines would make one iota of difference in these mass shooting situations. Even if each magazine only holds 10 bullets, it takes almost no time to switch them out, so I’m not convinced that’s a factor in the casualty rate of the shootings.

102

@doschicos, I have never shot an AR 15, and I suck with a handgun so I am probably not the person to ask. But I am not sure it takes more skill to spray a room full of kids with a 9mm pistol as opposed to a AR 15. So if we are talking about “pumping out bullets in a limited amount of time” or stuff like the alleged “120 shots a minute” into a classroom or crowded cafeteria, then I am really not sure I see a difference. Plus the pistol is lighter, easier to conceal, etc. Which is why it is used far more often in homicides.

Shooting at a single target more than say ten yards away? Yep, I agree, the long gun of any type is much easier to use. And the AR 15 (which is the civilian model of the M 16 remember) is designed to be very easy to learn to use. I just don’t think that is the metric here. I may be wrong, but my understanding is that most school shooters are not looking for one particular person in a crowd and trying to accurately hit that person. They are looking to hurt a lot of people generally in an enclosed space.

As I said above, the thing that would scare me the most would be a loon with a shotgun in an enclosed space. You could harm a whole lot of people very quickly with a Remington 870. And all you need is a hack saw to shorten the barrel and a screw driver to punch out the plug. By the way, the 870 is I think still the most popular firearm ever made, and Remington sold its 10 millionth copy about a decade ago.

I don’t want to get too deep into this, but I do want to make one point about the current talking point that the muzzle velocity of the AR 15 makes it some type of uber dangerous weapon. There has been more written then any of us will ever want to read about the effect of muzzle velocity. There are shelves full of studies done on bullet tumble, windage, barrel twist, etc. There are even more done on the type of bullet used in a particular cartridge. Virtually everything I have ever read until two days ago (and I used to hand load a lot) indicates that velocity primarily effects accuracy at distance and that bullet construction and size primarily effects “stopping power” (and I apologize for using that phrase in this context, but when discussing hunting loads, that is the phrase used to describe the damage a particular load does to a game animal). The idea that everything written up to today should be tossed out because of a writer’s interpretation of one doctor’s reaction to a set of wounds is misplaced I think. An AR 15, or any firearm for that matter, is plenty dangerous enough as it is without having to make it sound worse.

That said, @“Cardinal Fang” you are not wrong that a long gun is more powerful than a hand gun, especially at distance. My point though is that over the likely distances involved here, meaning shots something less than ten to fifteen yards, I believe ballistics tells us there won’t be much real difference, despite the report of the doctor’s opinion. Also, I would really appreciate it if you would not truncate my quotes to make it appear I said something different than I did.

103

Very true. I have seen guys who shoot a lot of pistol switch magazines in a couple seconds without even trying or thinking about it.

104

Talking about which gun “kills more” or is the “chosen weapon” is just noise. For everyone one of A, I can show you one of B. That’s why banning something is just a feel good.

As for a SRO officer having a larger weapon available, they probably should, but the car may not be the best place.

Bottom line is most of these officers know what they are doing and could most likely successfully confront a single shooter with their handgun. What happened with the Broward County officers is a story which will unfold. Suffice it to say there where many governmental failures in this case.

105

Maybe if you are the “good guy with a gun,” you are trying to aim, and not to hit anything extraneous. If you are the typical school shooter, you are not trying to hit any particular person, you are sending as many bullets as possible in the general direction of clumps of people trying to cause as much damage and terror as possible. You don’t need to aim, to be accurate, more than at a barn-door level. It’s not going to matter if your arm gets tired. You’re not being scored on points for form, and you generally don’t expect to be alive more than a few more minutes.

All these arguments why banning assault rifles doesn’t solve the problem: Of course it doesn’t solve the problem! The problem is guns. It would be great to limit all of them severely, but the Second Amendment probably doesn’t allow that. But if you ban assault rifles, or do something to make them prohibitively expensive, maybe you divert two or three potential shooters whose mental image of the act wouldn’t be satisfied with handguns, and maybe some of the others who switch to handguns leave more victims with survivable wounds. Incremental is OK, if you wind up saving incremental lives.

106

Here’s one from a trauma surgeon and 24 year veteran of the Navy and it’s not from this week. First one that came up on a search. I’m sure I could find more.

https://www.wired.com/2016/06/ar-15-can-human-body/ :-??

ETA:

Here’s another from 2015 (there are so many to choose from!)
Scroll down to the part with the question: Does it matter what kind of gun a victim is shot with?
https://www.thetrace.org/2015/09/bullet-injuries-wounds-trauma-surgery/

107

Again, distance is a huge variable. And the relevant metric isn’t “most powerful” it is the relative difference in the force delivered by a round (and the performance of the round on impact) at close quarters and whether the difference in this context is significant. Based on what I know about ballistics generally it is just hard to see how a person shot with a 9mm hollow point slug fired from a pistol at twenty feet say has an appreciably lower survivability rate than a person shot in the same place with a round fired from an AR 15 from the same distance. That’s what I am saying.

108

The US army considers the military model of AR15 the most lethal practical weapon for its soldiers in combat. I really think they have the definitive opinion on this issue of military grade assault weaponry

109

For the people who argue that it would not help anything to ban this or that type of weapon - would it be harmful to anyone to do so?

110

@Iglooo . People who have never heard gunshots, and well, even some people who have, can’t often distinguish b/w gunshots and fireworks. Sadly, there is an area of town a few miles from me that has a lot of crime/drug activity. It borders, as in, directly across the residential street, homes that range in price from $550K to a million dollars. I belong to the area FB page and there are regularly postings from people that live in that neighborhood asking “Was that fireworks or gunshots” and then there is an ensuing debate, but almost every single time someone responds that they already called police and it nearly always turns out to be fireworks. Unfortunately though, there have been murders/shootings there, including a high school senior killed just before Christmas a couple of months ago so people err on the side of caution when they are unsure.

111

Only if you don’t believe in the constitution. And if we are flippant about the 2nd amendment how long before we are flippant with the first, fourth, 14th. Unfortunately, we may already be down that road with those rights.

112

@roycroftmom, I don’t mean to be nit picky, but the US Army (and Marines I am pretty sure) standard issue weapon is an M4. The m4 is basically a shortened version of the m16/ar15. They all shoot the same NATO 5:56 round, but the M4 has less muzzle velocity ( which is a function here if barrel length). Which I guess is another data point that muzzle velocity is not the be all end all some assume.

113

So as this thread heads all over the place. For you ballistics guys, is there anything they can do to the ammunition?
If you think about the golf ball, USGA has design rules to limit its flight.

114

We have common sense rules that limit the other amendments as well. Free speech is not boundless if you scream fire in a crowded theater, as we all know. Sensible limitations are also applied to the 4th amendment, and we live quite well with those. There is no reason common sense must be abandoned for the sake of the second amendment.

115

I would suggest that we are already flippant about the 2nd amendment. In NYS and many other states it is illegal to own a switchblade or many types of martial arts weapons, which are certainly a type of armament. It seems unlikely that I could go out and practice using a cannon, which is technically a gun. Hand grenades? Flamethrowers? Shoulder-mounted grenade launcher? Maybe not.

116

" And if we are flippant about the 2nd amendment how long before we are flippant with the first, fourth, 14th. Unfortunately, we may already be down that road with those rights."

You do realize the constitution has been amended many times, right? 19th Amendment to give women the right to vote, 13th Amendment abolishing slavery, 18th Amendment banning alcohol and the subsequent 21st Amendment repealing the 18th. The forefathers weren’t all knowing. The Constitution gets rewritten to contemporary times and issues. I doubt the forefathers foresaw mass shootings and the weaponry available now. The Constitution is a living document. Besides, commonsense gun policies doesn’t equal = zero guns.

117

MODERATOR’S NOTE: Please get the thread back on topic - it has drifted far away from the original topic.

118

As an active police officer he knows from training the difference between a firecracker and a gun shot. Even I can tell the difference. While there are different sounds within a school, his years there would tell him what is normal and what isn’t. Sounds will echo in a school but again, from his time there, he has a much better idea of where the sound is coming from. Even I can tell the direction that a gun shot came from. All of this is part of his training along with active shooter training. Schools across the country now do active shooter training. Some are implementing a new program called ALICE. https://www.alicetraining.com/about-us/ IMO, the police chief didn’t throw him under the bus but based his actions after reviewing the video and the comment from the other police chief. The resource officer failed to due his duty and follow his training.

119

You do realize how hard it is to amended the constitution. Especially to take away a current right. And yes, right are not unlimited. But look at what is happening these days. “Hate speech” is being declared “unconstitutional” by talking heads. We should take these right seriously, whether we like them or not.

But getting back to the original discussion. It is now being reported that they where ordered not to go in unless their body camera’s, which they didn’t have, where on. At what point do we expect our police to act with regard to the situation at hand and not follow some policy from some desk jockey?

120

Yeah. Any trained person should be able to tell the difference from a firecracker. I used to work in a rough neighborhood. You could hear the difference.