Massad Ayoob's Blog, page 120

REFLECTIONS ON FORT HOOD REDUX

John Farnam

I’ve waited this long to comment on the latest atrocity at Fort Hood, to allow the investigation to play out. A few days prior to the incident, my friend and colleague John Farnam had pointed out that military intelligence indicated there would be a “replay of Fort Hood” very soon somewhere in America.  At this point, there is no indication that he latest mad dog was a jihadist, only a man with a broken mind who had apparently put a good deal of thought into such mass murder before he carried it out…closer to the monster of Sandy Hook Elementary School than the fanatic who previously wrought havoc at Fort Hood.

In the end, the motive matters less than the act…and the failure to interdict it in a timely fashion. The same John Farnam, a combat Marine in the Vietnam era and a lawman later, noted after the last rampage that on the rare occasions when gunmen do the same in a domestic law enforcement environment – that is, open fire in a police station – they at most get off a few shots and inflict a few wounds before the intended victims react, draw their own ever-present service pistols from their holsters, and shoot the gunman down like the mad dog he has obviously become.

Large institutions steeped in tradition are slow to change their paradigms, and the American military fits that description  in this respect.

Andy Brown

But it has now been 20 years since the mass murder at Fairchild AFB, five since the jihadist rampage at Fort Hood (“workplace violence,” my ass), and days since the latest horror on the same killing ground.  Each time, it ended as soon as the mass murderer came under fire. A bullet in the brain from my friend Andy Brown’s Beretta put down the rabid dog of Fairchild. A security officer’s bullet paralyzed the first Fort Hood coward into a limbo that stopped this side of his hoped-for martyrdom. When the latest killer came under fire, he shot himself dead, as so many mass-murderers have in other settings as soon as they met return fire, or knew they were about to.

Unilaterally disarming our own armed services in the face of clear and present threat is simply ludicrous. Arming the potential victims on our domestic bases will be a complicated thing. Simply recognize civilian carry permits for qualified personnel on base? Easier at Fort Hood in Texas or Fort Benning in Georgia than at the Pentagon in the District of Columbia.  If nothing else, select officers and non-coms wearing service pistols on base would be a good start.  There are many fine minds at the Judge Advocate General’s Office which could work that out.

Otherwise, history tells us, the second Fort Hood massacre will not be the last replay of this American Tragedy.

FORT HOOD: UNANSWERED QUESTIONS
FORT HOOD: Go ahead, blame the weapon, not the killer…
FORT HOOD: DÉJÀ VU
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YOU CAN’T KEEP A GOOD MAN DOWN

My old friend Frank James has long been one of America’s favorite gun writers.  His honest warts-and-all evaluations of new firearms won the hearts of firearms enthusiasts even as they pissed off certain manufacturers.  He brought the same straightforward approach to his TV gun shows, “Gallery of Guns” on The Sportsman Channel and “Gun Stories” on The Outdoor Channel.

I learned from one of my favorite bloggers, Tamara Keel at View from the Porch, that Frank had been felled by a severe stroke in late January.  Thanks to brother writers Rich Grassi and Walt Rauch, I discovered that he was recovering in one of the world’s best rehabilitation clinics, and was able to adjust the schedule and fly there for a quick visit.

Happily, I can report that Brother Frank is still very much with us, still with a strong gun hand and working on getting the other hand back up and running.  The stroke damn near killed him, but he’s walking better than expected and exceeding the requirements of physical therapy every day. He wants to express his thanks for the volunteer emergency rescue team that saved his life, and for the rehab nurses he calls “angels with bedpans.”

Best of all, his incisive mind remains intact.  One friend told him, “You sound like the old Frank, with a cold.”  Hell, talking with him at the clinic, I couldn’t even detect the “cold” part.  You’ll be able to catch Frank on “Gun Stories” toward the end of July, because he recorded his segments prior to the stroke, but the medical crisis forced him to miss “Gallery of Guns” this season. Expect him back next season though!

Frank wants to remind all y’all to closely monitor high blood pressure if you have it, take your meds religiously, and dial 9-1-1 at the first hint of stroke symptoms. He doesn’t want others to go through what he did.  He’ll soon be transferring to a rehab center closer to home, so his lovely wife of 37 years won’t have to travel three hours each way to visit him.

“I’m going to beat this,” he says resolutely.

I know the man. With his determination and strength of character, I think he’s going to beat it, too.

You are all invited to post your good wishes to Frank in the comments section here, and I’ll see that they get to him, sorta like a cybernetic get-well card.

Frank James is an inspiration to us all.

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A HERO OF GUN OWNERS’ CIVIL RIGHTS PASSES

I sadly learned of the death today of Otis McDonald.  He passed at 79 after a valiant battle against cancer. It was the first long battle he didn’t win.

As a black man in America, he fought his way up from economic disadvantage to earning a good living for his family.  He fought against violent crime in his adopted city of Chicago, and in so doing came to his most famous battle as the lead named plaintiff in McDonald, et. al. v. City of Chicago. In the plaintiffs’ landmark victory in that case in 2010, the Supreme Court of the United States ruled that neither the Windy City nor any other city could ban law-abiding citizens from owning handguns for defense of self and family.  The McDonald decision helped pave the way for the concealed carry permits now being issued throughout Illinois.

You can listen to my interview with Otis McDonald and co-plaintiffs Colleen Lawson, David Lawson, and Adam Orloff.  Not long before his death, Colleen and David and I were able to gather some students to create a video postcard of thanks and well-wishes to Otis.

He was a fighter for civil rights and human rights in every respect, and Otis McDonald will never be forgotten.

Godspeed, brother.

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WHY WE USE EXPANDING BULLETS, PART V: THE MOST SURPRISING REASON

Ever since some ACLU types tried to ban hollow points in the early ‘70s, the clueless have been shouting about “malicious intent” to cause “additional pain and suffering” with “more lethal” ammo. We’ve explained several reasons why it’s used. There’s one more, and it surprises folks until they look at what the courts call “the totality of the circumstances.”

One sharp-eyed, sharp-thinking reader, Alonzo Gomez, has already found it. In the last segment, he commented, “…just wanted to add this: stopping who needs to be stopped as fast as possible is not only in the interest of the shooter and any possible bystanders or victims, but also in the shootee’s. While the antis are so busy finding terminal ballistics discussions distasteful and irrelevant to their approach (‘don’t have a gun’), they seem to miss that one effective bullet, as abhorrent as the term ‘effective’ may be to them, is preferable to 12 ineffective ones in the target’s body. Hollow points are actually more humane. Unless they prefer that we load with icepick projectiles so they can better nail us in the courtroom for overkill?”

Alonzo nailed it. If you look at the big picture, the guy shot fewer times is probably easier for emergency medical personnel to save, making the expanding bullet literally less lethal. Now, the points of less over-penetration, reduced ricochet, and faster stops are pretty much incontrovertible. This last point is more debatable, because there are so many variables as to where even one bullet can land. But it’s a strong argument for our side, certainly strong enough to serve as an antidote to the poison of the BS “dum-dum bullets are indicia of malice” argument.

Thanks for taking the time to read this short series. Life has taught me that if you can’t explain why you’re doing what you’re doing, it’s nature’s way of telling you that you probably shouldn’t be doing it. The above explanations have served me well for forty years, and for the best of all reasons: they’re absolutely true.

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WHY WE USE EXPANDING BULLETS, PART IV: FASTER “STOPS”

The reason police unions and police firearms training units fought so hard for hollow point bullets back in the day was that they wanted their cops to survive gunfights with violent criminals.  Simply put, expanding bullets stop the bad guys faster.

The history of law enforcement shows it, incontrovertibly.  I was a young puppy when I learned of the case in which an NYPD officer emptied his six-shot .38 into a man charging him with a knife. The 158 grain round-nose lead .38 Special bullets just punched ice-pick wounds in one side of the criminal and out the other, and he was still able to stab the officer in the center of the chest. They died together on the street. Then I remember a friend of mine, a mid-Western policeman, who had to use a similar .38 Special revolver against a man trying to murder him: a single hollow point bullet in the center of the chest dropped the attacker in his tracks.  My friend, all these years later, is still alive.

That was the history of the old “ball ammo” versus today’s hollow points.  It runs true across the range of calibers in handguns, and even up into rifles.  Why do hunters use expanding bullets on soft-skinned big game?  Same reason: it drops them faster.  Mammals are mammals, two-legged or four.  Yes, some of both kinds of critters soak up a lot of bullets before they go down. As a rule, it takes fewer hollow points than it does “ball” rounds. This is why, from the Los Angeles Police Protective League to the Patrolmen’s Benevolent Association in NYC, police representative organizations shouted long and loud for more effective ammo for their members. Once the hollow points were on the streets and the results were in, those cries died down.

Why is a citizen, security guard, or cop ever allowed to shoot a human being at all? Because that human being is doing something so terrible that the laws of Society and Man and God together have approved shooting him as justifiable homicide, to save the innocent from the man who has to be shot.  The sooner he falls, the sooner he stops shooting or stabbing innocent people;  the sooner his savagery ends, the better it is for all the innocent people concerned.

Wasn’t it Napoleon who supposedly said that God fought on the side that had the best artillery? If you’re on the righteous side, you want the best artillery…and, history shows, with small arms from pistols to rifles, the best artillery is a bullet that does more than punch a narrow, puckered ice-pick wound.

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WHY WE USE EXPANDING BULLETS PART III: REDUCED RICOCHET POTENTIAL

They don’t call cities “concrete canyons” for nothing.  Many shootings have taken place at banks and courthouses. Did you ever notices that the architects who build such edifices seem to be obsessed with polished marble? It would be hard to design a substance more likely to cause ricochets.  And, we all know, “bouncing bullets” follow unpredictable paths.  Heavy bone can also deviate a bullet off its intended path.  An adult lifetime of studying shootings has shown me multiple cases of bullets glancing off sloping foreheads, U-shaped human mandibles, etc.

If the Good Guy’s bullet ricochets away from its intended trajectory it can continue onward with enough residual velocity to kill the next innocent person it meets.  This, obviously, is unacceptable.

While any bullet can ricochet on an extremely acute angle, the supposedly “more humane” round nose non-expanding bullet is MUCH more likely to do so. It’s as if the damn thing was  DESIGNED to ricochet.

The hollow point bullet, by contrast, has a nose that is literally shaped like a cookie-cutter. It is MUCH more likely to bite into the hard surface it strikes, and either bury itself there, or shatter into small, less harmful fragments, or tumble and quickly decelerate, decreasing its power to cause injury.

The NYPD was one of the last police departments to drop “ball ammo” for hollow points. A couple of years ago, a controversial shooting took place outside the Empire State Building, in which two street cops engaged a man who pointed a .45 at them after just murdering a man. The officers quickly dropped him, but the department took a lot of heat because some nine bystanders were injured by their gunfire.

NONE of the injuries were life-threatening. Then-NYPD Commissioner Ray Kelly initially reported that all the bystanders were hit by fragments. Later reports (and lawsuits) indicated that two or three of the bystanders might have been hit by whole bullets. At least two of those projectiles were recovered from a limb or a buttock at the treating hospital. Exact details on this have not yet been made public.

The officers were issued Speer Gold Dot 124 grain +P 9mm hollow points, which will penetrate a foot or more into solid muscle tissue simulating ballistic gelatin.  If they stopped in a glute or a leg, they were obviously slowed down by something before they hit: something like the concrete planters outside the Empire State Building, which were behind the killer from the officers’ angle of fire.  Had those been the full metal jacket round nose bullets that NYPD issued prior to 1999, more deeply penetrating wounds and more serious or even fatal injuries would likely have resulted from ricochets.

Reduced ricochet potential is another reason why virtually all of America’s police issue hollow points.  It’s a public safety thing.  But there are still more street-proven reasons to use hollow points, and we’ll detail them as this series continues.

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WHY WE USE EXPANDING BULLETS FOR SELF-DEFENSE PART II: THE OVER-PENETRATION FACTOR

Let’s return to the things which justify our choice of hollow-point bullets.  A major factor – the one that convinced police chiefs in even the most “politically-correct” cities to insist on this ammo when some were calling for a ban on “dum-dum bullets” – was reduced penetration.  Cops called them “controlled expansion rounds” because as the nose of the hollow-point bullet widened as it passed through flesh, it met more resistance and came to a stop sooner.  Therefore, it was more likely to stay inside the only backstop the Good Guy or Gal pulling the trigger had: the body of the violent criminal attacker.  Self-defense shootings, after all, aren’t likely to take place on gun ranges with the Bad Guy standing in front of a backstop.

Your typical military “ball” ammunition will tend to shoot through and through a human body with more than enough power to kill another human standing behind the intended recipient of the projectile. A full metal jacket (FMJ) round nose 9mm bullet will pierce two feet or more of ballistic gelatin, which is designed to replicate the resistance of human muscle tissue.  A .45 “hardball” round in this configuration will penetrate 26” to 30” depending on the load.  A human thorax is simply not that deep, nor that solid.  Stand three average adult men in line: such a bullet will completely perforate the upper torso of the first, enter the chest and exit the back of the second, and lodge deep in the body of the third.  It can kill three people in a row, two of them theoretically innocent bystanders.

“Just be sure of your target and background” is altogether too simplistic an approach to reducing that danger.  Tunnel vision is known to occur in a majority of gunfight participants.  Darkness may hide the innocent from the sight of the Good Guy who is firing.  The Bad Guy’s body may even physically block the Good Guy’s view.  This is why it’s important to have a bullet which is highly likely to remain in the intended target and not pass through.

You’ll hear the argument, “There’s more danger to bystanders from misses than from over-penetration, and you’re likely to miss some anyway, so don’t worry about it.” That is “apples and oranges,” and terribly short-sighted.  It’s like saying “Don’t be afraid of herpes, AIDS is worse.”  In each example, the smart person wants to avoid both bad outcomes.

Let’s say you come under fire from an armed robber this very night, and have no choice but to shoot back. One of your shots misses and strikes a bystander. It is tragic, but you have a very strong defense: in the Doctrine of Competing Harms, your disciplined defensive gunfire presented less danger to innocents behind the Bad Guy than his wanton, criminal gunfire presented to the innocents behind you. You were forced into difficult circumstances (a moving target in the dark, as you ducked desperately to avoid being shot as you returned fire), and the proximate cause of your less than perfect marksmanship was his action, not yours.  It will very likely be seen as excusable: that is, it shouldn’t have happened, but it would have happened to any cautious, competent person in the same situation you had been forced into.

But let’s say your full metal jacket .45 ball round hit the bad guy in the chest, exited his back, and then struck the unseen bystander.  You had ample time beforehand to select appropriate ammunition, and you knew or should have known this could happen…yet you used the wrong ammo anyway.  Now, opposing counsel has the ingredients to cook up a recipe of “willful, wanton disregard for innocent human life” on your part.

So, reduced likelihood of dangerous over-penetration is one strong reason to use hollow points…but not the ONLY reason.  There are more, and we’ll discuss them as this series continues.

Federal HST 230gr +P .45 caliber bullet shown here expanded, retrieved from hog.

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WE PAUSE FOR A BRIEF ANNOUNCEMENT

I’m going to interrupt the series on hollow point ammunition for a time-sensitive announcement.  My friend Rob Pincus is running for the NRA Board of Directors as a write-in candidate.  If you’re a voting member, he’d appreciate your help.

His announcement is here: http://www.icetraining.info/rob-pincus-for-the-nra-board-of-directors/.

His position statement is here: http://www.icetraining.info/open-carry-constitutional-carry-and-mandatory-gun-training/.

I’ve known Rob for a long time. He’s a very bright and articulate guy, and comes from the home- and self-defense side rather than the sporting side.  We don’t agree on everything, but I’ve always found him open to new ideas and extremely analytical in his approach.

New blood is a good thing for any organization.  I think Rob Pincus would be good for the NRA, and I’m herewith endorsing him.

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WHY WE USE EXPANDING BULLETS FOR SELF-DEFENSE

PART I

This past Monday I was at a state bar association headquarters, leading a panel discussion they were filming on gun modifications and gun-and-ammo choices as they relate to shooting cases.  On the same day, half a world away, South African athlete Oscar Pistorius was on trial for murder in the death of his girlfriend. It turned out that the ammunition in the death weapon in South Africa was jacketed hollow point, and the prosecution was making a huge deal about its deadly effects, implying that using it was indicia of malice in and of itself.  http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/world/prosecutor-in-pistorius-trial-says-autopsy-testimony-is-graphic-should-not-be-broadcast/article17391312/.  Oddly enough, at the bar association CLE (continuing legal education) film we discussed the same thing.

The ammo was reportedly Ranger, a Winchester brand which in this country is generally sold as “law enforcement only,” though outside of San Francisco I don’t know of any laws actually banning its use by private citizens.  (Interestingly, the images they showed on CNN looked more like Federal HST.  I watched the talking heads babble on about how the bullet spread itself out into petals that spun like a fan.  Slice and dice…it could have been a Cuisinart commercial.

The panel they were filming on our end was made up entirely of people carrying Glock pistols with Winchester Ranger ammunition.  The police chief who used to command LAPD Metro and SWAT had 124 grain Ranger +P in his 9mm Glock 17. The Sergeant/Rangemaster who had shot a guy with such a bullet was wearing the same Glock 21 he had used that night, with 230 grain Ranger .45 ACP.  And I had the same ammo he did, in my RoBar custom Glock 30S.

The BS arguments about “malicious dum-dum bullets” have been going on for more than 40 years in this country.  Yet such expanding bullets are issued to virtually all of American law enforcement, and are the smart thing to put in personal defense and home defense handguns. The reasons are reduced likelihood of overpenetration, reduced likelihood of ricochet, and faster neutralization of threats to the innocent so deadly that they warrant lethal force in the first place. I think those are incontrovertible arguments.  But there’s also a fourth argument, and we’ll get to that before long.

This will kick off a five-part series, so our readers can have the tools to defend their use of appropriate ammunition when that choice is falsely questioned in a court of law.

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A MOVIE THAT GETS IT RIGHT

A little while back, in this post, we all had fun with some of the “gun bloopers” from TV and the movies.  I have now been authorized to tell you about one movie that’s gonna get it right.

Panteao Productions is a producer of high-end tactical training films, as a quick scan of their website at www.panteaoproductions.com will show.  In the interest of total disclosure, three of those films are mine, and like the others are all downloadable to computer or available to you on DVD.  I also shot on his pistol team for many years.  So, he’s a friend of mine…but I also know the guy, and when he says he’s going to produce a film, it gets produced.

Now, Panteao is going to expand into movie theater entertainment with the film “Alexander’s Bridge.”

You can check it out here: http://www.indiegogo.com/projects/alexander-s-bridge.  Their quick synopsis is: “Alexander’s Bridge is a science fiction/action film about an elite team of US Army Delta Force Operators accidentally sent back 150 years to the middle of the Civil War. Finding themselves where a battle is about to take place and where thousands of Federal and Confederate soldiers will be killed or wounded, they must decide what to do. Can they make a difference? Who will they try to help? Will they get back home?”

I’ve read the script. This ain’t “Guns of the South” with M4s instead of AK47s.  Panteao CEO Fernando Coelho has real Delta Force operators like Paul Howe and Tom Spooner on his team, and many more top-notch people from whom to draw technical advice. The movement patterns, the tactics, and of course the gun handling are all gonna be real. The Civil War battle scenes won’t consist of Hollywood extras dressed in blue and gray and given rubber guns to run around with: they’ll be made up of hard-core Civil War re-enactors who are absolutely authentic down to the threads of their clothing,  period-correct boot-laces, and of course, the guns.

I hope I’m not letting a cat out of the bag here, but my favorite part of the script is that it ain’t just about 21st Century dudes rockin’ M4s and kickin’ butt on dudes with muzzle-loading single shots (though some of the players will be using period-correct lever actions like you’d have somehow found the money to buy for your son if he was going off to fight in the War Between the States back then).  The most moving part of the film will come when bone-tired battle surgeons of the 1860s watch America’s Finest apply modern tactical emergency medicine to wounded soldiers.  I like it because it shows the world that Our People care more about saving lives than extinguishing them.

It will be entertainment…but it will also be “enter-train-ment.” With the “indiego” thing, you get to chip in for a piece of the production action.

And once it comes out, the next time you and your friends are joking about how movies and TV always get this stuff wrong, you’ll be able to say…”Well, they got it right on the movie I helped to underwrite and produce!”

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