It’s now becoming clear that just about all of the injured in today’s mass shooting outside the Empire State Building were injured by the police response rather than by the shooter himself. This begs some questions:
- How do you expect to have police that know how to shoot when you’ve done everything possible to extinguish any kind of responsible shooting culture in your city?
- How many police officers do you think learn to shoot because they interact heavily in the civilian gun culture by taking part in competitions, belonging to shooting clubs, and generally shooting for recreation?
- NRA has an entire division dedicated to law enforcement training. Have you ever considered inviting them to New York?
- Law enforcement is a profession that tends to run in families. Indeed, a good many gun bloggers come from law enforcement families. Part of that is indoctrinating the next generation in the ways of the gun. If there is no civilian gun culture, how are the martial arts of this profession going to be passed down?
- What if there is a Mumbai style attack in New York City? You’re now advertising to the world that your officers can’t shoot. The terrorists are listening.
There will probably be a lot of wailing and gnashing of teeth over this. Some will undoubtedly want to disarm police officers. Cooler heads will call for more training. More training would obviously be a good thing, but the best thing for New York would be a restoration of a responsible civilian gun culture where police officers can find means to hone their skills recreationally, where there’s a body of knowledge and competence from which to draw from, and where there are places to shoot and plenty of people practiced in the art of shooting, from whom much can be learned. In other words, allow New York to be more like the rest of America, and you might find that suddenly your officers can reliably hit a target from yards away without having to expend a magazine and seriously injure innocent bystanders.
UPDATE: I guess we’ll see how some folks in Idaho stack up in the LAPD combat course.
And according to the media, the police involved were an anti-terrorist unit. Definitely, AQ will note that.
VPC is already blaming high capacity magazines for this crime. Given that the shooter appears to have used a 1911 with a 7-round mag, I assume VPC is talking about the police’s G17s?
Also, I did some research and it looks like the NYPD is required to use sidearms with TWELVE pound trigger pulls. How in blazes are they supposed to hit anything with marginal institutional training, no off-duty practice opportunities, and awful equipment?
They carry either the S&W 5946 (DAO version of the 5906), a DAO Sig, or Glock 19. The NY trigger in the Glock is an 8Lb trigger bar. It’s denoted, on the bar, by the + sign. The whole 8lb trigger bar came about in the early 90’s when NYPD cops couldn’t stop shooting themselves in the leg. It turns out, they were drawing with a finger on the trigger as well as holstering with a finger on the trigger. Not too smart. Glock found that the 8lb trigger was just enough to stop the cops who couldn’t be broken of the habit they were taught.
Control at all costs, what MB does not understand, like or agree with must be controlled. And this mindset is what leads to these type of situations.
I mean, hey, nobody can say for sure how well they would have performed if they were one of the responding officers….but gosh darn that is allot of “collateral damage”. Just not acceptable.
Hell, even new IPDA shooter can shoot a whole match without a hit on a non-threat. It’s time for the NYPD to disarm or go back to the range for more training.
From the original news story:
“‘New York City, as you know, is the safest big city in the country, and we are on pace to have a record low number of murders this year,’ Mayor Michael Bloomberg said.”
Yeah, cuz when the cops kill people it isn’t murder, at least not officially.
“A witness had told police that Johnson fired at the officers, but authorities say ballistics evidence doesn’t support that. Johnson’s weapon held seven rounds, they said. He fired five times at Ercolino, one round was still in the gun and one was ejected when officers secured it, authorities said.
Another loaded magazine was found in Johnson’s briefcase.”
So, when he pointed his gun at the cops he never fired, so that means the cops shot the wounded innocent victims, there were five women and four men who were shot by the cop’s spray of 16 bullets.
Perhaps we should start asking if COPS should have guns in NYC. Since nobody else is allowed them they shouldn’t need them either, right?
Here’s the shooting talley:
Civilian, 5 shots all hitting his intended target and only his target.
2 Cops, 16 shots, at least one hit it’s intended target, the rest hit 9 innocent bystanders.
Cops are more dangerous than the criminals!
My only quibble with the media’s count here is that it doesn’t seem to account for the possibility that he had one in the chamber when he started (likely because the media doesn’t know enough about guns to consider it). So, it’s still possible that he did fire one round at the cops and that the brass just hasn’t been found yet.
It also wouldn’t surprise me if the police aren’t considering the possibility, and for the same reasons.
the avg cop only practices about once a year with less than 100 rounds of ammo. So these guys have 11 months and 84 rounds left to improve. check out this article from the NY Times regarding hit/miss ratios for NYPD. Says that in 2005 they had a hit rate of only 17.4%!!! True to your point the slightly more pro gun area of LAPD had a hit rate of 40%.
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/12/09/weekinreview/09baker.html?pagewanted=all
In about 10 days we will have data from Lewiston Pistol Club in Idaho on how well ordinary gun owners do when attempting the LAPD Combat Course.
My expectation is that nearly everyone will pass and that most will pass with very high scores.
You know, with this fact coming to light, the media has quickly dropped the story down the priority list, probably because they know they HAVE to mention the fact that the bad guy might not have gotten a shot off after the cops showed up. If this is the case, it of course means that ALL innocents were hit by police, but since police should be the only ones trusted with “high capacity assault clips,” it has to be a low priority story in order to keep the facade up.
http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-201_162-57500279/civilians-hurt-in-nyc-gunfire-highlight-dangers/
Lots of detail in this article.
Do you really think if any sort of non-police gun culture were allowed in NYC Bloomberg, the NYT and the usual herd of far-lefties would not seek to regulate, control and limit it into a Great Britain-style farce?
Simple solution: stay out of NYC where government is a bigger enemy of the people than elsewhere.
So many said about the Auroro Co shooting that if a CCW had been there then many more would have been shot. Yet here we have the police responsible for 9 injured and they were the only ones shooting.
I did see the video and there was a concrete container that could have spalded off chips and that injured bystanders.
NYC already has a civilian gun culture. Ex. Colonial Rifle & Pistol Club, Bay Ridge Rod & Gun Club, Metropolitan Rod & Gun Club, Chinatown Pistol Club.
Some of the european countries are having a lot of trouble for similar reasons. I know the UK is having to do a lot more work to train competent riflemen for their Army.
A surprising number of gun bloggers have been LEO’s at some time or another. As have a startling percentage of NRA members. So yes, the shooting community has a lot of law enforcement experience. And that is something the gun control crowd and the political appointees who support them lack.
Turning to the NYPD, that bunch of poorly led and utterly hapless crowd I generally refer to as “The Gang That Cannot Shoot Straight,” has 34,817 LEOs and 15,251 civilian employees. The sheer volume of spent brass Bloomberg is selling says that they have the opportunity to become at least moderately proficient. The fact that they can shoot at a single man and hit nine bystanders says they have not reached even a “first time at the range” level of proficiency. Meaning they are more dangerous to themselves than to any criminals they might stumble across.
Gotham needs a professional LEO at the top, and a supportive mayor. For his taxpayers protection as well as his city.
Stranger
This incident certainly disproves the common anti-gun claim that only police have adequate training to use firearms for self-defense!
They won’t see it that way. Police are alway better than gunnies because they are trained by the government. And whatever the government does is automatically better than what can be done on the open market. So if the police are this bad, imagine how many people would have been shot if that were “untrained” CCW types shooting.
I once worked with a guy from Brooklyn. He came of age in NYC when the city was a crime infested dump. He grew up around guns and became an enthusiast. One day we were discussing gun control in NYC and he told he how difficult it was to own a gun legally. He also stated everyone he knew still in Brooklyn had a gun, none of them legal.
I would be very curious to know how many New Yorkers scoff at the gun laws and still keep firearms in NYC despite the efforts of the despot Bloomberg.
Regarding the shooting abilities of police officers…I took a course to obtain an armed guard permit in Arizona. The instructor was a retired Phoenix PD officer (20 years on the job, 8 in SWAT). He stated my shooting skills were excellent for a beginner and that I was a better shot than most cops he knew. He emphasized that he was not joking. Makes you wonder how many times cops drop someone simply because they can’t shoot well and then cover it up.
Even if there are many scofflaw gun owners in NYC, the problem is that they aren’t likely to get much practice. It’s one thing to keep an illegal gun hidden in your home; it’s another to regularly take it to a range or other location where you can safely shoot it to maintain proficiency. The result of Bloomberg’s restrictive gun laws in this case is that the people who will own a gun regardless of the laws are now more of a danger to others because practice is risky.
“What if there is a Mumbai style attack in New York City? You’re now advertising to the world that your officers can’t shoot. The terrorists are listening.”
Yes, indeed, the terrorist are listening. At least I have a great deal of faith that New York cops will at least engage terrorists who attempt a Mumbai-style attack, unlike the Mumbai police who cowered in fear and were berated by bystanders to “do something”.
I am thankful that terrorists have been unable or unwilling to attempt such an attack: it would have a Hell of a psychological impact, and it would be exploited to increase gun control for all such an incident would be worth, even if the guns were smuggled into the U.S.