Why you should keep shooting

This is going to get graphic. I'm sorry if I offend anyone by publishing these pictures, but I feel it is the only way to get the message across.

 

I have sketchy info on this incident. It is an incident where an armed sky marshal encountered a person with an edged weapon, and the sky marshal shot the bad guy ONCE, in the K-5, with his 9mm service weapon (unknown what it was loaded with, but they use an extreme velocity, non-penetrating round like the Glaser while on duty).

The wound to the bad guy was evidently NOT enough to deter the attack of the edged weapon assailant, and he grievously wounded the sky marshal with his weapon (see photos).

I know what you are going to say, that if he had been carrying a .45ACP, the blade-killa would have been vaporized. That's debatable, but immaterial in any case.

The key here is that the sky marshal fired ONE ROUND and stopped firing. He may have been trained, erroneously, to do that, but that's an article for another day. That one-shot non-stop was his error. YOU ALWAYS SHOOT TO STOP, AND YOU HAVE ONLY A SMALL CHANCE OF STOPPING A DETERMINED ASSAILANT WITH ONE HIT, NO MATTER WHAT CALIBER YOU ARE SHOOTING! Sorry for shouting.

I once fired a police practice course with a target I haven't seen since. It was a full-silhouette target, with the usual black silhouette, but overlaying that was a red grid of sub-scoring depending on (anatomically) how vital a hit there was. The spine, only one inch wide, counted ten, certain areas in the head (brainstem, etc) counted ten, the heart was a smallish ten zone, but you would have been surprised how much of the area within the usual "K-5" zone was as low as a 3 or 4. We fired a couple of courses at these targets. The first one, we were told to just fire our usual concentration on the K-5. We did, and we got scored. With 25 rounds, my per-round average was about 3.4 That meant that with one round hit to the K-5, I would have a 34% chance of totally disabling the goblin with that round. Not healthy for me. A different mathematical formula was employed to take in 3-round groups, and my score shot up to over 70%.

Now, we fired another course on a fresh target. This time, we were told to concentrate our fire centered & vertically in strings of 3-5 rounds (6-shot .357 revolvers). We evaluated the targets after each string. My strings went up into the 90s! I was getting 2 or 3 spine hits in each string, by thinking I was tring to shoot out the assailant's spine. This is a well-known pnenomena called "instinct-targeting", where you think of the actual microtarget you want to hit within the general mass of the silhouette in front of your sights. You think it, and you hit it. It takes a lot of practice. I actually took an instinct-targeting course from a shotgun master from Georgia once, and over the course of a day, he trained me to hit ever smaller moving targets until at the end of the day, I went to the skeet range, and broke a perfect 25 (never having broken more than 14 before).

Instinct-targeting, combined with firing multiple rounds, will turn a 9mm or even smaller caliber weapon into a guaranteed stopper. Your goal should be to develop a double-tap, in which you hit the spine with both rounds, then a single round to the head of the then-falling goblin, in which you are microtargeting his center upper teeth. That will get you the brainstem. Most "Mozambique" technique shooters shoot for the spot between the eyes, but if you hit it, you get the outer brain, and your only damage might be that the goblin won't be able to recite poetry to you as you have destroyed his speech center. You want to destroy the comm-center of the brain, the brainstem, with your head shot. The other danger of a high head shot is that if you hit the upper skull, you risk no penetration to the brain at all, even with a .45! If the angle isn't right, your round may just deflect off the skull. By shooting the mouth, you avoid all that. It's an opening waiting for your round, sort of like Luke Skywalker when he destroyed the Death Star battle station in Star Wars 4.

So, just to show you what a good knife-wielder can do to you, if you let him, check these out:

 

Sorry, you will probably want to put that steak back in the freezer now...

OK, summary time.

One round, especially if it is a low-power, non-aircraft-hull pentrating round, will not stop a determined knife attacker.

It's a known fact, derived from studying hundreds of knife attacks, that if your knife-assailant is within 21 feet of you when he begins his charge, you can probably NOT draw your weapon in time to stop him before he gets to you, WITHOUT DOING SOMETHING TO DELAY HIS CHARGE.

I'm not an unarmed combat master (yes, you are first going to fight the guy unarmed, then draw and kill him with multiple rounds in a situation like this). I've had the training to do this series of moves, however, so I can at least tell you what I would do.

First, I'm going to shuffle my feet into the combat stance, and then blade my body with my gun side away from the bullrushing assailant. I will assume a slight crouch, and raise my left hand to chest level, keeping an open hand (not a fist). I will have my gun hand lower, at waist level, with a karate fist, and tensed to strike.

The assailant will get to me in 4 strides if I stand and wait, but I'm not going to. I'm going to give ground, if possible at a 45 degree angle away from his line of charge. I will take combat shuffle-steps backwards on my toes, about a foot backwards at each step, but maintaining my crouch and upper-body balance.

Sometimes the first step of a knife-wielder's bullrush is a feint. I will watch for this, and if he stops, I will draw and begin firing with my gun. If it isn't, and he keeps coming, I will prepare to parry his first thrust with my left arm. The parry will be inside to outside, a forceful contact of my forearm upper surface with his forearm inner surface. If I'm forceful enough, I may just disarm him with the parry-strike. If I do, I will step back two steps, draw and fire my gun as he gropes for his weapon. He will be in a crouch trying to pick up his weapon, so the angles of fire are not optimum. Center of upper mass, empty the weapon, try for a head shot on the last round.

If I don't disarm him (probably won't), I will at least have interrupted his prepared chain of knife moves, and he will recoil to reset before striking again. This is my opening, and maybe the only opening I will get. I have a decision to make: Do I strike a focussed fist blow with my gun hand, or do I shuffle back two steps and begin a draw to fire my weapon? Open targets for the fist blow would be the Adam's Apple or the underjaw or the face, depending on how it presented itself.

If I strike the fist blow, I am committing myself to unarmed combat against an edged-weapon assailant. Risky for anyone below the 3rd Dan, it seems to me. I will go for option two, shuffle back and fire. The shuffling back is the key here, as I have to move backwards and not trip, then draw and fire while moving backwards. YOU NEED TO PRACTICE THIS IF YOU ARE GOING TO HAVE IT AS A PLAN!

The military and some dojos teach a third option: After executing the parry, you roll the parry-arm into a grab of the knife-wrist, lock the assailant's arm straight, then strike a downward chop with the other hand to disjoint the elbow. The assailant cannot maintain the weapon and WILL drop it (unless it's a finger-hole weapon, of course). Choices of fully disabling the assailant vary from that (think K-Bar).

I've practiced that move a few times, in fact, did so in the most recent training I've taken, about 4 years ago. I do not have confidence enough in my ability. I won't use the option. To get good enough at it, you have to have superior grip strength, better-than-average upper body strength, and lots of practice with the focussed chop blow required.

This technique with close-in bladed-weapon assailants is designed to return tactical control of the fight to you, and give you enough time to finish the fight with your gun. It has a large leap of faith in it, and one that most carry-permitted people haven't though of, that of the REQUIREMENT to engage the close-in knife assailant with unarmed combat BEFORE trying to engage with the firearm.

If you have time to shoot first, you MUST keep firing until you see the assailant fall, not do a "golly-gee, I shot him, why is he still charging?"

This slashed marshal bought his own misery. He bought it with faith in his draw and his "disabling" bullet. He bought it with his ignoring of the rules of the combat he found himself in. His superiors may have paid for part of it by their stupid, politically-correct insistence on the ineffective bullets and their insistence that he shoot ONE round, then stop to evaluate. I've heard that as policy for skymarshals, but don't know for certain. If it's true, this incident should spark some change, but I'm not holding my breath.

 

Yea could be,my point of sharing this is, watch what can happen when someone is coming at you with a knife. I talk to some who think the damage isnt as bad as shown above.

 

http://www.answers.com/topic/federal-air-marshal-service

 

Amen

 

I for one am not at all sure where this 7 yards crap started, but it seems to me that is for young folks in top shape. For my purposes 12 or 14 yards makes better sense. As it should for most. I would not have a hard time justifying shooting a goblin at 40 feet given my age and physical condition. All of us like to think we have fast reactions, as well we may if in Condition Red. Betcha most of us A) Are not in Condition Red all the time and B) are not in top physical condition, and C) don't have reaction times worth the mention. Think on it, and do what you need to do.