University of Alabama police officer kills naked student

[davsand]

53. Defensive shooting is shooting into the center of the body mass.

Cops and military are taught to aim for the center of the body mass. I realize that the TV shows have created a culture that thinks it is somehow a good idea to "shoot the gun out of their hand" or "shoot them in the leg" but the reality is that any training at all teaches you to shoot for the center of the target. Partly this is because you stand a better chance of hitting what you aim at when you shoot for the center. Partly this is because a shot to the extremities is possibly not gonna stop the aggressor from keeping on coming. (Even shooting somebody according to the training is no guarantee that they are gonna go down and stay down, BTW.) Don't even think that a head shot is possible, either. THAT is a huge fiction created by TV and movies.

Something else I want to point out here is that nobody can ever really predict how they will react physically or emotionally to a scenario where they are under attack and have to use deadly force. We can sit here safely removed and second guess actions, but we are not there attempting to process everything in real time. The time you just spent reading this one paragraph is longer than most shooters have to make the decision, and when it means killing somebody that is not much time to work it through.

I'm not gonna defend the cop. I dunno what happened for sure, I was not there. I'm like a lot of other people in here who wonder why a taser was not brought out, and I'm also wondering why it was ONE cop coming out of the station to deal with this kid (wouldn't you think there'd have been more than ONE guy holding down the fort on a Saturday night???) You have one dead kid and quite probably a cop that is wrestling with the reality that he ended a life. This whole thing is tragic, and a lot of questions are gonna need to be answered before it is all said and done.



Laura