Some interesting takeaways. Feel free to list yours.
The officer shot the bad guy 21 times before neutralizing the threat. He fired a total of 31 rounds. That’s a much higher than average hit ratio.
He had to reload.
When he reloaded, he appears to strip the magazine out of his gun. Some of my trainers have taught this technique others have criticized it. I’m not suggesting a method, simply observing. The insertion of the fresh mag does not appear to be very smooth or fast. But he got it done. My point in saying this is the loss of fine motor skills under stress. Again, no critique of the officer. Just the pondering/reflection of why do I think I’ll do it better?
While the camera angle makes it difficult to tell how far away he is, this does not appear to be a typical 3-5 yards from the bad guy shooting. This is true even after he crosses the road.
5 The officer does a tremendous job of using that space. He was able to make his shots at distance. He also uses the cover/concealment of the car.
The cop shoots across a lane of traffic. I found that interesting. Not a criticism and likely not something a civilian is going to face, but interesting.
There are obviously a lot of differences here between what an officer does and what a civilian would/should do. For example, the civilian has no duty to pursue the perpetrator.
I don’t think it is out of the realm of possibility for a civilian to have to deal with crossing traffic or crossing people. Especially if they get caught up in an active killer type event like this. The safest thing for a solo civilian in this situation would be to use the vehicles as cover and run away. But if their family was in one of the vehicles involved in the accident they may have no choice but to try and engage.
You have to wonder if the officer was mentally aware of when vehicles were crossing or if he was just locked in on the target? I think it would be very challenging to keep your situational awareness broad enough to account for rapidly moving non threats when faced with a threat that is actively shooting at you and your companions. I don’t know of a good way to train for this aside from mental reps unless you have access to force on force training with extra participants able to play the part of innocent civilians.
Regardless of the officers awareness of the traffic, he was dealing with a deadly threat that was firing rapidly across that same traffic with no care for what innocent people they might hit. The killer may even have been targeting those vehicles as well. So the officer needed to take whatever actions necessary to end the confrontation ASAP without exposing himself any more than necessary. So his actions seem completely reasonable and necessary to me.
It sounds like this guy was looking to cause even more harm in the future but saw this opportunity and decided to act. This officer not only saved most of the people immediately involved in this event but likely many other lives at some future event as well.
For me, sitting here watching the video, That cop kept his composure even after 3 of his partners were injured/killed. I’m not sure I would have been yelling “Drop The Gun”. I think I’d be making hamburger.
With apparently 21 hits on target I think this LEO accomplished that task. It just took some time for the murderer to realize he was dead which is one of the big disadvantages with being limited to a handgun during a self defense situation.