Author: James Williams

A good friend of mine forwarded a Facebook post to me today, and I read it with interest. It’s a well-written account of an OIS in which “center mass” hits failed to stop an armed and aggressive felon. If you want to read the account, please open this link:  http://www.lawofficer.com/articles/print/volume-4/issue-12/features/officer-down-peter-soulis-inci.html

The first thing I must say is that in my opinion Officer Soulis did an outstanding job in this gunfight. Did he make some mistakes? A lot of people on Facebook seem to think so, and they’re not shy about pointing Soulis’s “errors” out. But I wasn’t there, and I refuse to second-guess a copper’s actions in a deadly force incident without a FULL set of facts.

Second thing: Soulis did several vital things that ended this encounter in a positive manner. That is to say, he lived, and he stopped the perpetrator’s attack. He was surprised by the felon’s aggressive resonse to his questioning, but he recognized the presence of danger and responded appropriately before the perpetrator could opportunistically murder him. He put bullets into the bad guy, and even though he was hit multiple times by bullets, he did not stop fighting. In fact, he actually escalated his level of counter-aggression.

So on the face of it, I think this officer did a pretty damn good job.

But here’s a hint as to the root of a correctable problem: the author of this article states that  “Palmer had taken 22 hits from Soulis’ .40-caliber Glock, 17 of which had hit center mass“.

The author’s implication is that a “center mass” hit is a good hit. And that, my friends, is where we descend from good tactical analysis into the Land of Bullshit.

If you’ve attended my Shooting With Xray Vision class (SXRV), or you’ve read my book, you have heard me say this before:  there is no such thing as Center Mass.  In 6 years of undergraduate and graduate level science, I never once read or heard of an anatomic structure called “center mass”. In all my years of medical school and postgraduate residency, I never read or heard of a medical term called “center mass”. And in 40 years of hunting animals for food with rifles, handguns, bows, blowguns, atlatl’s, and other weapons, I never once heard another hunter tell me to aim for “center mass”.

The reason for that is that outside of police circles, the term does not exist. And for good reason. It’s a bullshit term that has no relevance to reality. People use the term “center mass” because they’re lazy and ignorant. Sorry if that offends you, but that’s the bottom line. People who use the term “center mass” are admitting for all intents and purposes that they have no idea that critical structures of the human body exist in the human body that need to be interdicted by a police bullet to stop a felon’s violent actions. They are admitting that they have no idea where those vital structures are, and they have no idea how to visualize those anatomic structures in a real live human body. 

If you don’t know a fact, you are ignorant of that fact. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing. But if that fact is highly relevant to your job, continuing to not know that fact is willful ignorance. And if your job involves training cops how to win and survive deadly force situations, not knowing that fact is in my opinion gross negligence.  And if you fail to learn the fact you are ignorant of and you fail to incorporate it into your training, you’re not only negligent, you’re lazy.

In other words, police firearms instructors who continue to use the term “center mass” in training their officers are, to borrow a phrase from Chief Jeff Chudwin, “occupying a uniform that rightfully belongs to someone else.”

Defining Center Mass

In 2003, I stood up in front of 18 police LE instructors in a classroom and asked them to take out a sheet of paper and write down the definition of “center mass”, and pass them forward. During the break I read through them and was only slightly amazed to read 18 different definitions. This shouldn’t surprise anyone, because there is no credible publication anywhere that adequatly defines this bullshit term.

I then proceeded with the full SXRV  curriculum, and all 18 officers passed the final evaluation with flying colors. In the end-of-day debrief, I asked each the class to raise their hands if they thought that “center mass” was useful term in training police officers in the use of dealdy force. Not one hand was raised. And one veteran officer said, “Training cops to shoot ‘center mass’ is getting good cops killed.” As each of those officers discovered, just because you think you know what center mass means doesn’t mean that the green recruit you’re training knows what you mean. And it for damn sure doesn’t mean that the armed and aggressive felon shooting at you gives a tinker’s goddam that you think you know what center mass might be!

Training cops in something that is going to get them killed is gross negligence, pure and simple.

A Better Alternative: Mediastinum, or High Chest

In Tacical Anatomy’s SXRV training, we teach relevant human target anatomy, not meaningless bullshit like “center mass”. We demonstrate to students in easily-grasped demonstrations exactlywhere the relevant target anatomy is located, and we teach our students how to visualize that anatomy in three dimensions. Which means a cop who is trained in SXRV is able to place his or her bullets where they will do the most good in the shortest time frame. The primary target area we teach is the mediastinum, or the high chest. This is both easier and harder than it sounds… trust me, you need to take the class to get the full understanding of what I’m saying. But that’s not all (cripes, I’m starting to sound like a late-night commercial for a Salad Shooter!): we also teach alternate target zones if the high chest isn’t available, or if bullets going into the primary target area are ineffective.

Better Hits = Better Outcomes

When cops learn precisely where to place their shots in an OIS, they make better hits and they miss less often. Don’t take my word for it, look at the data from agencies that have adopted SXRV for their firearms training programs. Oh, wait, you can’t look; police agencies still consider that info highly proprietary and highly classified. So you’ll have to take my word for it, after all. Sorry about that.

Example One: large midwestern metro department, 2000+ officers. In the 3 years after they eliminated “center mass” targeting and completed SXRV training for all officers,  their OIS hit ratio rose from ~20% to 94%. Of 34 felons shot in 36 OIS’s, 27 were permanently removed from the criminal population. And in those 36 OIS’s not one officer was shot.

Example Two: a smallish West Coast sheriff’s office, ~50 deputies. In the two years after they eliminated “center mass” targeting and completed their SXRV training, they had a dozen OIS’s, 98% hit ratio, and 100% permanent removal of relevant felons from rescidivism. Again, zero officer casualties.

I could go on, but you get the idea. Providing better training to police officers on where to shoot the bad guys rather than flipping them off with a bullshit term like “center mass” is a training concept that our LEO’s deserve to get from us, their trainers. Shooting with xray vision stops felonious behavior before cops or innocent bystanders can be injured by violent felons.

Better hits result in better outcomes.

It’s time to purge the bullshit terms and techniques from police training so that we can guarantee the best possible outcomes from our OIS’s. “Center mass” is a term that was always bullshit. It’s time we turn it into antique bullshit.

Yes, that’s right… an online expert has declared the lateral pelvis as the “best worst option” for the tactical shooter, whatever that means.

I’ve read a number of online blurbs & blogs about this topic, and have mostly dismissed them as unworthy of response. But this one got my attention. Not just for the confusing title, but for the surprising amount of verbage in the article that appears to have been lifted directly from my book, Tactical Anatomy Instructor Manual (TAIM; copyright 2006). I’m not saying it’s plagiarism, because you can’t say that when someone has copied a term or a phrase or even a partial sentence. But it’s clear enough to me that either the author, or someone the author knows, has read my book and copied some of my words directly.

Which is not a big deal, as long as the author(s) use my words to  promote tactical advice I endorse. That happens a LOT (which tells me a lot more people have read my book or my magazine articles than I thought). But when someone turns around and says the opposite of what I teach using my terminology, that sticks in my craw more than a litte.

Let’s put it this way… prior to the publication of the TAIM, I had found nothing in the laymen’s press  stating that “there are only two reliable means of incapacitation by GSW: CNS disruption, or rapid, incapacitating disruption of blood flow to the CNS.”  This is a phrase I’ve been using in my lectures and in my SXRV training since 2002, and I’ve seen it repeated in multiple sources both online and in print since my book came out in 2006.  So when someone uses this exact same phrase in their writing, and uses it to supposedly prove a point that contradicts my position on the matter, I get a little bit miffed. 

(Author’s note, added Dec. 11, 2016:  Please let me emphasize: I wrote the above phrase and used it in my book, but the concept is not my intellectual property nor my own invention… it is an axiom of wound ballistics and terminal effects, going back to Dr. Martin Fackler’s work in the 1970’s and Dr. Gary Roberts’ work in the 1980’s, the numerous contributors to the IWBA Journal,  and beyond; I do not mean to give the impression that this is anything I discovered or promulgated on my own! I read the wound ballistics literature of these, my predecessors, and assure you that nothing I have done through my training or through TAS could have been accomplished without the foundation works of these authors.)

However, I made it clear in the TAIM and I make it clear in all my talks & classes that there are exceptions to this rule. And ONE of those is a lateral pelvis shot that fractures the bony structures of that region (the “weight-bearing triangle”, an orthopedic surgical term), WHEN the subject is armed with a contact weapon. A contact weapon is an edged weapon or a bludgeon.

Some authors, such as the “best-worst” guy, point out that a bad guy lying on the ground with a shattered fem, aur can still fight. Well, duh. I wish I’d thought of that… oh, wait, I already did!!  Read the book, Sherlock!

I covered this in detail in the first 2 pages of the chapter on lateral pelvis shots. It doesn’t take a brain surgeon to figure out that a bad guy with a firearm who’s got a busted leg can still shoot you, and he can still fight you if you close with him. But we’re not talking about bad guys with guns, for the most part. We’re talking about bad guys with contact weapons. The POINT of shooting a contact-weapon-armed adversary in the lateral pelvis is to KEEP HIM FROM COMING INTO CONTACT WITH YOU. He can’t stab you if you’re 2 steps away. He can’t hit you with his tire iron if you’re 10 feet away. And if your adversary can no longer offer you harm with his contact weapon, you don’t have to shoot him again. You can wait for backup to arrive to help subdue him… he sure as hell isn’t going to run away from you!

The plain fact is that police (and righteous armed citizens) are FAR more likely to encounter a criminal attacker armed with contact weapons than they are with a bad guy carrying a gun. The statistics are pretty clear on this.  Being able to stop a potentially deadly attack by a guy with an edged weapon without killing him is a nice tool to have in your toolbox, most of us good guys agree! 

Curiously, the critics don’t talk much about this. And the author of the “best-worst” piece certainly didn’t offer any cases where a lateral pelvis shot failed.

But, being the nice guy that I am, I will offer you not one, but TWO real-world cases where a lateral pelvis shot stopped the attack and saved at least one life. These are not hypothetical cases. These aren’t internet rumors. These are real life cases, not something I heard from a guy who heard it from another guy. I spoke directly with the officers involved in these shootings, and I have verified the pertinent facts through corroborating evidence. I could cite upwards of a dozen more cases, but these two stand out in my mind because they were two of the earliest successful lateral pelvis shootings by some of my SXRV students.

CASE #1

Multiple officers in a mid-size Midwestern city responded to a call to an angry man with a knife. One of the responding officers, who had taken my Shooting With Xray Vision class (SXRV), retrieved his department-issue shotgun from his squad car as he exited the vehicle. He saw that the subject had a large knife in his hand. The subject was shouting and cursing at the responding officers, threatening to attack. The officer in question took aim at the subject’s lateral pelvis and fired one round of 00 buckshot (this was Federal ammunition, with the Flite-Control wad). The buckshot entered the subject’s pelvis and shattered the head of the femur and the acetabulum. The subject fell to the ground immediately, and offered no further violence. He subsequently had to have the leg amputated at the hip.

CASE #2

A police firearms instructor in a large Midwestern city was off duty, visiting his girlfriend in her home, when he heard a vehicle alarm. He looked out the window and saw a man trying to break into his personal vehicle with a large screwdriver. The officer, who is a nationally-ranked champion shooter, ran out and confronted the felon. The subject responded by advancing on the officer with the screwdriver as his weapon and threatening his life. The officer, who has not only taken SXRV but teaches it to his department’s personnel as part of their firearms training program, recognized the possibility of stopping the attack without killing the subject, and shot him in the lateral pelvis (double-tap) with his service pistol. The subject’s pelvis was fractured (the right ileum, as I understand) which was both very painful and made standing on the right leg structurally impossible. The subject fell to the ground immediately and ceased the attack. He was taken to hospital and survived his GSW.

Notice that in both the above cases nobody was hurt except the bad guy. And as the second officer told me, it was a huge relief to him to know he could shoot the bad guy without having to kill him. As it happens, he knew the subject to be a juvenile, and the son of a neighbor. The death of this boy at his hands would have been devastating to him. 

Now, I’ll offer you a freebie. Don’t tell anyone.

CASE #3

This isn’t a single case. The guy I’m talking about here was a cop in a third world country, a former colony of a European power, and who went on to serve in that country’s special forces unit. After that, he worked in executive protection for another country outside the CONUS for a number of years, and eventually moved to the USA to open a shooting school. This school was very good, very hard to get into, and it wasn’t around very long because some people who have much deeper pockets than you and I gave him an offer he couldn’t refuse. Since then, he’s been the fulltime trainer of a group of very high-speed low-drag tip-of-the-spear guys a lot of us admire who do good work in the GWOT. This guy (I’ll call him “Harry”, not his real name) has been teaching the use of lateral pelvis shots for a lot longer than I have. Harry’s been teaching lateral pelvis shooting as part of his CQB package because he’s actually shot multiple bad guys in the lateral pelvis, multiple times over multiple years, in multiple jurisdictions; and Harry’s served alongside other guys who’ve done a lot of the same kind of stuff. And Harry is a strong proponent of this tactical expedient… because it works.

<sigh>

This is not a theoretical discussion, unlike the blog written by “best-worst” guy.  I’m not citing a bunch of medical papers to prove my point, because as a trauma physician I know very, very, very few doctors who have any experience in shooting people… and aside from myself, I only know a handful of medical doctors in the USA who have enough tactical training and experience to even comment on this subject. I’m not offering the opinions of a bunch of supposed experts who have never actually done what they say can’t really be done…. I’m offering examples of real guys who’ve BTDT and got blood on their shirts doing it.

Shooting bad guys in the lateral pelvis is not an “entry level” tactical tool. I don’t recommend it to new shooters, and it don’t recommend it to IDPA/IPSC or other recreational shooters for their home defense planning. I only teach this tool to people who have the advanced firearms skills, anatomic knowledge, and tactical training to implement it effectively. I do cover it in my lectures and in my SXRV classes, with some significant limitations… and the only class I train people in this skill (outside of special classes for SWAT/military personnel) is my Deadly Force Decisions class, which I co-teach with my great friend and training partner David Maglio.

I don’t intend this to be the final word on lateral pelvis shots. But like I more or less said in the beginning of this blog entry, I’ll be damned if I’ll let some armchair trainer use my own words to say the opposite of what I teach.

 Train with good trainers, and keep your skills sharp.  

Leftists have been rocked to their foundations by several developments in the past year… starting with the enormous failure of their gun control campaign following the Sandy Hook massacre (which, was clearly a coordinated publicity campaign involving the Democratic politicians and the anti-gun mainstream media), followed by the gigantic failure of Obamacare rollout and the public outcry against it from all quarters (including leftist news outlets), then the abysmal failure of the Connecticut AR-15 ban followed now by the equally complete failure of the New York “SAFE” Act “assault weapon” grab, and of course last week’s BLM backdown from the the Nevada stand-off, it has not been a good year for the Democrats. 

Under the provision of the SAFE Act, citizens of the Empire State were given until midnight on April 15, 2014, to register any “assault weapons” in their possession, thereby creating a state registry. Governor Andrew Cuomo, who pushed this bill through the legislature in only 3 days under circumstances that would be called shady at best, is now faced with the fact that the first real test of his anti-gun law has been an almost complete failure. Unnamed sources from within the NY state government have said that less than 5000 weapons were voluntarily registered by New Yorkers. It has been estimated (by the NY state govt) that there are at least 1 million “assault weapons” in the state, which means that 99.995% of New York’s assault weapons are now illegal, unregistered, and firmly in the hands of private citizens who don’t give a tinker’s damn for Cuomo’s gun law. These citizens are now, by the definition of the SAFE Act, felons.   

But New York gun owners clearly don’t care. For that matter, neither do gun owners in Connecticut, who similarly defied an “assault weapon” registration law in their state earlier this year. 

Cuomo’s law, which faces several serious legal challenges on its constitutionality, is in big trouble. The flat refusal of hundreds of thousands of New York’s citizens to comply with the “assault weapon” registry is a wake-up call for the gun-grabbers, and they appear to be totally confused by it.  

Cuomo is faced with the fact that Connecticut Gov. Daniel Malloy had to swallow earlier this year: a law of this type that the people choose to disobey en masse is a ticking time bomb, and the incumbent is stuck with it. The people who oppose the SAFE Act, which is by polls a majority of New Yorkers, are voicing their intent to throw Cuomo out of office at the next election. The people who applaud the SAFE Act are furious with Cuomo for not enforcing the law vigorously, and they vow to replace him with someone who will. He can’t win. If he backs down and repeals the law, he loses the liberal gun-control vote. If he enforces the law, he risks inciting violence between police and gun owners and an even greater public outcry as bloodshed is visited upon the good people of New York.   Gun control zealots like Cuomo and Malloy are re-discovering the political consequences of being a gun-grabber in America… it’s political suicide.

When I read the liberal press they are either conspicuously silent on the issue, or they express puzzlement that New Yorkers have en masse engaged in one of the biggest acts of civil disobedience to ever take place. They fail to grasp the implications of this watershed event. Americans are saying in numbers like never before that they are sick and tired of the overreach of elected officials, and they are not going to take it any more. 

And almost simultaneously with New York’s quiet rebellion, a rancher in Nevada along with an awful lot of supporters around the country have forced the Federal government to back down. 

I get the sense that the Nevada standoff was a watershed event in this nation’s history. It doesn’t matter to most Americans that, as many legal analysts have pointed out, the law was against Rancher Bundy. Yes, we are a nation of laws; but when the government has made so many bad laws that even the lawyers and tax accountants can’t make sense of them, the people will cease to have respect for the law. They necessarily revert to Natural Law, the law of Right. Many Americans, perhaps, most Americans, just don’t care that Rancher Bundy has defied the law. They recognize that any law that steals cattle and property from a citizen is bad law, and bad enforcement of a bad law just makes it worse. And as the backstory of Harry Reid and other crooked Nevada politicians profiting from this boondoggle comes out, Americans are even more incensed  and even more committed to defiance of bad law. 

There is no doubt in my mind that the Obamacare rollout fiasco and the intense criticism it drew made the Washington Democrats nervous, but it was and is apparent they thought that they could steamroll over that speed-bump in the road to total power. But the failure of the BLM tactical teams to accomplish their objectives, and the failure of their control of the mass media to keep the story out of the public eye (thank God for the internet!), and the realization that they were on the verge of an actual shooting war with American citizens, and now the NewYork (and Connecticut) “assault weapon” registry’s failure, well… in my mind’s eye it’s like a virtual hard left jab between the eyes.  They are stunned, confused, and temporarily at least set back.

However, I expect them to recover and pick up where they left off, with renewed purpose. And like a stunned palooka who’s too punchy (and wasn’t that bright to start with) to know that he’s about to walk into the beating of his life, they’re going to regroup and attack again. It might be at the Bundy ranch, or it might be on Texas’ Red River, but it’s going to happen. It makes me unutterably sad to realize that the powers that be are committed going to war against their fellow Americans in the blind pursuit of and addiction to power, but it seems to me to be inevitable. But I believe we can rest assured that they will attack again, and American blood will be spilled on American soil. 

Unless we can elect a Republican Senate  in November, and a united Congress can force a bloodless revolution, I fear the outcome is going to be unthinkable. 

I’ve neglected this blog for several months now, I apologize. 2013 was a difficult and chaotic year for me, personally, and I had to let Tactical Anatomy business take a backseat to personal and professional challenges. I am glad to see the end of 2013. 

I hope to be able to put more time and energy into Tactical Anatomy this year, but the first three months of 2014 are going to be very busy for me, so it might be a slow start. At this point I have NO CLASSES scheduled for 2014. Of the 4 SXRV and TTGSW classes scheduled in 2013, only one class gathered enough students to make it possible to hold the training, and I still posted a financial loss on my books. Two of the other three classes had ZERO registrants, despite a lot of emails, etc. I know that trainers across the country are having trouble filling their classes due to the poor economy and the uncertainty caused by the impending Obamacare onslaught, but still… It’s discouraging to see so little tangible support for the training I offer. 

If you are interested in attending a SXRV or TTGSW class in 2014, please consider the possibility of hosting the class in your area. If you are willing to take this job on, I’ll give you the tools you need to get students signed up (and paid up!), and in turn you’ll get up to 3 free slots in the class for you and your friends/family. This is the only way we can get these classes off the ground, so please consider hosting. 

Training has always been less popular with the vast majority of shooters than hardware is. Yesterday a friend posted a link on Facebook to a training article on The MOAT Group’s website that I thought was spot-on. I reposted it on my Facebook page, and got a few interesting comments. 

In particular, I love this quote from the article: “Far too many folks are under the impression that buying and carrying a blade and/or firearm makes them more prepared or inclined to defend themselves. This mindset is like assuming you know how to play guitar simply by going to a store and buying one.” 

As a guitar player of many years’ experience, this parallel struck me as being particularly appropriate. Learning to shoot a firearm well, particularly a pistol, is a slow and sometimes frustrating journey. So is learning to play a guitar (like the Bryan Adams song goes, “Got my first real 6-string down at the five and dime, played it till my fingers bled in the summer of 69”). Learning how to play a guitar well enough to stand up in front of people and entertain them is another thing entirely, though… it’s a whole ‘nother level of learning and training to get to that point of musicianship. 

The parallel in firearms competency is apt. A man might be able to punch holes in paper at the range with accuracy, and even shoot his deer every fall, but that is not the same as knowing how to fight with that firearm. Learning how to fight with a rifle or pistol is akin to learning how to play your guitar well enough to stand up on a stage and entertain.

The people you can go to for that sort of training aren’t on every street corner. The average concealed handgun permit instructor has no training in gunfighting, nor are you likely to find someone at your local gunclub who can competently teach that class. You aren’t going to learn gunfighting by taking classes from big-name IDPA or IPSC competitors. And you aren’t going to learn it by buying a DVD set from an advertisement in the back pages of American Handgunner. No, you’re going to have to do the research and find one of the schools scattered around the country that do it right, you’ll have to invest the money to travel and pay for that school. It’s not real expensive, but it ain’t cheap.

The problem is that most people look at the cost of a school that will teach them something about gunfighting and they think, “Man, that is way too much money!”… but they never take the time to put it into perspective. You can attend a class at Gunsite or Thunder Ranch for about what you’d pay for a midrange-priced custom 1911. Open up your gunsafe and count your guns, then multiply by an average price of, say $600. If you’ve got 10 guns, which is not a lot of guns for a regular shooter, that means you’ve got $6 thousand invested in guns alone, never mind the money you’ve invested in ammunition, reloading equipment, holsters, match fees, and so forth.

So be realistic: doesn’t it make sense to spend 25% of what you’ve already invested in your firearms & shooting equipment, to learn how to use it effectively in defense of your life?  

Last month I read a story about a guy who was fishing for sharks in one of those sit-on-top sea kayaks, with his legs dangling in the water. A shark took his foot and part of his lower leg off, and he was bleeding to death rapidly. Fortunately, he had the foresight to carry a trauma kit with him, and had a tourniquet. Unfortunately, neither he nor his fishing partner knew how to apply it. He bled to death despite having the perfect lifesaving equipment right there, because he never bothered to get the training in how to use it!!!

I urge every reader to think long and hard about this. You never know when you may face a life-threatening emergency that you will only survive if you use the emergency equipment you have on hand: your pistol, your rifle, your fire extinguisher, your tourniquet. Are you sure you have trained with this equipment enough that you will be able to use it effectively when the shit hits the fan, your heart rate is 150 bpm, and your hands are shaking from the adrenalin dump?

If your answer to that question is not a 100% confident YES, then you have just told yourself you need to spend the money and time to get the training that will take you to that level. Tactical Anatomy Systems offers two classes: Shooting With Xray Vision which is school covering the mental aspect of gunfighting, and Tactical Treatment of Gunshot Wounds, which is a school training in the critical trauma care skills needed in the tactical environment once the bullets start to fly. I teach these classes anywhere in the USA, provided enough people sign up for them. Think about hosting one of my classes, or putting together a group of your friends to come down and take the class from me here in Texas. If you want a more comprehensive course in either discipline, drop me a line and I will be glad to help direct you to the schools and trainers you require.

But please, get serious about your training. If you’re not trained, you’re just pretending.  

Best wishes to all for 2014. 

I know, I know, the title is grammatically incorrect. It should be “fewer” bullets. But I’m no English teacher, so please bear with me. 

Here’s the deal: most people I know who carry a handgun daily, whether LEO’s or private citizens, don’t carry enough ammunition. If you’ve followed my blog, or taken one of my classes, or you’ve listened to people who’ve BTDT and carry a boatload of ammo everywhere they go, you should know this. But I haven’t covered this topic in a while, so I’m going to put it out there again for those who might have missed it last time around. 

This blog entry was prompted by an article on a police website last week about an Illinois cop who got into a shootout with a “highly motivated” felon who was determined not to go down. The cop hit the felon multiple times with his service handgun, a high-capacity .45 ACP, and according to the ME at least 6 of those hits were fatal wounds. But the guy just kept on coming at him with murderous intent until the cop finally put a bullet in the felon’s brainpan, and finished the fight.

I wish I could say that this was an exceptional case… but it wasn’t, and it isn’t.

The plain truth is this: contrary to internet mythology, a substantial minority of “good” gunfights involve dozens of shots fired, if not scores of shots fired. For example, in the Pennsylvania shoot-out that made internet rounds several years ago (and which I review as core material in my Shooting WIth Xray Vision classes), a total of 107 rounds of ammunition were fired by 3 police officers, while the single felon fired in excess of 30 rounds back at them. The subject was hit 17 times and, yes, he died of his wounds en route to hospital, but he was still fighting the cops when they put the cuffs on him.  

My good colleague Chief Jeff Chudwin shows a video in one of his classes in which a lone officer gets into a shootout with a felon and is forced to take cover behind his vehicle with only the ammunition on his person, i.e., one hi-capacity magazine in his service handgun and two more mags on his belt. He ran out of ammunition within 2 minutes, and the only thing that prevented his adversary from stalking him down and murdering him was the arrival of a second officer just as he ran out of bullets.

I could go on, and on, and on. I have literally dozens of similar cases related to me. Not from “a friend of a friend”, but by the involved officers themselves.

Ammunition is dissipated amazingly rapidly in a gunfight. If you don’t put your adversary down, and I mean down, with your first 2 to 5 rounds, you’re almost certainly going to be dealing with incoming fire. Which means you’re going to be moving to cover, and your adversary is going to be moving, too. Hit ratios drop into the low single digits when both fighters are moving, the statistics show. And you know you’re going to be firing while moving to cover, because you want to keep your enemy off-balance so he can’t draw a good bead on you while you do so. 

So let’s do the math. Your attacker points his gun, you see a opportunity to fight, so you draw and fire a double tap to his “center of mass”. He acts like you didn’t hit him and fires back. Suddenly you’re both moving to cover and rounds are going both ways. Let’s say your route to cover was 5 yards and you fired rounds as fast as you could while getting there. That’s 2 initial rounds, then another 8 rounds while moving to cover. If you’ve got a hi-cap auto, you’re probably OK now without a tactical reload; if you’re carrying a revolver or a single-stack 1911, you were empty before you got to cover. If your enemy has a hi-cap auto and he heard your hammer going snap-snap-snap he knows he’s got you, and while you’re trying to reload (assuming you have a spare mag or speedloader), he may well close in on you and execute you.

It happened to the California Highway Patrol troopers at Newhall in 1970, kids, and it can just as easily happen to you. Unless you prepare for the worst.  

When I was still an active member of my county’s SWAT team in Wisconsin, on my armor vest I carried 9 single-stack magazines for my SIG P220 service handgun (72 rounds), and five 30-round magazines for my M4 carbine (150 rounds). Most of the rest of the guys on the team were similarly kitted-out. We read the reports, we did some training exercises that proved to us how quickly we could run dry with a “standard” load-out, and after that, we all carried a LOT more ammo. Regular patrol deputies initially carried only 2 spare mags for their SIG’s on their duty belts, but most quickly upgraded to a minimum of 4 spare mags in a quad magazine holder.

What about the armed private citizen? I know there are some folks who figure that if they carry a fully-loaded gun, they’re GTG. And honestly, since the chances of getting into a gunfight as a private citizen are miniscule, it’s hard to argue with them. But I do argue with them.  They’ve already acknowledged that there is risk out there, which is the reason they carry a gun in the first place. If a person is already carrying a deadly weapon, why not carry a spare magazine as well? The extra weight is too much? It’s inconvenient to add a mag carrier to your concealment rig? Come on!

I strongly recommend the armed citizen should carry at least one fully loaded spare magazine on his person at all times. 

I also strongly recommend the armed citizen to select a hi-capacity autoloading handgun as his primary weapon. I used to carry a revolver or a 1911 as my primary weapon, but over time I came to realize the folly of that. I now carry a Glock 19 as my primary weapon, but I’d be equally happy with a Springfield XD, S&W M&P, or SIG 229. I don’t care about caliber, as I have stated before. But I do care about having enough rounds on my person to finish a gunfight, if one should break out. 

 Everyone needs at least one 9mm pistol. I don’t mean your only pistol caliber should be 9mm, but if you find yourself with just one pistol, it should be a 9mm. 

The reasons for this are many and varied, and I can’t possibly put them all down in one blog session, but for starters just consider that it is unquestionably the most ubiquitous pistol round in the world. I would venture to say there are more loaded rounds of 9mm ammunition in the world than all other service calibers put together. This should tell you something about the utility of the round for general military and law enforcement sidearms use. 

But to get to some specifics:

1. The 9mm is a compact cartridge. This means you can carry more rounds in a given pistol chambered in 9mm than if you’re carrying a .40 or .45.  Example: the Glock 17 holds 18 rounds of 9mm, while the .40 caliber version of the same gun, the G22, holds 15 rounds. Does this really matter? Hard to say… but I know guys who work in Executive Protection who assure me that they all carry Glock 17’s, in no small part because they have plenty of anecdotal evidence from EP guys all over the world who have needed fast access to all 18 rounds in executing a successful protection/extrication. And because it’s compact, you can carry more reloads, too. 

2. The compact size of  the 9×19 cartridge also means gunmakers can chamber extremely small pistols like the Kahr M9/PM9, the Keltec PF9, and the Ruger LCP. I carry a Kahr PM9 as my “always” gun, which means it’s my backup gun (BUG) even when I’m packing a larger pistol, and my only gun when I’m in maximum concealment mode. And I can shoot it very, very well, even with +P ammunition.

3. The 9mm is about as light-kicking  a round that packs enough punch to win a gunfight. This means it’s highly controllable for just about anybody who can shoot a handgun. This means it’s more likely to be an accurate pistol in most people’s hands, and as the late Bill Jordan said, when it comes to gunfights, accuracy is the final word. 

4. The small size of the 9mm cartridge means it’s cheaper to manufacture (or reload your own, if you’re so inclined) than any other service caliber cartridge. Cheap is good. 

5. The 9mm has more than enough power to deliver lethal force to your attacker’s vital hit zones. I have plenty of stories in my files about the effectiveness of the 9mm in Officer Involved Shootings world wide. Members of this website can go to the members-only area and look at the photos of the would-be armed robbers shot by that cop in Brazil a few years back. He was shooting a 9mm pistol and his duty ammo, which was, IIRC, 115 gr +P Magtech JHP ammo. It’s a deadly cartridge provided you put your bullets where they need to go… but that applies to all service caliber handgun cartridges from 9mm through 10mm and 45ACP.

So now you’re convinced you need a 9mm handgun. Which one should you get? 

Well, I admit I’m biased very strongly toward the Glock 19. It’s a good sized pistol, but slightly more compact than the G17, a great shooter, and reliable as all get-out. I prefer my Glocks with a NY-1 trigger, which is more crisp than the standard Glock trigger, and with a shorter reset. Combine that with a 3.5 pound trigger connect and an internal polishing job, and you’ve got one sweet-shooting pistol that is uber-reliable. Other 9mm’s I know and trust in the fullsize category include the G17, the Browning Hi-Power, the Beretta M9 and its Brazilian clone, the Taurus PT-92, and the great Smith & Wesson Model 39/59/69 pistols plus their new M&P line.

You should probably get at least one sub-compact 9mm, too. The Glock 26 is a great pistol, if a bit chunky. The previously mentioned Kahr PM9/CW9 pistol is a phenomenal little 9mm handgun, and while it’s kind of ugly, the Kel-Tec PF9 is a rock-solid subcompact as well.

I have found a 9mm pistol that fits the hands of all the shooters in my family. My youngest daughter and my son both prefer the S&W 6906, while my elder daughter prefers the Glock 19. My youngest daughter has also obtained her CCW permit, and is planning to purchase a Kahr CW9 for her standard carry gun. With my G19 or Taurus PT92 on my belt and my Kahr in my pocket, I round out the group nicely, and we can all share and shoot the exact same ammo. I have a Dillon Square Deal B set up in my shop to reload 9mm ammo in quantity, so we have no excuses not to go to the range to maintain our proficiency.