03/23/2014

Back in 1997 two men robbed a bank in California. The incident is best known as "The North Hollywood Shootout" after almost 300 officers responded. The shooting lasted almost half an hour, with the robbers firing around 1,100 rounds and police firing about 650.

The police were mainly using .38, 9mm, and .223. The robbers were wearing mil-spec bulletproof vests. There's video on YouTube of them walking around with bullets hitting them.

The officers had all been trained to shoot "center of mass", which actually means "center of torso", true center of mass being somewhere at or south of the belly button. For half an hour they continued to shoot where they had been trained, other than one cop who fired underneath a car and hit one robber in a leg. The robbers weren't dodging or doing much hiding; for the most part, they were the next thing to stationary targets.

The media took off on the "body armor" rant and the police used the incident to leverage the budget more powerful firearms. The gun press went along, and the few faint voices saying, "WTF?" were mostly ignored.

One definition of insanity is repeating the same mistakes while expecting different results. Watching the robbers absorb fire and failing to go down, the officers kept shooting them in the same place, over and over and over.

The police were doing as they were trained; that's what training is FOR. Center-of-torso is a high-value target and easy to sight in on and hit; that's why they were taught that way. But in that specific case, it failed to work, over and over again.

The late Jeff Cooper advocated the "Mozambique Double-Tap"; two in the chest, one in the head. When I first read about that years ago I dismissed it as overkill. And in most cases I still think that's true, and a bad idea for most CCW scenarios. But if you have to pull your gun, and you shoot someone with it, and you shoot them again, and they still don't go down... put the third shot somewhere ELSE. Shoot them in the face, or in the crotch, because if the first two bullets in the chest failed, the outlook for #3 isn't all that bright.

I'm not advocating 2+1 as a default response; unlike the military shooters that came up with it, as a CCW we have to consider what it would look like to an unfriendly jury. But if your first two shots didn't do the job, "Plan B" might need to be something different than doing what didn't work before.