Home Forums Hunting & Shooting Handguns Let's be honest...

This stuff of a bad guy being down in one or two shots is fantasy and will get you killed. A pistol does not kill like a centerfire rifle. Unless one is lucky and hit the brain you will have to wait for the bad guys blood pressure to drop low enough that his body will shut down.

A buddy of mine (road cop, swat officer) shot a guy 5 times through the chest (damn near perfect on all shots) one night that was chraging him with a three foot piece of pipe. He told me that he still had to run backwards and avoid several swings of the pipe before the bad guy hit the ground and left this world. It was later determined that the bad guy was on nothing other than being determined.

Dink

You are spot on DINK, how about the FBI shoot out in Miami in 86 these guys weren't on anything either except adrenaline

a long time ago, in the 70's, i felt perfectly comfortable with a model 19 and a couple of speedloaders. To some extent i still do.
however, I have been down in that area between tucson and phoenix several times in the last month way back in the sticks.
These days i have a high powered scoped rifle in the vehicle with me, and a high capacity pistol with several mags.
Times have changed.

Dink first off where did I say killed?????? No person or animal dies the same. For whatever reasons I have seen animals with perfect shot placement drop dead, run off and die, and no I didn't see this but a friend of mine killed an elk this season with his rifle. After removing the heart they found 4" of an arrow shaft and broadhead dead center of the heart. No new holes and everything around it healed. So you explain that.

I haven't been to any of the fancy shooting schools. Only training I have is USMC. I have been in combat and I have seen what the capablities of different weapons are. I pick the proper weapon for the job. I am not going out to fight a war with a pistol alone. As I am not taking my wife out to dinner with my Rifle slung over my shoulder.

I'm trying to figure out why it should matter to so many people. Sounds like a good forum for 10 round magazine restrictions.

JWP475 I was just talking about that gunfight today. For anyone that does not know special agent dove shot platte(bank robber) through the heart with a 9mm 115 grain silver tip at the onset of the gunfight. Platte went on to kill two agents (one being Dove) and wound five others with a mini 14. His partner in crime Matix was shot at the start of the gunfight also with a 158 grain lead hollow point from a .38 in the nasal cavity and was only able to fire one round from his shotgun. Most experts agree that if Matix would have been in the fight also that all FBI agents would have been killed. Matix did again engage in the fight just as Platte was killed but Matix was then shot a additional four times in the head while still seated in the car. ending the fight.

Dink

Montanacreekhunter didn't you say that any fight would be over in a round or two or the good guy would be down?

It is documented that a person shoots between 8% and 10% of there ability they show on the range. I am not a very good pistol shot to began with and all I have to work with is less than 10% of that when chit hits the fan there is a very good chance I will miss the first two shots.

Everyone is free to defend themselves and there families any way they want. I have spent years studying and talking to people that have been there and done that. I get to teach firearms for my job and it gives me a little insight to what the average person can and can not do. You can take my opinion for what its worth. If anyone wants to defend there families with a Ruger LCP and believe they will survive most incidents I think thats just wishful thinking on there part.

Dink

Actually Agent Doves 9mm bullet didn't reach the heart. The bullet entered the left bicep where it ruptured a maim artery and this was a fatal wound. The bullet then entered the chest cavity in line with the heart but didn't have enough penetration to reach the heart. Pratt continued to press the fight for another 4 1/2 minutes after agent Dove's shot and multiple other hits

I have a complete forensic report on the shooting and have studied it completely

JWP the info I have says the bullet went through the heart but failed to expand. The FBI deemed it bullet failure for the reason the fight went on for 4 1/2 minutes. This why they went to the 10mm that none of them could shoot very well. They wanted the speed the 10mm produced.

I also have a forensic report complete with drawings of where Platt and Matix were shot and angle of bullet travel.

I wonder which one is correct.

Dink

Lack of expansion was not the problem, lack of penetration was. The bullet that hit Matrix under his left eye went through the sinus cavity and stop next to the vertebrae again a lack of penetration in order to totally incapacitate.

I have the forensic report by right here on my desk complete with autopsy pictures as well as statements by the surviving agents

Mine states that the bullet did not expand as it went through the heart. Mine also states that the bullet that hit Matix stopped in the sinus cavity and says nothing about the vertebrae.

Mine also has the autopsy pics but not the statements by the surviving agents. How did you get yours?

Dink

I wonder how far away we are from being told he should have been using big, heavy, wide-meplat, hard-cast bullets?

On page 38 I quote:

The bullet through Platt's right upper arm caused considerable damage. Besides rupturing the brachial blood vessels there must have been significant nerve injury since several of the major nerves of the arm travel with bradhial vessels. However, at least a portion of the median nerve, which controls the muscle used to pul a trigger had to have remained intact since Platt did continue firing his Mini-14. The large ragged exit wound from the arm and the jagged entry wound into the chest suggest a tumbling of the bullet as it entered the chest, passed through the fifth intercoastal space, and stopped in the helium (perhaps damaging either the pulmonary artery or vein or both). A markedly deformed bullet can be seen in the hilar region in the chest X-ray. The right lung was totally collapsed and the right pleural space contained 1,300 ml of blood-a major life-threatening blood loss. Blood exited from the brachial vessels as evidenced by the large quantity of blood that Platt left in his wake and on Grogan/Dove's car."

Any bullet that would have penetrated to and through the heart would have ended the fire fight sooner


Wide meplat hard cast bullets don't give the erratic performance of jacketed

Plenty of danger in the great outdoors from the two legged vermin: Linkie

Article 1

Article 2

Article 3

As one forest official recently warned me, you better be armed if you visit the forest.

MtnHtr

No what I said was that in MOST cases a decent shooter with the heart (meaning the ablity to be a warrior) is going to shoot one maybe two rounds or they will be down. A robbery or what have you is a short and fast transaction. I didn't say good guy or bad guy. To use a LE case isn't a good choice as those are rare and LE type situations. I don't believe the orginal poster was talking from a LE perspective. For the average guy wanting, needed, or believing they need to carry will never see that type of cenerio. Also I never said what pistol would be my choice, I would be and do carry a .45ACP, I think time and time again the 9mm has shown its inferrior. I wasn't taking a side on what to carry. My point was 1) You have three types of carriers. The first is John Rambo that thinks around the next corner he turns is going to be WWIII. The second is the guy that is a average guy that wants to protect himself in the rare case of an ugly situation. The third is LE/MIL that never know what is around the next corner because that is their job/career. This isn't to say you can't have a guy that is a mix of two or all three of these. My second point was that until you are truly in a [bleep] situation you don't know how you will respond or handle it. And no amount of training can determine this. You study these things and so I will assume you know a little about the subject. I don't study it but I have been in a few firefights. In my first my best friend who I thought was the toughest guy I ever met turned out to be a "no show". He qualified expert on the rifle range and pistol range. He loved to shoot whenever he could. He loved to fist fight and was a one hit wonder. I can't tell you how many guys I saw him knockout in our time stationed together. But when the bullets started flying he was useless. Please don't think I am trying to argue with you, I am not. I just know from experiance that until you are tested under actual conditions you truly don't know.

With that said I will say that just because someone is LE/MIL doesn't mean they are weapons experts and tactical experts. Most are not from my experiances and knowing a lot of them. CERT/SWAT/ERT's are a little different story as their training is more intense and aimed at this. But they are the minority in the overall picture of LE.

Hmmmmmmm, you tell this guy to move his business to a new town for protecting pontentially 100's of thousands of dollars of merchandise and possibly his life and you want to pull your gun one someone for taking your wallet?

Guy pulls a gun on me and says give me your wallet.........guy gets my wallet. I go home unharmed, maybe out the less than 20 in cash that I carry, and have to go through the hassles of replacing some credit cards and id's. I also dont have to deal with killing another human being over 8 bucks and get to avoid possible criminal, and guaranteed civil cases.

No, no shots were fired in either case.

Well said Rocky

A tiny pistol one can hit with is Much more effective than a cannon that you might miss with.

My grand mother had a .25 auto she could and did shoot rats with!

At much longer ranges than I ever dreamed possible!

But it was "her " gun and she was effective with it!