Quote:
Originally Posted by jyl
No, just the first two tables were for officer fatality outcomes, there is plenty of data there for all gunfights including where the officer survived. Read the rest of the article.
It makes sense that if you study only "successful" gunfights (officer survives), the hit ratios get higher (maybe that's why the officer survived) and the distances get longer (maybe everyone survived). You're deliberately skewing the sample, so you are skewing the data.
At the extreme, if you select gunfights where the suspect does not survive, I imagine you can get hit ratios up to 100% . . .
Personally, I'd be more interested in what went wrong in the cases where the good guy does not survive.
I'd also caution against drawing strong conclusions from small sample sets. A database of 200 shootings is less informative than a database of 1000s of shootings, is less informative than pooled databases of many 1000s of shootings. That is the nature of statistics. At the extreme, a single sample tells you very little - hence we don't conclude that citizen shootings take place at 100 yds with a rifle.
Some CCW'ers are trained, but most? I'm skeptical.
There's been a boom in buying of CCW guns, and plenty of those people go to the range a couple times and then never practice again - or are the people missing the paper at 6 feet, who we've all seen. Most of the people at my local range aren't even shooting at 25 yards, and they are doing well to hit a dinner plate at 10 yards with slow fire in good light.
I don't know about hunters - don't know enough of them - to say if their proficiency with a scoped bolt-action or an over-under 12 ga carries over to a snubby .38.
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It is useful to pick out the surviving officer stories and examine what their specifics were. it can help us to see what they did to win. (Which the article i linked to goes into). A few of the things it shows to me is that extending range favors the more trained shooter. (Ie, me). It also tells me that good marksmanship results in a higher hit rate. Most of the cops that fare well in gunfights are also the guys that spend extra time at the range and shoot distinguished.
A long range gunfight is extremely unlikely.
Not impossible. Again, "Can't happen to me" is not a defense that will save your life.
Where hunting experience helps most is in the familiarity with "buck fever", that moment of adrenaline where you've got a live animal in your sights and you still take careful aim and make that shot count. A seasoned hunter will be used to taking life with a firearm, he'll be used to the adrenaline rush at the moment of truth. He'll have experience at killing that the non hunter lacks.
This is a hugely invaluable bit of experience to have, IMO.