From Sergeant Don Knoll, Range Master and Director of Firearms Training for the San Diego Police Department, now retired.

“One of the biggest misconceptions about firearms is, the very high percentage of misses that all shooters experience. That includes police officers, citizens, crooks, everyone. In police shootings, the national average is four shots fired per hit at a distance of three to nine feet. Anyone who believes it is easy to hit someone in a real-life gun battle, even at close range, has never been in a close-up gun battle.

Many people inexperienced with guns believe that a shotgun offers better protection than a handgun because of the erroneous assumption that shotgun pellets spread out at close range, thus obviating accuracy. Just point a shotgun in the general direction of the crooks, shoot, and everyone falls…some people believe that. We see that reinforced on television…from westerns to cops & robbers.

But, the facts are: even at a distance of zero to ten feet, accuracy still counts with any type of firearm. Because, for example, the spread of a shotgun is very little at that range; a shotgun using 00 Buck ammunition spreads an average of one inch per three feet beyond the end of the barrel. So, if you’re standing six feet away, a shotgun blast at you will spread about one inch.

Of course, in some cases the shotgun may do more damage to body tissue and your ‘vitals’ because of the mass of lead (pellets) and the ‘wad’.

Nonetheless, generally from point-blank to ten feet, it doesn’t make much difference what anyone is shot with. It’s where your body is hit that counts. If you’re hit in a vital area, you’re in trouble. If the hit isn’t in your vitals, and if you have the will to survive, you probably will.”

 

Sergeant Don Knoll

More on cops use of shotguns

“I remember an almost shooting at the border. One of the guys had a car stopped for ‘possible drugs’. Our man had four males in the car…all were cooperating with their hands up and stretched out each window of the car. We had cops…guns drawn in the rear of the car and on each side. Things were ‘Code-4.’ *

One of the cops in the rear had his shotgun on the rear window. And, then it happened.

The cop with the shotgun thought he saw a movement from inside the car…something, and he fired. Frankly, I think it was an accidental discharge. No one was hit!

The blast shattered the rear window, passed between the shoulders of both crooks in the rear seat, between both shoulders of each crook in the front seat, and the lead slammed into and through the dash.

The crooks were stunned, frozen in place, speechless…we were too.

We got ‘em out of the car one at a time. Unbelievable! Not one scratch on any. They (the crooks) were convinced that it had been a warning shot. They could not do enough to satisfy our every command from that point on.

Sergeant Knoll is right; not much spread within just a few feet.

* “Code-4”…police code-talk for, “No more help needed”.

Sandy Strong

One Citizens Alternative to a firearm for protection of his wife…while he was away.

“We had responded over the months to a couple of “peeping tom calls” …same house, and same bedroom window. The woman, a young Navy wife and mother, was truly afraid and with good reason. Peeping Toms often get their courage up, and become rapists.

My experience has been the following progression from voyeur to rapist; first the peeping outside, then the evidence of masturbation, and sometimes defecation outside (yes, some of these voyeur’s are weird), then the stolen underclothing from clothes lines, then the burglary with little loss of property except a picture or two and the ransacked undergarment drawer, then (not always) the intrusion and rape or attempt at both. This was the summary of my advice to the husband with this addition: ‘…the guy probably lives in the neighborhood and knows when you’re deployed at sea.’

The husband took it all in. He was not a San Diegan. As a Navy man he was stationed here, but his home was in the Northwest. He was country boy.

Our next call to his house was again when he was away. I arrived at the same time as my adjacent beat partner. It was around 11PM. There was wailing coming from the rear of the house. My partner and I went directly to the rear.

The Peeping Tom was going nowhere. He had the jaws of a Bear Trap snapped tight on his right leg. The trap jaws had not severed his leg bone, but they had definitely punctured into bone and were holding tight. We got an ambulance for him, arrested him while waiting, and booked him later that night…with his casted leg from the knee down.

The husband had asked his wife if she was okay with learning to use a gun. She wasn’t unless she had him around more to teach her thoroughly. So, he bought the trap and placed it where his neighbor consistently stood (the voyeur was a neighbor).

I those days (late 60’s), our courts cared more that we got the crook and less about his right to sue for how he was caught. Nothing came of the husband’s choice of family protection.

Nowadays, the victim (that Navy man and his family) would pay a huge price for his method of protection, however non-lethal. Too bad.

End