Six Officers Charged In Police Pursuit That Ended With 137 Shots Being Fired At Suspects In A Little Over 20 Seconds
from the 90-of-which-failed-to-find-their-targets dept
Late last year, we discussed an investigation of several Cleveland police officers after a high-speed pursuit involving over 60 squad cars and 100 officers culminated in officers unloading 137 bullets in the direction of the stopped vehicle -- 47 of which found homes in the two suspects, who were both killed. One officer -- Michael Brelo -- fired 49 rounds in a little over 20 seconds.
In all, the investigation by the state found that 64 officers violated orders, but none of these officers received anything longer than a 10-day suspension. Two supervisors were demoted and one was fired.
This whole debacle was set off by a couple of perception errors. Some officers thought they heard a gunshot and others thought an officer had been injured. This was all the "evidence" the officers needed to justify mounting a by-any-means-necessary takedown of the two suspects. 137 bullets later, the officers searched the vehicle, recovering exactly zero weapons, bullets or casings.
Nearly eight months later, a grand jury has returned charges against six of the officers. Five of the officers -- all supervisors -- are facing misdemeanor charges of dereliction of duty. Officer Brelo, the cop who single handedly delivered over a third of the 137 bullets, will be facing something more severe.
The Cuyahoga County Grand Jury today voted to indict Cleveland Police Patrol Officer Michael Brelo on two counts of Manslaughter for the killing of Timothy Russell and Malissa Williams on November 29, 2012.The prosecutor's statement further details Brelo's actions.
Under Ohio Revised Code Section 2903.03, Manslaughter is a felony of the first degree, carrying a mandatory prison sentence of from three to 11 years.
After more than 100 shots were fired at Mr. Russell's car, it was trapped by police cruisers in a narrow lane and came to a full stop.You can see Brelo's "heroics" in the State Attorney General's computerized "reenactment," based on evidence gathered. Starting about the 1:00 mark, you can see Brelo move closer to the suspects' vehicle (and across a squad car, apparently), before finally standing directly on the hood and firing down through the suspects' windshield.
All officers at the scene saw fit to cease fire.
Then Officer Brelo started shooting again and fired at least 15 shots, including fatal shots, downward through the windshield into the victims at close range as he stood on the hood of Mr. Russell's car.
The state prosecutor notes that the Supreme Court recently upheld the right of police officers to use deadly (read [in most cases]: "excessive") force to end pursuits that possibly endanger officers or citizens. (More on that here.) But he points out that this situation was not one of those.
The law does not allow for a stop-and-shoot...The statement also calls out the dereliction of duty by police supervisors, who allowed a petty criminal to dictate the actions of a large percentage of Cleveland's police force that night, rather than seizing control of the situation themselves. The officers themselves aren't blameless, even those who didn't contribute to the hail of gunfire. Based on little more than a sound heard by a couple of officers (which may have been a backfire), dozens of cops bought into a narrative that armed and dangerous suspects were on the loose and may have (no one seemed to have been interested in confirming this) injured an officer.
Let's be clear what happened here:
The driver was fully stopped. Escape was no longer even a remote possibility. The flight was over. The public was no longer in danger because the car was surrounded by police cars and 23 police officers in a schoolyard safely removed from pedestrians and traffic.
The primary danger facing the police at this time was from themselves, if they continued to shoot at each other in the circular firing squad they had inadvertently formed.
After the ceasefire, Officer Brelo unleashed an unlawful, second barrage of shots.
The ultimate legal issue is whether the police officer was justified when he stood on the hood of Mr. Russell's car and emptied his clip into the occupants after the chance of flight was completely eliminated and they no longer presented a threat to the public's safety.
He was not.
The prosecutor notes the grand jury no-billed murder charges against Officer Brelo. Murder charges would be excessive, but manslaughter completely undersells Brelo's actions. After all, the vehicle was barricaded and every officer had ceased fire before he jumped up on the hood and ensured the two suspects were completely dead by unloading his weapon at point-blank range through the windshield.
Also noted by the prosecutor is the difficulty investigators had reconstructing the events, thanks to the Cleveland Police Department's lack of dashcams. Why these are still missing from its vehicles after decades of near-universal use by police departments nationwide is a true mystery, especially considering this fact:
The cost of investigating this shooting by the Attorney General, the Cleveland Police Department and the Grand Jury will exceed the cost of purchasing dash cams.There's no conceivable reason for any law enforcement agency to be lacking this equipment. The only reasons verge on inconceivable, most of which can be traced back to a reluctance to be held accountable.
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Filed Under: cleveland, michael brelo, police, police brutality, shooting
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What Violence!
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Perhaps this is the outcome we need to learn to expect.
Recently a police chief in Indiana made it clear as day, "the United States of America has become a war zone".
http://boingboing.net/2014/06/09/small-town-sheriff-buys-tank.html
If this is the mindset of the police, what chance do we have? Feeling like you are at war with those you are supposed to protect and serve and the bad guys aren't wearing black hats so everyone might be a bad guy.
If you don't get them first, they will get you.
It is nice to see charges filed, but this is the exception not the rule these days.
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Cowards like that really, really do not deserve to wear a badge/get out of charges free card, as they are a large factor in why people increasingly don't trust the police, because when someone see you, and treats you as, the enemy, and has the ability to make your life all sorts of bad and/or short, with effectively no limits on what they can do, you'd be a fool to trust them or want them around.
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It's like that old Bill Hicks joke about turning on the news and hearing about "death famine war destruction" only to look outside and hear crickets with nothing else happening.
Used to be you had to wait for the morning paper to get the daily murders buried in page 3, now they're always on and always right in your face on your smart phone.
The mentality is derived from the perception of nonstop chaos (that used to be masked by limited access) which in turn feeds the war. It's a vicious feedback loop of chaos and the expectation of chaos.
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You keep using that word. I think it means what you think it means
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No actually, they wouldn't, not in the slightest. The 'officer' didn't 'accidentally' kill the victims, he deliberately got on their trapped car, and emptied a clip into them. I don't know about you, but that sounds like murder to me.
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Not that I'm a lawyer.
That said, i have a hard time seeing how any of these morons would manage to avoid whatever the actually viable combination of charges that add up to the equivilant of 'attempted manslaughter' would be, save where there's actually evidence that the individual in question somehow managed Not to do anything wrong while participating in the event (or, more accurately, that they did everything right based on information available, despite being caught up on it.)
Note that that's charges, mind you. A conviction requires proof of guilt and an assumption of innocence until proven otherwise. The standards for charging someone should really amount to 'we're not wasting resources harrassing obviously innocent people'... well, ok, a bit higher than that, but I'm not knowledgeable enough on the subject to be more specific.
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In this particular case, the situation escalated in a way that could be argued caused the officer to be either fearful for his life or unable to make a rational situation.
This does not appear to be a case of premeditated murder or murder to further another crime.
While it is horrible and their actions cannot be justified, a charge of manslaughter (given the details we don't know) could be reasonable.
I am really glad to see he didn't just get a two week suspension.
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It's still murder. This argument simply speaks to using the insanity defense.
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It's not aggravated murder, but it could be "normal" murder...
Here's the relevant part of Ohio aggravated murder statute.
I think it's clear that the officer isn't guilty of that - he didn't show up for work that day planning to kill anyone. Here's the relevant part of Ohio murder statute.
Fairly simple. Here's voluntary manslaughter:
So was the officer in a "sudden passion" due to "serious provocation" to "incite" the officer into killing him? I think you could argue that manslaughter applies. Of course, I think in most cases a DA would go for the murder charge and offer manslaughter as a plea deal.
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Well, that's better than letting the criminals win. USA indeed!
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FTFY?
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Response to: That One Guy on Jun 11th, 2014 @ 4:37am
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Re: Response to: That One Guy on Jun 11th, 2014 @ 4:37am
Furthermore I suspect he would have dropped is second, partly expended magazine and reloaded when the shooting stopped, and inserted his third, and possibly final, fully loaded 17 round mag. Which would give him eight rounds per victim while standing on the hood, or if he were more honorable (like other recent multiple murderers in the news when surrounded by cops after they have realized what they have done) seven rounds per victim plus two to finish himself of (just incase one was not enough) to save the rest of the country, and the whole of humanity, from his ass-hattery.
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Re: Re: Response to: That One Guy on Jun 11th, 2014 @ 4:37am
Quite possible.
In the "olden days" the firearms instructors would push their students to "count your rounds" and would give disciplinary actions to anyone who dropped live rounds or kept firing after their gun was dry (a real problem when you had five or six shot revolver, hence Clint Eastwood's famous line.)
With semi-automatic weapons, the slide goes back when the magazine is dry, so it was easier, if you're paying attention, to know that you need to reload, but it still happens. Throw in adrenalin and fog of war, and you could very easily reload on a partial magazine.
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Re: Re: Re: Response to: That One Guy on Jun 11th, 2014 @ 4:37am
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Re: Re: Re: Re: Response to: That One Guy on Jun 11th, 2014 @ 4:37am
I remember reading something like that too. However, 12 seems a little excessive for a single officer in a single incident. I'd have to see the data to figure out whether it was really comparing apples-to-apples. Four officers firing three rounds each would be quite different than one officer firing 12 rounds.
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Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Response to: That One Guy on Jun 11th, 2014 @ 4:37am
Well, the person being shot probably won't notice much difference.
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Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Response to: That One Guy on Jun 11th, 2014 @ 4:37am
To the victim, it makes no difference. But it could make a big difference in terms of what is needed to fix the problem.
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Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Response to: That One Guy on Jun 11th, 2014 @ 4:37am
To the victim, it makes no difference. But it could make a big difference in terms of what is needed to fix the problem.
What's needed is MOAR GUNS, amirite?
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Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Response to: That One Guy on Jun 11th, 2014 @ 4:37am
Exactly. Certainly, the police shouldn't be shooting just because everyone else is shooting. They should be shooting to end a threat. If the threat has been eliminated, there is no need to stand on the hood of the car emptying two and a half clips into the car (or stand over the body committing a coup-de-grace.)
Four police officers, seeing a person pointing a gun at them, respond by firing three shots each is far more justifiable than one police officer firing 12 shots.
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Re: Response to: That One Guy on Jun 11th, 2014 @ 4:37am
Well within the required time limit for qualifications of a police officer. The standard is 3 shots in 2 seconds. Someone who spends the required range time and is firearms qualified can do this easily (if they can find a range that will allow them to do this, since most public ranges don't look kindly at "rapid firing.")
He reloaded twice and still emptied multiple clips (not knowing his specific gun model, 2+ reloads would be typical for a police sidearm).
Out-of-battery exercises are also required for qualifications.
He's just firing wildly with complete disregard to ...everything.
Probably not. Unnecessary, yes. Cold blooded murder, yes. Complete disregard to everything, absolutely. Wildly, probably not.
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Re: Response to: That One Guy on Jun 11th, 2014 @ 4:37am
Do we know it was a sidearm, or might it have been a rifle?
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Re: Re: Response to: That One Guy on Jun 11th, 2014 @ 4:37am
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What a pity
If only they had all opened up with automatic weapons simultaneously.
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Are you sure this wasn't the Blues Brothers
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What did these people DO?
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The chase was further fueled by rumors that a police officer had been injured.
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So, yeah. It began with the non-gunshot. They mistook a sound for gunfire and chased the car until they shot and killed both the passenger and the driver.
Now, hearing what might have been a shot is a justification for attempting to pull over the vehicle, and once the driver started going 110 MPH in a residential area, he's committing several crimes and is a threat to safety and the police are justified in stopping the driver from continuing to do that.
But I'm going to bring up another point here. Why shoot the passenger? Are they going to claim that if one person in a car might have fired a gun, they're justified in executing everyone inside, even if they can't see a gun at the time? For all they know, the driver fired the shot and the passenger is a hostage. So did they intentionally shoot and kill someone who was certainly NOT driving because he may or may not have fired one shot 20 minutes ago, or did they just have bad aim?
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You're talking about someone standing on the hood of the car and firing far more rounds than necessary into the vehicle. Unfortunately there's probably no good answer to "why didn't he just murder the driver and leave the passenger alone?"
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and to most cops in Cleveland that warrants a death sentence.
(possibly after being sexually assaulted by senior staff at the station)
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Can we fire all of them and hire people that can actually hit their target? A competent group of officers should have been able to kill the suspects far quicker.
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That is actually quite respectable, for people when the adrenalin is flowing and who do not practice every day. To shoot accurately under stress needs continuous training, including lots of live fire exercises. Think 40 to 50 rounds a day per person to gain and keep the ability to take a snap shot and hit.
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Response to: Michael on Jun 11th, 2014 @ 5:18am
Situations are different but Consider that Vietnam was on the order of 40000 rounds per kill. Ww2 was around 20,000.
Even a trained sniper is about 75% ( shots/kill)
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Re: Response to: Michael on Jun 11th, 2014 @ 5:18am
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Re: Response to: Michael on Jun 11th, 2014 @ 5:18am
This was a group of police officers in a civilian-filled area firing their weapons AND NOT HITTING WHAT THEY WERE AIMING AT. I think it is a bit disconcerting that 90 bullets went somewhere they were not intended.
BTW - a car does not stop a bullet. You can fire a round into the door of an average car and it will go through the door, through the door on the other side, through a window, and into whatever is on the other side. 90 misses in a neighborhood is a really big problem.
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Re: Re: Response to: Michael on Jun 11th, 2014 @ 5:18am
"In all shootings — including those against people, animals and in suicides and other situations — New York City officers achieved a 34 percent accuracy rate (182 out of 540), and a 43 percent accuracy rate when the target ranged from zero to six feet away. Nearly half the shots they fired last year were within that distance."
Now the total volume of fire expended was excessive but the hit rate is in line with expectations.
And a car most definitely will stop a bullet. Especially a 9 mm which does not have much penetrating power. It depends on the angle and what the bullet passes through, but it definitely can. A car can even stop a .50 cal AP round, depending on what it hits (just a door-no, the engine block-yes)
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Re: Re: Re: Response to: Michael on Jun 11th, 2014 @ 5:18am
Holy crap. Trained police should be able to consistently hit a target from six feet, unless a large percentage of those targets are moving, maybe.
And a car most definitely will stop a bullet. Especially a 9 mm which does not have much penetrating power. It depends on the angle and what the bullet passes through, but it definitely can. A car can even stop a .50 cal AP round, depending on what it hits (just a door-no, the engine block-yes)
A car door will generally not stop a 9mm round, let alone anything with more energy. And the engine block is about the only part of a car that can stop a .50 caliber round (transmission or differential maybe?). My understanding is police are trained to try to keep the engine of a vehicle between themselves and a shooter.
http://www.theboxotruth.com/docs/buickot3.htm
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Re: Re: Re: Re: Response to: Michael on Jun 11th, 2014 @ 5:18am
They are. That is why police cars are always parked at odd angles with the front end to the left during traffic stops.
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Re: Re: Re: Re: Response to: Michael on Jun 11th, 2014 @ 5:18am
I blame it on the target ranges. Target practice simply focuses too little on shooting someone in the back from a distance of one yard. I mean, you probably can't even straighten your arm at that distance.
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Re: Re: Response to: Michael on Jun 11th, 2014 @ 5:18am
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I'm not a gun-owner. But I do have some grudging respect for people who practice rigorous, intelligent self-discipline when using them. And from those people, I've learned (1) never point a gun at something you don't intend to shoot and (2) always clearly identify your target before aiming your gun and discharging your weapon. Aren't both of those topics covered in the first hour of the first day of police weapons training?
If not, why not? If so, then why are ANY of these officers being allowed to carry a gun, when they're so clearly ignorant of the basic principles of its use?
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check
"and (2) always clearly identify your target before aiming your gun and discharging your weapon"
and check.
Seems like he did those things. Still doesn't make it OK.
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Murder
Wrong. The suspects were subdued and no longer posing a threat. Then the "officer" (I use the term loosely) at issue apparently took it upon himself to execute them in cold blood. That's murder in the first.
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Re: Murder
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47 rounds
http://www.glock.com/english/glock19_tech.htm
Even with 19 round clips thats 38 rounds plus the one in the chamber for 39. Cops do not use big huge clips for obvious reasons. So in 20 seconds he emptied a clip, loaded another, emptied it, loaded another and used some of those. It is unlikely they have more than 19 round clips, they might even have 17 round.
As far as I am concerned what they did was at least Voluntary manslaughter along with several other crimes and at least some of them deserve the punishment for that. However, it is VERY common for cops to get away with these things. All they typically have to do is say they saw what looked like a weapon or they felt their life was in danger or something of that nature.
Cops fear the people and people fear the cops.... It is a bad cycle going on here and the cops are the ones who are always armed with lethal force.
Any time I am pulled over I am slightly afraid for my life. I always try to pull over in a parking lot type place if possible, i put my hands on the steering wheel and explain any time I am going to reach for something, etc...
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Re: 47 rounds
"Even with 19 round clips thats 38 rounds plus the one in the chamber for 39. Cops do not use big huge clips for obvious reasons. So in 20 seconds he emptied a clip, loaded another, emptied it, loaded another and used some of those. It is unlikely they have more than 19 round clips, they might even have 17 round."
How hard is that to do? That is, how much practice does someone need to fire all those shots and change out the clips like that? Is this something that anybody could do, or is this only-in-a-movie-with-SFX stuff that no real human being could actually pull off?
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It is EXTREMELY difficult to be accurate while doing so.
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Also as Michael said, it is very difficult to do this accurately. It takes a lot of practice - several hundred rounds per month. There are very, very few police officers who practice this much. When I was competing, we often had police officers come to matches. Many of them didn't come back. My observation was that the ones who didn't generally did pretty poorly in their first outing and didn't take it well. Now this isn't a blanket statement - we had a few officers who were regulars and were very, very good.
Military folks refer to the type of unloading in this story as "spray and pray." Our competition mantra was "you can't miss fast enough to win."
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The police qualifications I am familiar with are 3 shots in 2 seconds. Well below the 4 shots a second for normal competition shooters. 2 seconds doesn't sound like a very long time until you qualify...then it seems like ages. I suspect competition shooters have the same problem at a much greater scale for a second.
Also as Michael said, it is very difficult to do this accurately.
Depends on how close you are to the target. Most out-of-battery exercises are about 3 yds from the target (which actually isn't a very bad distance.) At that range, pointing the gun at the target is all the aiming you really need and you can get very close to the center of the milk-bottle without much effort. For competition shooters, 3 yds is the bare minimum and most of them like 5-10 yds. At that range, front-site-picture and accuracy are far more important.
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By the way, about an hour ago I went outside and stood on the hood of my car and assumed the position that I suppose someone trying to shoot the occupants would use. My first order guesstimate of the range from my hand to someone sitting in the front seat is three feet. (Roughly speaking: arm extended out at about 45 degree downward angle. I'm about six feet tall.)
Maybe this is my lack of understanding, education and experience showing but I don't see how I could miss a human-torso-plus-head size target at that range. Am I overlooking some obvious difficulty with this?
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By the time he got onto the hood, he was the only one firing.
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I completely understand that the job of a police officer is difficult and dangerous, but even when someone is shooting at them, they are not supposed to spray the neighborhood with bullets to protect themselves - they are supposed to be protecting EVERYONE ELSE first.
This yahoo was far more dangerous to the public than the perpetrators - who in this case were apparently not dangerous at all, but would have been even if they happened to have a handgun and had fired it at the officers.
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"Sight picture" and where the shooter's eyes focus are important. If the shooter isn't focused on their gun's sights, sight alignment will likely be off when the shot fires and the shot can go anywhere.
Smoothly recovering sight alignment from the previous shot's recoil takes both strength and dexterity. Shooters with poorer arm and upper body strength will do more poorly and performance will degrade rapidly over multiple shots.
The role of the windshield glass can't be discounted. A windshield won't stop a major caliber handgun bullet, but it can most certainly deflect the bullet, depending on the angle of impact. When shooting through such heavy glass, the shooter will have to consider the angle and adjust the point of aim to get the desired hit.
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While they can be done smoothly, they require repositioning of the hands at least - getting back on target quickly after a re-load takes lots of practice too.
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They shouldn't. Reloading should be as fluid and with one hand as possible, with no looking. The gun remains on target the whole time. If you are repositioning your hands, you are doing it wrong. The only time you should remove your trigger hand from the gun is when you put it back in your holster. The trick is practicing this over and over until it becomes easy.
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This is Ameriku after all.
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Tim Cushing pushes his hate-cops agenda here because his life is a failure. He says stupid things like bad cop behavior is "prevalent" because he searches the web for bad cop stories. And thusly he, and you, and any other simpleton are going to be mocked. Deal with it.
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Since the police are generally unwilling to solve the problem, it falls to us to force the issue. A big part of doing that is publicly pointing out and decrying the abuses. How is this a bad thing?
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No, it's not prevalent. There are well over a million police officers in the US. You could look at most other similar sized professions and find bad actors. Why isn't Tim Cushing posting about the abuses in the medical, auto dealer, construction, accounting, etc professions?
Because he's a loser that hates cops. Now do yourself a favor and go buy a book on critical thinking before you end up a failure like him.
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Medical: About 2 or 3 stories per year of a medical type killing somebody on purpose.
Auto dealer: I don't recall any Auto dealers killing anybody.
You have a cite?
Construction: I hear of dozens being killed. Can't recall any of construction workers killing somebody on purpose.
Accounting: I can imagine accountants going on rampages under the flag of the Crimson Permanent Assurance. But none in reality.
Law Enforcers: Killing innocent people? LOTS!
You didn't think this out, did you? Or perhaps I should leave at "You didn't think..."
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Let's face facts, you just don't want anyone pointing out the wrong-doings of police. That is just as bad as openly supporting them.
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It's not much of a stretch to see that if you're this indiscriminate in people getting riddled with bullets, you probably don't mind it yourself. If you're so adamant that the majority of policemen aren't this abusive, cite your sources.
Would you rather condone this behavior and allow for more policemen to be trigger-happy, and shoot everyone up until there's no one left to complain?
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What kind of fairy obsesses with Tim Cushing articles on bad cops?
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Yikes
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*IE, Taking care of the bad cops, not eliminating journalists.
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A big step, I'd argue the first step, to fixing a problem is admitting and/or knowing that the problem exists, something that these articles help do, so where exactly are the objections coming from?
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Are you going to find proof that this is happening?
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It's now understood that it reflects a different kind of warfare. Just as it took decades to recognize that rank-and-file had become absurd against heavy rifles, it took years to recognize that suppressive fire was an excellent tactic.
In Vietnam we had excellent logistical support and complete control of the air. Bullets were cheap and easily resupplied. It wasn't always clear that what you were shooting at should be dead, or was just a decoy for the real danger. So the best tactic was loosely aimed fire at a density that made it a risky for the enemy to move or return fire.
If you actually want to kill something in a specific area, that's what artillery was for: keep them from moving using suppressive light rounds, while you call in AP artillery rounds.
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I wonder if they still have those pinned up?
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