Not Hearing the Law to Drop It

Decided to weigh in on this thread because I have something to offer from experience. In Nam as a combat photographer I mostly shot a camera. Only when things got bad did the “Every Marine is a rifleman” kick in. My experience was that when you are under fire and returning fire, especially at close quarters, you absolutely lose awareness of all except the aggressor(s) you are engaged with. It is due to a combination of training and instinct. I can assure you that I such a situation you are driven be self-preservation. So, you are totally focused on staying alive. That means you are totally focused in the enemy. Even when the shooting stops you stay so focused for a short time because you want to be sure it over before you let down. While in that hyper state you might not even hear the mane next to calling your name. Your awareness is directed at the possible continuing threat. So, I can understand not obeying a command to drop a weapon while under fire or moments thereafter. This time it sucks.

Thanks for sharing from personal experience. Good training will incorporate a search and breathe scan after engaging a target to get oxygen back to the brain and reacquire situational awareness.
 
This is an interesting but tragic incident:

https://www.foxnews.com/us/off-duty...-shot-police-new-york-after-refusing-drop-gun




Given the vagaries of selective attention - I wonder if the officer even heard, in the perceptual sense, the commands to drop the gun. So threat focused, nothing else mattered. We know that perception is altered by stress. I know at a very professional FOF event, one participant was so threat focused after a run, that he had to almost be forcibly disarmed as he was acting as if he was in a real incident. Things like that happen.

In the back pack rifle thread, it made me think, that someone assembling his or her gun would or might ignore arriving law or other defenders commands to cease - leading to something like the incident described. I could see other defenders telling the backpacker to STOP!


Maybe he couldn't hear the commands after the gunfire exchange. Mine have been critically ringing after one round of +p without earpro. He could have also had tunnel vision and adrenaline dump happening...sad story for all involved.

I'm picturing that scene from robocop with all the entry and exit wounds mentioned. Glad he is stable medically.
 
I was replying to; It’s not right. I’m waiting for you to tell us all how it can be any other way. There is no good way to tell who is who in most situations. Exactly what would you do to make that interaction safer?

There is always a danger of fratricide when two armed people on the same side first interact under stressful conditions. In the Army we used far and near recognition signals before we ever got to the password/countersign.

People get threat focused. Uniformed officers have been shot by other responding officers. Until someone comes up with a fail safe IFF system it will be the way it is.



Well if it makes you feel any better theres also the chance of a CCW'er getting shot by another CCW'er. I didn't mean to lay it ALL on LE.

However I've seen far too many videos of LE showing up to a scene and the cops are beyond trigger happy. I'm sure a CCW'er could be the same coming into a situation where they don't know whats going on.

But LE are supposed to be, or should be held to a higher standard than civi's.
 
Well if it makes you feel any better theres also the chance of a CCW'er getting shot by another CCW'er. I didn't mean to lay it ALL on LE.

However I've seen far too many videos of LE showing up to a scene and the cops are beyond trigger happy. I'm sure a CCW'er could be the same coming into a situation where they don't know whats going on.

But LE are supposed to be, or should be held to a higher standard than civi's.

How many situations like that have you responded to? Did you serve in combat arms in the military?

It’s really easy to sit behind the safety of your monitor and look at video and make judgement calls. Everyone does it. Professionals analyze video all the time in order to improve performance and training. But it’s really hard to make meaningful judgements without a background in what you’re watching. The sad fact is that there is currently no fail safe way to tell who is who upon arriving on the scene.

To my knowledge it’s never happened but I can envision a really bad situation where armed citizens and police both respond to a mass shooting and there is a friendly fire incident. Doesn’t matter if it’s police on armed citizen, armed citizen on armed citizen or armed citizen on police.

Responding officers are fed information by dispatch as dispatch gets it. Often that information which is coming from citizens calling 911 is completely wrong. Dispatch has no way of knowing so they broadcast it all.

It’s also not an exercise for the responding officers. The bullets are real. That generates an amount of stress that is hard to replicate in training. There are a lot of things that aren’t shown in the video that need to be taken into consideration before you judge anyone’s performance in a video.
 
As an aside, after my last employer read a study about OIS and where the officers wore their badges, our plainclothes and off-duty officers were mandated to wear badges on chains hanging around necks rather than badges clipped on belts. It seems that the majority of LEOs shot by friendly fire were wearing belt-clipped badges rather than from neck-chains. A badge on the belt being much harder to see from even close distance...<snip>

We were originally instructed that in plainclothes we had to have our star show before our weapon-so if you carried at 3 o'clock, your star should be on the right side of your belt buckle, if you carried in a should holster it was to the left of your belt buckle (both assuming right handed shooters.)

We eventually were told to go to the neck chains, but the rationale was slightly different; the theory was that when another LEO aimed center-of-mass at you, they'd be staring right at your badge and thus not shoot you to ribbons.

These remained blissfully hypothetic for me, as I was seldom seconded to assist in plainclothes, and didn't have a situation where another officer consider shooting me.

Larry
 
The "defensive experts" who say you always have time to properly reholster in a safe and purposeful manner are completely wrong. You may need to just shove it into your jacket pocket,

Meh. In that situation, is there any benefit to reholstering over simply laying the gun on the ground at your feet? Police are going to confiscate it anyway.

a scenario where a full DA trigger would be miles ahead of a "great" striker trigger for avoiding AD/ND issues and immediate incoming return fire.

One of many scenarios where the DA/SA is miles ahead of a striker fired gun.
 
10 bullet wounds and he's in stable condition. Buy a lottery ticket. And maybe don't go out drinking at 3 am with your girlfriend.

Yeah. My first thought was: Shot ten times and survived? What did they shoot with him, an airsoft gun?
 
Meh. In that situation, is there any benefit to reholstering over simply laying the gun on the ground at your feet? Police are going to confiscate it anyway.

My thoughts are:

1. Yes- They will take custody of the weapon, but that timing is unknown.

2. I am not disarming myself by laying my weapon on the ground ahead of LE arrival. You never know how a situation will develop or if additional actors are at play.

3. Obviously, you do not want to have weapon in hand when LE arrives, if at all possible.

4. Hasty concealment on your part allows you to remain armed, but not an immediately viable threat upon LE arrival.
 
Meh. In that situation, is there any benefit to reholstering over simply laying the gun on the ground at your feet? Police are going to confiscate it anyway.

1) As defenders, we reholster after every defensive drill, live or dry fire. We get good at it. Reholstering safely should be virtually automatic.

I suppose you could train to end defensive drills by dropping your gun or placing it on the ground, but I don't know anyone who does this.

2) At home or out in public, the safest place for a loaded, ready-to-use handgun is holstered, on our person.

3) The easiest way for a defender to avoid being seen as a deadly threat by members of the public or initial responders is to lawfully conceal our defensive tools.

These principles apply all the time, including after a defensive shooting.
 
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In a FOF, I was 'shot' by an officer when just standing there in the fog of the fight - because I moved. I had my hands up. That was just an exercise.

In another exercise, a 'terrorist' attack on a court room, with very well trained civilians, military and LEOs, the stop single was sounded. One participant still shot another with sims. That caused another participant to curse the 'shooter' in vile terms and almost came to blows till the referees intervened. Shooter said, the signal didn't register. Lots of AAR action on why and the reaction of the cursing participant. This was a very competent group.

I had a sims gun which I took from a 'terrorist' - and 'shot' said terrorist. A good guy law team entered the fray and I put the gun down, raised my hands and yelled "Good guy" repeatedly. Some discussion of my taking the gun and immediately shooting unarmed terrorist. The 'terrorist' was about to engage me to get their gun back, so a retention shot. The state trooper who was my referee said the shot worked for him as it part of the fray.

Reholstering might always work in exercises but I'm not trusting it in the 'real world'. You don't want anything in your hands, IMHO. Drop it. Tom Givens demonstrated how someone 'putting' the gun down, even without a classic grip can quickly shoot you. In a class, Mas showed us a video of a guy, IIRC, with a shotgun, not facing you. He was told to drop it. He slowly turned towards you and said he would put it down. He started to turn. Asked us what to do. I said - Shoot him - and that was correct as the gun could have been shot before you could react. That's why you need to comply instantly if faced with the law.

So there are several problems, the warning not being heard and an response that can been as not complying and an active threat.
 
Reholstering might always work in exercises but I'm not trusting it in the 'real world'.

The exercises you appear to base this conclusion on all appear to have involved other armed defenders who were already on scene and who had to quickly distinguish between other defenders and threats.

They made for fun with sims for sure. But they focused on the blue-on-blue threats members of responding cavalry face.

But for non-sworn defenders, or those who are sworn but not on-duty, these scenarios are pretty much fantasy. They have little to do with the more common, quick in-and-out, give me your car-money-wallet-phone-keys, one-on-one threats most defenders more commonly face.

As this recent discussion concluded (https://www.thehighroad.org/index.php?threads/youre-on-your-own.914198/), in a garden-variety attack, most defenders are actually on their own. In general, nobody is coming to save you.

In the 'real world' the quickest cavalry response time might be, what, three minutes? This generally gives average defenders plenty of time to check the scene, look for other threats, look for friendlies, move to cover, check the status of your tool, reholster, restore a concealment garment, and communicate long before help arrives and the blue-on-blue threat begins.

Yea, if you see a friendly in your scans, plan to drop your tool. But for most, that will be exceedingly rare.
 
Sure, but my point was that when challenged, drop it and don't futz around. Holstering if there seems not to be the risk of immediate, friendly fire from a challenge works for me. I've heard folks say that my gun is an expensive super duper XYZ, so I will tell the officer I will slowly put it down. Of course, the officer should appreciate that OR Bang, bang. He will only hear his or her screaming commands and looking for visual conformation.
 
I've heard folks say that my gun is an expensive super duper XYZ, so I will tell the officer I will slowly put it down.

If that's the case, they shouldn't be carrying it. When I wanted a bear gun, I saw it as an excuse to buy a Colt Anaconda. Then I thought, what if I drop it in the woods? I bought a Ruger.


He will only hear his or her screaming commands and looking for visual conformation.

Yeah. We talk about "auditory exclusion." You don't think an officer has auditory exclusion from stress while pointing a gun at a stranger who has a gun? On a mass shooter call?
 
You know having read this a few times since the tread was started it occurs to me, so far as defensive civilian incidents are concerned, common sense tells you put away your weapon immediately after you conclude the treat is over.

Now I do understand in high stress adrenaline dumps this “common sense” is much more easily said than practiced. Staying calm is more important than we will probably ever know, and probably harder than one would think.
 
Yeah. We talk about "auditory exclusion." You don't think an officer has auditory exclusion from stress while pointing a gun at a stranger who has a gun? On a mass shooter call?

They even have forms of visual exclusion - there are several:

Change blindness : when a person viewing a visual scene apparently fails to detect large changes in the scene. For change blindness to occur, the change coincides with some visual disruption such as a saccade (eye movement) or a brief obscuration of the observed scene or image.





Inattentional blindness, or perceptual blindness, is the phenomenon of not being able to see things that are actually there. This can be a result of having no internal frame of reference to perceive the unseen objects, or it can be the result of the mental focus or attention which cause mental distractions.

Repetition Blindness Subjects are less likely to detect the repetition of a target stimulus than they are to detect a second, different target.

Attentional blink (AB) When presented with a sequence of visual stimuli in rapid succession at the same spatial location on a screen, a participant will often fail to detect a second salient target occurring in succession if it is presented between 200-500ms after the first one.

Inhibition of Return:

If attention focuses on an object and then moves to another object, it is difficult to return attention to that object for several seconds.
So do you miss the backup guy? Miss seeing a gun if your attention is diverted.

----------- In a recent incident, a cop was yelling at a guy to drop the knife when the knife was clearly driopped. The guy had been shot several times and the last shot was controversial as the bad guy was probably out of the fight by objective evaluation.

Front sight focus - excludes everything else?
 
The results.

You are making unwarranted assumptions about the speed with which such encounters unfold. Before continuing to display such a degree of ignorance, inexperience, and naivete on the subject of shoot/no-shoot decision-making, you would be well served to engage in, or at least observe, some relevant FoF exercises involving several variations of a similar scenario. See how they turn out.
 
You are making unwarranted assumptions about the speed with which such encounters unfold. Before continuing to display such a degree of ignorance, inexperience, and naivete on the subject of shoot/no-shoot decision-making, you would be well served to engage in, or at least observe, some relevant FoF exercises involving several variations of a similar scenario. See how they turn out.
OK
 
You are making unwarranted assumptions about the speed with which such encounters unfold. Before continuing to display such a degree of ignorance, inexperience, and naivete on the subject of shoot/no-shoot decision-making, you would be well served to engage in, or at least observe, some relevant FoF exercises involving several variations of a similar scenario. See how they turn out.
Please note "sounds like" is not an accusation. This wording leaves room for doubt.
 
That's why I can't wrap my head around limiting myself to a five round gun.
It depends what you do in your day. I often have to climb & crawl in very dirty environments. As much as i would like more firepower, a j frame is about the most I can manage @ work. Ive carried other guns, but makes my job much more difficult. Magazines get full of grit, ditto for gun. You end up w a very poor functioning weapon pretty quickly. A revolver will also need cleaned, but much less maintainence. Try & replace air lines on a tandem axle trailer in a limestone parking lot & you will see what i mean. If you have to replace a blade cylender in a garbage truck, i promise you will not want to pack @ all. Is also embarrassing when the customer inevitability sees your carry.
 
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