The worst has happened. You, a CCW permitee who is carrying, are shopping in a store when an emotionally damaged person (EDP) enters with arms and the determination to take many people with him in his grand finale. He fires at you. You return fire.
You have engaged the shooter in a defensive gunfight, and by moving, correctly using cover and sparingly shooting, you have cornered the EDP in an area of the store away from the exits, and shoppers and employees have taken the opportunity to flee. Your role has switched from defensive to "hold your ground" tactics to keep the shooter bottled up so that he can't escape to do more damage outside.
The police finally get there, and entering the active shooter scene, see you first and take you under fire, hitting you. Your days are done. It matters not what happened to the EDP.
Sound extreme for a scenario? It's probably as close as it's going to get to what would actually happen.
What happened here?
The cops, responding to the active shooter scenario, are all business, and their adrenalin levels are ramped up. They see a gun in your hand and they fire. You died because you were concentrating on your armed enemy who was trying to kill you at the time, and you didn't see the officer first.
How did it come to this?
It came to this because of the "ninja" or "Tommy Tactical" mindset that police are trained to these days.
As a cop first on the street in 1973, and retiring just as "Tommy Tactical" was taking hold here five years ago, I was taught that the use of deadly force REQUIRED first the evaluation of the scene THEN steps to make sure that the legitimate felon was the only one to be taken under fire, then finally verbal warnings ("FREEZE") before the trigger was pulled. The tactical situation depicted above was possible then, but had rarely occurred. SWAT call-outs in my entire city of 400,000 probably averaged 8 per year. There are now at least that many per month, and SWAT gets called out for perfectly ordinary felony warrant service (that one detective and one patrol officer, both armed with revolvers, used to do).
In the Tommy Tactical Age of policing, the deadly-force doctrine is much closer to the military doctrine (area denial fire, taking unseen enemy behind cover under fire, etc). Now the training emphasizes "see a gun, shoot the gunner". Voice commands to gun-armed persons are NOT given, under the theory that they only serve to give advantage to an armed enemy.
This change of doctrine from civilian/police to military/police tactics is going to cost a lot of lives, and especially at the point where citizens have to resort to firearms to defend themselves in urban settings. It's all un-necessary, and I can prove it.
One year in the mid-'70s, I reported with the rest of my shift for semi-annual firearms qualifications and training. We did the quals quickly, then several old-line detectives appeared and told us that we were going to assault a bunch of heavily armed bad guys holed up in a fortified building as a training scenario. We would be employing only our patrol revolvers, and LOTS of blanks were issued. The dicks had rifles with blanks and shotgun blanks also, in addition to their revolvers. The building was the old, boarded-up jail at Kelley Butte, right next to our range there. We had smoke grenades (or our Training Sgt did, he was leading us into "battle"). On the signal, about 8 of us moved out to envelop the building's perimeter, and we were immediately taken under fire from windows, the tower, everywhere in that building. We had to move forward, but we also had to remain concealed from the 4 dicks in the building, who were keeping notes on who they had "killed".
When it was all over, we learned:
- Lightly armed deputies are at a HUGE disadvantage assaulting barricaded felons in a building, but CAN carry the day, but MUST expect to take casualties doing so.
- The barricaded felons are going to die in the building, because even if they have decent cover, we had surrounded the building and they weren't getting out.
There was a thorough debrief afterwards, and we learned that half of us had been killed and almost everyone else wounded. I was listed as winged but not confirmed killed, which took two detectives to confirm. The detectives admitted that all of them would have either been killed or wounded due to the huge volume of aimed fire directed their way. In other words, we junior gunslingers achieved our goal of ending the days of a major gun-gang, but there would have been funerals and weeping wives and kids.
Weeping wives and kids are not allowed now. As I've railed at before in these pages, today's cops believe that by aggressive moves, such at shooting on sight of a firearm without warning, they can always go home to mama at the end of the day. In my book, that promise is NEVER made when you pin on the badge.
That "Tommy Tactical" philosophy needs to change. If I could wave my magic wand, cops would find their tactical ninja suits changed back to traditional police attire, and their training altered to determine who is an enemy and who isn't before opening fire.
The mere sight of a gun should never be cause to shoot a person, but read this little tidbit linked by David at "Of Arms and the Law", and you will see what I mean about today's ninja-cops.
