TMPHBITEU
Thank you, David. We needed to hear that.Originally Posted by David A. Rowe
Member
I like this post because it’s a reality check and does a great job of elucidating the nuance of chaotic situations. Thank you for sharing.
I am curious, have you been in a real room clear/active shooter/live, precarious self-defense or LEO situation in your career?
I realize many will think I am being passive/aggressive. I am not. I ask because I’ll have follow up questions on how you feel your training helped you in those situations.
Thank you.
Member
I've spent the last 17 years of my life in front of a computer on my fat ass, occasionally breaking it up with video games and xnxx fap sessions.
So I agree with what David said.
Hindsight is 20/20 though Johnst, and I imagine David would counter with a hypothetical, if your job was to run into a room with a gunman/men and kill them before they killed you, how much information about the environment would you want before you ran in the room?
Member
For a lot of folks, this would be much easier to swallow if there were far fewer incidents of police "enforcing the law" at an innocent citizen's expense.
I don't doubt it takes exceptional skill to take out an active shooter in a school (or any building), especially when there are numerous unknowns. At the same time, I expect police officers to "serve and protect", which is not what they do (and I don't think they are legally required to do this anymore). If there is a gap in their training to protect citizens from violent criminals, that should be fixed. It won't, because cops tend to spend considerable time (and are proficient) in 1) writing traffic tickets 2) using civil asset forfeiture to enrich their department. I know this sounds very critical of police officers in general and not every officer fits this description.
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Bro, they weren’t women…
Member
I have been in law enforcement for a little under two years (I made the transition during our discussions here, in fact). Before I went to the academy I had to respond to and clear a house for a threat of an individual with a rifle and conducted a high speed pursuit with felony stop. Since the academy, I have had to draw my service weapon four times for manifesting threats. Two of those times it was a very near thing. One time I took slack taken entirely out of the trigger and was holding the wall. One of those was someone drawing a knife on me from about 15 feet away, and the other was a person who refused to show me their hands after having received reports that they were waving a gun around and assaulting people. I've cleared structures several times due to unsecure doors, alarm calls, etc., but none of those have had threats present.
The stress and fear inoculation I received during training and deployments helped me tremendously because you still have a physiological response, but you're used to it. Actually, in the case of the knife, my adrenaline didn't fully hit until afterwards when I was trying to search the individual. Makes it hard to manipulate small items. I almost dropped the baggie of meth more than once. Had I not drawn quickly along with the other officer on scene, they likely would have charged one of us. Once they looked down two barrels they changed their mind, and I'm thankful they did.
The second case the individual had both of their hands shoved into hoodie pockets. They were extremely belligerent and kept yelling at me to shoot them while advancing on me before quickly whipping their hands out. It literally came down to a split second decision when I noticed they were flipping me the double bird in a very similar hand and arm position to drawing a handgun. Had I not been trained for threat stimulus shooting and had enough practical application time on that and training combat shooting I likely would not have had both the confidence and experience necessary to hold the shot, nor would I have had enough cognitive capacity left to process that series of events. Had I shot him the investigation would have ruled it a righteous shooting given the foreknowledge I had from dispatch and their behavior and furtive motions.
There's a Venn diagram of things I consider horrible and things I am capable of doing, and there's quite a bit of overlap in the center. If necessary, I'll do those things. I sincerely hope that I never have to take life for the rest of my career, but I have 26 more to go.
I would consider an active shooter at a school the worst case scenario to respond to. I've always had a soft spot for animals and kids, so I have made the decision and discussed it with my wife. If I do respond to that, off duty or not, I will go in alone. She understands that it's a personal decision, and she knows I couldn't live with myself otherwise. It's not the most tactically sound decision, and solo clearing is very, very slow. I accept the lower chances of success and survival, though. I do not expect everyone, LEO or civilian, to do the same.
As a final caveat, I don't want someone to interpret my ramblings as arrogance or that I think I'm a badass. I absolutely do not, and I constantly try to remain hypervigilant of my mistakes and weaknesses. It is still terrifying every time it happens, and anyone who says otherwise suffers from "tombstone courage." I was humbled enough from mistakes and hard lessons in the past that I don't forget it anymore, but I'm still nowhere close to perfect. I also pray that I don't fail utterly if the day comes -- because the odds of failure are always high.
I've said it before, but please... take these problems seriously enough and remain humble enough to put in the work to adequately address them.
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Lessons learned, and not just for LEOs:
The Ten Fatal Errors That Have Killed Experienced Lawmen • Spotter Up
Member
People are woefully uninformed on the profession, law and the policy of their agencies where they live. Even with my military experience and the fact that I had a lot of veteran and civilian LEO friends, I was also extremely uninformed before I went into the career. There is a certain amount of tragedy in the police-public interaction because of that gap. The two problems you mentioned are overwhelmingly driven by department policy and political/budgetary pressure from the local, county, state or federal government.
So, again. I'm not defending others, but allow me to offer some suggestions.
1. If you want to get a taste of critical scenario, try to find a department, academy or training facility who has a VirTra training setup and ask them if they will run you through it.
2. If you want to understand a little of what a typical LEOs day is like, request a ride along. See for yourself and inform your opinions further. Ask them questions, and if they are allowed to answer you may be surprised at the nuances of the answer. I did many ride-alongs leading up to my decision to switch careers.
3. Request a copy of your locals LEA's policy, and read it cover to cover. Ask about what you're interested in (ticket quotas, asset forfeiture, etc.).
4. Use resources like US Law, Case Law, Codes, Statutes & Regulations :: Justia Law to review state law. Find or ask for a copy of local ordinances. Review what your states criminal procedure entails, and brush up on constitutional law.
TMPHBITEU
As the Democrat Party and their media rev up the hysteria in the coming months approaching the 2022 elections, here is something that will be omitted from their coverage, a paper from 2020 by John Lott:
Comparing the Global Rate of Mass Public Shootings to the U.S.’s Rate and Comparing Their Changes Over Time by John R. Lott :: SSRN
We are going to be inundated by the propaganda, despite the obvious logic associated with being able to protect yourself by being armed. The Left doesn't want you armed, for obvious reasons.Comparing the Global Rate of Mass Public Shootings to the U.S.’s Rate and Comparing Their Changes Over Time
Abstract
The U.S. is well below the world average in terms of the number of mass public shootings, and the global increase over time has been much bigger than for the United States.
Over the 20 years from 1998 to 2017, our list contains 2,772 attacks and at least 5,764 shooters outside the United States and 62 attacks and 66 shooters within our country. By our count, the US makes up less than 1.13% of the mass public shooters, 1.77% of their murders, and 2.19% of their attacks. All these are much less than the US’s 4.6% share of the world population. Attacks in the US are not only less frequent than other countries, they are also much less deadly on average. Out of the 101 countries where we have identified mass public shootings occurring, the United States ranks 66th in the per capita frequency of these attacks and 56th in the murder rate.
Not only have these attacks been much more common outside the US, the US’s share of these attacks has declined over time. There has been a much bigger increase over time in the number of mass shootings in the rest of the world compared to the US.
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This week a West Virginia woman legally carrying a handgun stopped a mass shooter with an AR-15 dead in his tracks | Not the Bee
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School Shootings: Here's Why Guns Aren't the Root Cause
I'll tell you why school shootings have increased. It happened after control of discipline in the classroom was removed from the authority of the teacher. We brought guns to school, and most every truck in the parking lot had an occupied rifle rack. But inside the school building we had a different attitude. I've heard from teachers I know that it is common for students to tell the teacher to "go get fucked" or some other rebellious-youth shit. We couldn't have even framed the concept, because had I said such a thing to Mrs. Huffines she would have said, "Excuse me," and gone down to the gym to get Coach Page and his Paddle, and he would have removed me from the room, leaned me up against the wall, and beaten my ass to jelly, while everyone else in the building listened.
This fundamental change in mindset is the direct result of "modern" educational theory. Think about it.
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Active Shooter Facts
Pay close attention to the statistics for the time an active shooting incident lasts. Less than 5 minutes is stellar police response. Less than 2 minutes is a miracle of circumstance.
Active shooter =\= Mass public shooting.
TMPHBITEU
Here's how he opens the piece:
This is not true. School Shootings: Horrific but Statistically Rare | City JournalActive shooter and mass shooting incidents have become more common in the United States in recent years, with some perpetrators openly expressing their intent to inflict large numbers of casualties.
The only people who benefit from this hysteria are politicians and their parasites.Politicians and journalists cannot resist exploiting the deaths of schoolchildren, but the ghoulish wall-to-wall coverage serves no purpose except to terrify adults and kids. Contrary to what you’ve heard from Biden and the media, school massacres like the one in Uvalde are exceptionally rare events. They actually occurred more often in the 1990s than recently—but back then, there wasn’t an army of satellite trucks competing around the clock to chronicle the horror.
“There is not an epidemic of mass shootings,” says James Alan Fox, a criminologist at Northeastern University who has been tracking these events for decades and helps keep the AP/USA Today/Northeastern Mass Killing database. “What’s increasing and is out of control is the epidemic of fear.”
As Fox notes, the annual odds that an American child will die in a mass shooting at school are nearly 10 million to 1, about the odds of being killed by lightning or of dying in an earthquake. Those are also about the same odds that any American will die in a mass public shooting like the recent one in Buffalo. Such numbers, of course, are no consolation to the grieving parents and families in Uvalde and Buffalo, but neither is the frenzy to manipulate these tragedies for ratings and political gain.
...
“Why are we willing to live with this carnage?” Biden asked in his speech after the Uvalde killings, portraying them as the continuation of a decade of ceaseless slaughter by citing the “900 incidents of gunfire” on school grounds since 2012. But few students died in these incidents, which typically occurred outside the school building and often involved non-students going there after school hours. When Fox totals the number of students killed by any sort of gunfire at school in the past decade, including the victims in Uvalde, it works out to 10 deaths per year—among more than 50 million students. “Hundreds of children die every year in drowning accidents,” he says. “We need lifeguards at pools more than armed guards at schools.”
Journalists are similarly deceptive when they call Uvalde the 27th “school shooting” of this year, or classify the spree in Buffalo as one of the hundreds of “mass shootings” in America annually. But these “mass shootings” typically don’t result in more than one death, if that, and the ones with multiple fatalities typically involve family disputes at home, gang conflict, or other criminal activity like drug dealing or robbery. They’re not random attacks like that in Buffalo, which meets Fox’s criteria for a “mass public shooting”: one in a public place with at least four fatalities and not related to domestic violence, gang conflict, or other crimes. On average, a half dozen of these occur annually. Mass public shootings at schools are much rarer: a total of 12 in the past 34 years.
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