Do you remember the rule?
How many times should you shoot an aggressor? One shot? Double tap? Mozambique Drill? How good are you under extreme pressure? Do you know if your bullets are hitting the target? The only way you can know if they are having the desired impact is if the attacker stops. Therefore, you shoot until the threat stops.
The threat is considered stopped when the person making the threat can no longer actively commit violence against you. If you want to escape unharmed, you must keep shooting until the threat stops.
Take a look at this video. You see three different angles of the incident in less than two minutes.
In the first scene, you see the attacker strike the doors of the courthouse with a bat. This may not be deadly force. Maybe he just really hated those doors. But it is still grounds for an officer to investigate and attempt to take the man into custody. Because the man has indicated by his actions that he may be willing to use violence as active resistance to his arrest, the officer chooses to use a Taser. When the Taser does not work, the attacker turns his attention to the officer and, by his actions, indicates his intent to cause great bodily harm or even death. He has a weapon: the bat. He has intent: It is clearly shown by his actions. He has a delivery system: the ability to move and deliver injurious or deadly blows with the weapon. All the elements for the use of deadly force against an attacker are there.
In the video, the deadly attack beings at the 33-second mark. The attack is over by the 39-second mark as the man falls, still clutching the bat. The officer has retreated what looks to be about 30 feet or more, wisely moving a bit laterally in an effort to escape the attack. With no sound on this video, you can’t really tell when the shooting actually begins, but, trust me, it takes a bit of time, as you will see in the officer’s body-camera footage.
The body-camera footage begins at about the 40-second mark, but the real speed and danger of the attack is clear at about 1:10. At 1:13 in this video, you see the Taser deployment and notice immediately that it fails. The officer begins to back up, drops the Taser and, while continuing backward in the face of a deadly threat, fires, by my count, 10 rounds in just over two seconds. We are not told how many of those rounds hit the attacker, but it is clear that the attacker did not stop and apparently would not stop without the application of deadly force. Notice also that as soon as the threat stopped, the officer stopped firing.
This is time for some soul-searching. Have you trained to draw and fire while backing up? Look objectively at this video and ask yourself, “If I was suddenly face-to-face with an armed attacker, do I have the skills to stop the threat?”
Your nice tight group at 25 yards doesn’t seem so important, now does it? You need, I mean you really NEED, bullets into that bad guy as quickly as possible. As long as he can swing that bat, he is a danger to you.
Keep shooting him until the threat stops. Then stop shooting immediately. Then get a lawyer, because the attacker’s family will demand to know why you shot him “so many times.”
