According to an article about the Ferguson shooting

[jrdolall]

the suspect fired three rounds from a 40 caliber Hi Point at 125 yards and recorded two hits. Does this prove that a blind pig can find an acorn on occasion? I know I can't hit 2 out of 3 at 125 yards with a pistol (because I don't practice at that distance) while standing still and this guy was supposedly in a car when he fired the shots.
Another felon out on probation that somehow managed to procure a firearm even though that is against the law. Isn't it?

 

[barnbwt]

Well apparently you can catch a 40 in the face at that distance and not only will it not exit, you can go home in the morning. I was really surprised to hear it wasn't a 22LR the way the injuries were described.

TCB

 

[Snyper]

Does this prove that a blind pig can find an acorn on occasion?

There's no way he actually aimed at, and hit a specific target

He fired in the general direction of a good sized crowd and managed to hit a couple of people

 

[MErl]

was it the pistol or carbine?

 

[WestKentucky]

Hi points are suprisingly accurate. The fact that it happened like it did was absolutely luck, but I have no doubt that a skilled shooter could land 2/3 on a human sized target consistently. I have done it with a 357, 45acp, 9mm...not hi point but again they are accurate beyond what the pricetag indicates. 40sw is no different than the ones I have scored hit after hit with.

 

[RustyShackelford]

Comments...

I'm not going to comment on the remarks & tone of the topic but I would add that about 3/4 months ago, a Austin Texas police Sgt fired a round that hit a violent subject approx 104 yards away, .
It was a long shot but it ended the critical incident quickly. The APD officer was using a .40S&W M&P pistol.
If I find more details I will post it but the police officer showed how proper training & a cool head can help resolve a bad situation.

 

[LemmyCaution]

It's also pretty clearly acknowledged by all responsible and interested parties (including the Ferguson PD) that the two police officers were not the intended targets.

Sort of like getting two shots in the X ring on someone else's target.

 

[HorseSoldier]

Area target. Line of police officers doing crowd control isn't too much different than a line of red coats or civil war soldiers. His story he was trying to kill other protestors (black lives matter except to the black guys who kill black people ), but if it were deliberate I'd be willing to bet most shooters could manage some sorts of hits on an area target at 125 meters with a pistol even if hitting a standard IPSC target or similar at that range would be very good (or very lucky) shooting.

 

[MICHAEL T]

May be if we made it legal for felon's to buy guns. They would loose interest . What fun for a criminal to get something legal .

Remember till 1930's every one in America could buy guns legal. Dems put stop to that.

 

[FROGO207]

I have a Hi Point 40 pistol that I routinely score hits with at the 100 YD rifle line at the local club. The target size is a poster size (14X20) cardboard poster blank with a bullseye drawn on it. I also do it with a Ruger Super Blackhawk 7", a Taurus 357 7", and a S&W model 645 45 ACP. If you practice hits like that are not out of the ordinary. But for spray and pray that was some luck there.

 

[Swing]

was it the pistol or carbine?

Pistol. A Hi-Point in .40S&W to be exact.

 

[Arizona_Mike]

I heard on the TV news that there was a line of about 25 officers standing shoulder to shoulder. Not too surprising that two out of three shots found targets even arty that range.

 

[Cee Zee]

Why do people always think shooting is so hard. Hi-Point pistols shoot accurate. They just weigh 4 times as much as they should. A fairly fast moving round like a .40 S&W should stay pretty true for 125 yards. I can shoot my .44 mag 175 yards accurately all day. Well until I wear my hand out anyway. I used to shoot leaves floating down a river from 50 yards away with my Sig P220 (.45 ACP). If you practice enough it seems easy after a while.

Shooting is not as hard as some make it out to be. Heck I've had guys at the gun club laugh because I moved a 8" steel target out to 25 yards from 7 yards. They didn't laugh after I started dinging that steel every shot. In fact I had about 20 people standing around watching after about 5 minutes. I couldn't believe it. They did get the range master to come and challenge me. He did the same thing I did. I didn't think it was a big deal at all. But the guy who laughed - he said "gunfights take place at 7 yards anyway". Yeah so what? He was just jealous but I don't know why. I taught my wife to shoot a Buck Mark that accurate in about 10 minutes. I could have taught him to do it too.

A 125 yard shot with any pistol is pretty good but it's not crazy good. Bob Munden will show you what crazy good is with a hand gun. There's video of him shooting 200 yards with a snub nose revolver on Youtube. And he hits a small, steel target. A Hi-Point will do 125 easy enough for some people. Really it's just a matter of believing you can do it and then doing it. Yeah you have to learn the basics. It took me 10 minutes to teach them to my wife. It took another 5 to get her to put them into her shooting. Of course she hadn't learned a bunch of bad habits to correct which made it easier IMO.

Shooting pretty well is not that hard. Pretty much everyone can do it.

 

[jim in Anchorage]

Before this gets closed I found it amusing the perp was foolish enough to keep the gun that was linked to shell cases left on the scene.

To quote Clamenza after a murder on the Godfather-Leave the gun. Take the Cannoli.

 

[RustyShackelford]

Felons....

Many felons aren't MENSA members or NASA engineers, .
I remember a media story in the late 1990s of a inept crew of jewelry store robbers who tried to fence all the stolen loot in the same neighborhood.

In the 2000s, there were several jail-prison breaks where all the convicts stayed together even 100s of miles away, .

To learn the pistol was a .40S&W Hi-Point is somewhat of surprise.
I know some SWAT and corrections units have ballistic face-shields. Those might prevent gun-shots/shrapnel in some incidents or civil disorders but they may be too scary for the spineless politicos or city council members.

 

[silicosys4]

Seems odd to me that a guy would decide to fire on a crowd in front of......

A police station.

with what, 25 officers witnessing and ready to give chase?
Just seems a little hinky to me.
If the story is legit, thats one dumb dude who made two incredibly unlucky shots

I doubt I could hit two man size targets at 125 yards from a moving vehicle in the dark (presumably) without optics or night sights. To do it by accident...Either it was a target rich environment or God wanted that guy to go to jail.

 

[RustyShackelford]

Wild shots, freak incidents ....

The forum just had a topic posted a few weeks ago about wild shots & wierd incidents that involved firearms.
They are rare, but they can occur, .

Id add that in the mid 1990s, a ticked off gang member chased a unarmed rival into a squad room of group of police detectives. The cops had a wild shoot out with the violent thug. This was in Washington DC(DC Metro Police Dept). If I recall the gang member was killed in the melee.
A varitaion of the shooting incident was in the NBC TV crime drama; Homicide.
More recently a Detroit MI police station had a shooter walk into the main lobby and start blasting away.

Rusty

 

[MedWheeler]

Silicosys4, you'd be surprised. A few years back, here in my city, a youth who was apparently mentally lacking entered a building armed with a pellet gun (I think it was an AirSoft pistol) and attempted to rob the people working inside.

The building was a police precinct station.

But, yeah, the end result of the Ferguson shooter's actions has been discussed and explained.

 

[Tirod]

Look at the math of shooting at 100m with a pistol.

A 2MOA weapon - which isn't something a maker would be very proud to advertise these days - will have a 2" group at 100m. A human target is about 18" roughly rectangular for a center of mass hit. Same with a whitetail deer. That means it's an 18MOA target.

Now, how good a shot are you? Can you hit a 18MOA target with a 2MOA weapon? Take your pistol and tack up a FBI target on the 100m line and give it a try. You will find it's not that hard, it's a big target and about the same size as a smaller one closer in.

In fact, that is exactly the reason the black zone is often reduced to smaller sizes for close range targets. It simulates the larger actual hit zone further out.

Nobody shoots that far because "it can't be done." Really? There are plenty of videos on the net showing skilled handgun shooters hitting targets out to 400m. A lot of handgun shooters are convinced they can't do it and won't even try, but it doesn't mean it can't be done.

Don't confuse a cartridge which will lose effectiveness at longer distances with one that isn't accurate. It's a good thing the officers hit were far enough none of the injuries were life threatening, but it has nothing to do with a pistol not being accurate enough if deliberately aimed.

 

[vamo]

First for everyone talking about how this shot is "not that hard" keep in mind we're not talking about a dedicated hobbyist here. I doubt this man had the skills to even consider pulling off that kind of shot. I certainly couldn't but I'm far from an expert marksman so I'm not going to argue the difficulty of the shot past that you would need a lot of practice to be able to pull it off.

I actually live fairly close to ferguson (within a 20 minute drive) and the thing being reported locally was the suspect is claiming he was trying defend himself against someone else (presumably much closer) and missed. While I'm sure he is motivated for this to be the narative rather than he was deliberately targeting the police, it makes more sense to me than he was able to make those shots with a handgun.

 

[Browning]

Shooting happens @ 52:06. If you go to a minute before that you can see the red car go by that the shooter supposedly used.

http://youtu.be/Jciqyuqkjr0


Screen grab right before the shooting

At any rate the police line is approximately 35 yards long and approximately 6 feet high.

You can't hit a target that size at 125 yards and expect to hit something? It would be like aiming/firing at a target longer than an 18-wheeler although not as high.

 

[hso]

#8 is the answer. This is a case of firing into an area where people are crowded into the "box".

 

[ku4hx]

Long range pistol shooting is not unheard of. Although different in application, the principle is still the same: pistol bullet at long pistol ranges. Of course there were rifle events too.

For years my favorite was the full scale Ram at 200 yards using a .44 Magnum in the Creedmore position as shown here with a different pistol. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VS3IJMwJXec

I actually was fairly good at it before my eyes somehow got older than my body.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metallic_silhouette_shooting

 

[jrdolall]

I certainly am not dogging out the Hi Point since I own 6 of them including two carbines I also am not questioning the capability of a pistol to be accurate at that distance since I have done quite a bit of deer hunting in my life using a scoped 454 that I have $2k in.

What is the ballistic trajectory of a 40 cal bullet fired from a 4-5" barrel? I have no idea and I would guess that the shooter had little knowledge of ballistics but I imagine he would need to hold over quite a bit. Surely he was under a lot of stress firing into a crowd from a car (moving or not) and I am certain he had no definite targets but rather was just firing for effect. If he had fired 15 shots and hit two targets then I wouldn't even comment on it but two out of three? No protesters were hit but two officers just happened to be where the bullets wound up?
Now maybe we will find out that this guy is innocent and they were actually shot by a former Marine sniper trained to use a pistol (and we all know those guys are big Hi Point users). It will be interesting to follow the legal proceedings on this one. I am thankful that the victims are alive and wish them a complete and speedy recovery.

 

[george burns]

Come on it's just dumb luck. Like shooting up in the air, it has to com down someplace.
Analyzing the gun and shooter is just a waste of time here. It's not like he could miss the crowd, just a matter of where he was going to hit.