Suicide by cop: the Chris Raper incident

American Handgunner, March-April, 2009 by Massad Ayoob

He discovered that some friends and acquaintances were avoiding him after the shooting. "I realize now that they just didn't know what to say, or probably thought I wanted some solitude, but at the time, I felt somewhat abandoned."

In the months and years after the shooting, there was some hyper vigilance. Leaving his gun at home was no longer something he even considered. He remained constantly armed, 24/7. On the other hand, before the shooting he had enjoyed handgun hunting. A couple of months after the incident, he went afield with his Ruger Mark I pistol and dropped a squirrel with a carefully placed .22 bullet. "What I saw, I didn't like," Chris says softly today, remembering. "From that day on, I didn't hunt again. I never bought another hunting license."

Deeply grounded in strong religious faith, Raper was troubled by a sense of having violated the Sixth Commandment, Thou Shalt Not Kill. "I went to my pastor," he relates, "and he said, 'Chris, in the early Hebrew the word kill meant to murder. You didn't murder that guy. You were entitled to self-defense.' From that day on, I started getting better."

Today, Chris is happily retired from a long and distinguished career in law enforcement. He, along with his wife, Dianne, own Concealed Handgun Carry, Inc., and once a month teach the North Carolina Concealed Handgun class to qualify private citizens for concealed carry handgun permits. They find it rewarding. They're both excellent shots with their matched pair of Springfield Armory XD 9mm Sub Compacts. In fact, Chris shot a perfect score on qualification when he went through Lethal Force Institute. But his experience on that terrible evening a quarter century ago is something he draws upon when he explains to his students the grave responsibilities and consequences attendant to the carry and use of lethal weapons.

Changes

When the proverbial smoke had cleared, Raper at the time described the experience as something like being in the Twilight Zone. He is certain that he fired from eye level but has no memory of seeing his sights or even his gun as the shots went off. He was aware at the time of the deafening reverberation of the gunshot reports in the small, enclosed space, yet noticed no hearing impairment then or later. Like most survivors of gunfights that go past a couple of shots, Raper was not able to count the rounds he fired. He had been carrying no spare ammunition. When his antagonist fell dying, it was with a fully loaded semiautomatic pistol in his hand, and Raper was down to two .38 rounds left in his revolver. He'd had no spare ammunition on his person. Two-thirds of his ammunition had gone toward his opponent in no more than one second.

Shortly after the incident, the department adopted as standard the SIG-Sauer P226, holding sixteen rounds of 9mm Luger. Later, the department upgraded to new pistols, the same brand in the more powerful .357 SIG chambering.

Says Chris, "I went to the departmental psychological counseling. That was helpful. It allows you to debrief with someone you can trust, and it's not going to rise up and bite you." He likes the idea of today's post-critical incident debriefing groups that allow the officer to partake in peer counseling with others who've "been there and done that."