Experience: what armed citizens can learn from cops

Guns Magazine, June, 2005 by Massad Ayoob

In the latter half of the 20th Century, the most advanced armed citizens were ahead of the cops in a lot of ways. They discovered the most efficient two-hand stances first. They adopted the autoloader first. Civilian-dominated shooting sports like IPSC have greatly influenced modern police training.

At the same time, down on the streetwise level and up at the court-smart stratum, there are things the cops have learned collectively through their institutional history a lot of even the sharpest-shooting armed citizens haven't caught onto yet. In the interest of good guys sharing with good guys, let's look at some positive police learning experiences you can internalize.

Qualification Records

Allegations of manslaughter and wrongful death after legitimate self-defense shootings tend to hinge on a theory of negligence on the part of the shooter. You need to be able to show you were as skillful and competent with a gun as the average cop. See about hosting an optional "qualification shoot" at your gun club for those who carry concealed, sort of like the "sighting in day" hosted for hunters in the fall. Perhaps the club secretary can keep the scores on file. A phone call to your state's Police Officer Standards and Training council should get you some sample courses of fire for police qualification accepted in your jurisdiction.

Carry Spare Amino

A gun without spare ammunition is a temporary gun. Most actual gunfights don't require more than what the sidearm is loaded with ... but some do. If you were playing the odds, neither you nor the cop would need to carry at all, because statistics say that neither of you will have to shoot someone in self-defense today. Good guys and gals carry guns because they recognize that aberrations of the statistics can occur. When they do, they won't necessarily be average aberrations of statistics. This is why all uniformed patrol cops wear spare ammo, and why the smart ones do so off duty. Besides, there are some handgun stoppages best cleared by emptying the gun and reloading it, another reason to always have spare load on hand.

Upgrade to full-capacity magazines if you haven't already. The onerous "magazine ban" is behind us and you'll find 15-round magazines don't weigh noticeably more in the pouch or the gun than 10-rounders, and a 50-percent boost in capacity might make the difference some day. There was a reason so many police departments went with double-stack magazines.

Keep a Light Handy

As long as anyone on NYPD can remember, uniformed officers there have been required to carry flashlights, even on day shift. You never know when a dark basement or a dark alley is in your future. Powerful, tiny flashlights get used daily even if you don't pack a gun. The gun-mounted flashlight pioneered by SWAT teams and now almost standard with K9 units is also gaining rapid acceptance for routine patrol. It makes huge sense on a home-defense firearm. Powerful "white light" can blind antagonists, and probably more important, it lets you tell friend from foe and benign from malignant. Stay with the best, proven brands, as the cops do: SureFire, InSight, Streamlight, etc.

Don't Use Ball Ammo

Virtually every law enforcement agency in the United States now issues some sort of expanding bullet ammunition. Cops learned the hard way that roundnose lead and jacketed hardball are ricochet-prone, over-penetrative, and below par in "stopping power." A .45 ACP hardball round can pierce some 26" of solid muscle-tissue-simulating ballistic gelatin. That's perforation through two people in a row, with the bullet stopping midway through a third. On the street, it would be dead bystanders. For the armed citizen, whose greatest likelihood of using a gun is against a home invader, that dead bystander is likely to be a member of the household.

There's a lot more, but we're running out of space. Suffice to say that, as police gun expert Ed Sanow put it, our nation's 700,000-some cops are the "road warriors." They have the most well-collected and analyzed body of data on what happens when bad people force good people into shootings. Ignoring that large body of knowledge, and the policies that have resulted from it, would be foolish.