No virus found in this outgoing message.
Checked by AVG Free Edition.
Version: 7.1.394 / Virus Database: 268.9.8/380 - Release Date: 6/30/2006
Iowa Prohibitionists Demand Local Enforcement Of Federal Law: Iowans for
the Prevention of Gun Violence blame district court judges for not
requiring abusers to surrender their guns to police, claiming that Iowa
courts are not upholding a federal law that prohibits domestic abusers
from having firearms.
http://www.kcci.com/family/9440667/detail.html
---
Don't Try This At Home: An Arizona woman was confronted at her home by a
man holding a hand grenade. The assailant pulled the pin and threatened
to kill her and her family. With no prior knowledge of grenades, the
woman wrested it away from the assailant, keeping the "spoon" from
flying off, thereby preventing ignition of the fuse.
http://www.tucsoncitizen.com/daily/local/17775.php
http://www.azstarnet.com/metro/136202
---
From John Farnam:
27 June 06
Frangible 223:
At a Patrol Rifle Course in the Midwest last week, we used frangible 223
ammunition. Because it doesn't strike our steel rifle targets with much
force, it doesn't generate the distinctive "thwack" sound that we have
come to expect from ball ammunition. It is thus particularly
unsatisfying, as hits and misses are difficult to distinguish.
In addition, we had many functional problem with our AR-15s. In several
cases, the frangible bullet broke off at the case mouth during feeding.
The errant bullet fragment then wedged in the bolt locking recesses,
causing a subsequent failure to feed. Adding to our woes,
"no-lead"primers proved unreliable. We tried to use up our entire
supply of frangible, just to get rid of it, but eventually we had to
switch over to ball, because we were squandering too much time..
My opinion of frangible ammunition, particularly 223, remains negative!
Compressed-dust bullets are not durable enough for any kind of serious
use, and, even in training, they break in half, wasting much valuable
training time in the process. Leadless primers are unsatisfactory. I
will never trust them.
/John
(I have read similar reports in the past about some brands of frangible
ammunition. One distinctive aspect of John's training is the use of
steel targets, which do produce very good reinforcement for the shooter
when one hears the impact and, if it is that type of target, when the
target falls. Personally, I have been hit with enough ricochets off
steel targets and seen enough injuries from ricocheting jacket material
that I do not use steel targets myself. Frangible ammo, perhaps only in
pistol calibers, is successfully used by many agencies in training with
steel targets at distances where ricochets are a definite risk. I would
want more information comparing brands before writing off the stuff
completely in .223.)
1 July 06
Details from the Johannesburg, SA shooting last week, in which a number
of police officers were murdered:
"They stormed the building where the gang was hiding.. Officers were
armed with Z88s (Beretta 92 copy, built under license). The criminal
gang was armed with Kalashnikovs.
R5 patrol rifles are theoretically available, but they are kept in an
armory and are not assigned to individual officers. The check-out
process is monotonous and takes forever. Patrol rifles are rarely
maintained, and no one ever knows how the sights are set. As a result,
officers don't trust them, so they spend their entire useful life
gathering dust in the arms room. Ammunition is tediously booked out
also, with the result that live-fire practice is unheard of.
.. and then we are astonished when our officers are unable to use them
effectively!"
Comment: These cops are the latest casualties of SA's restrictive gun
policy, a policy that insidiously infiltrates into even police and
military cultures. In fact, the only place restrictive gun policy has
apparently made scant inroads is the criminal culture. Imagine that!
I'm sure leftist politicians and bureaucrats everywhere are astounded.
/John
(I have greater detail on this incident, via IALEFI, in format that does
not lend itself to inclusion in this mailing. If it is of particular
interest, contact me for individual copies.)
From FSRC:
I. ONE OFFICER'S WILD ENCOUNTER WITH "EXCITED DELIRIUM"
To read about the hyperaggression and superhuman stamina of a suspect in
the throes of excited delirium is one thing.
To experience it face to face with your life on the line is vastly
different, especially when one of your .40-cal. rounds has blown up your
attacker's aorta and another has drilled into his spine and he still
keeps struggling and threatening to kill you and when a K-9 that's
supposed to be helping you is instead chewing into the hand supporting
your gun and when the dog finally lets go he attacks his handler and
you've got to rescue him and you're trying to control this whole crazed
scenario in the middle of a high-speed roadway.
That unforgettable challenge confronted Ofcr. James Peters, 30, a 6-year
veteran of the Scottsdale (AZ) PD. With the help of an advisor to the
Force Science Research Center, Peters was exonerated this spring in a
shooting that ultimately proved fatal to a classic ED subject.
It was the third shooting in Peters' short career. Incredibly, he's had
a fourth since then, in which he killed a truck jacker who was holding a
gun to the head of a supermarket meat cutter he'd taken hostage at the
end of a police pursuit.
Scottsdale's legal advisors declined to let Peters be interviewed, but
Sgt. Todd Larson, who worked the ED case as a homicide investigator,
supplied Force Science News with exclusive details.
"I've never seen anything like this in my life," says Larson, a former
SWAT sniper who has worked homicides prosaic and bizarre for more than
13 years. "With everything he had to cope with, Officer Peters' actions
were absolutely heroic."
The horror-movie encounter started in the pre-dawn darkness of a Monday
morning last October when Peters and K-9 Ofcr. Dave Alvarado heard a
radio call about an attempted break-in of a car in the lot of a large
automobile paint and body repair complex.
A security officer reported he had discovered that a window of the car
had been smashed. He'd spotted an unidentified W/M nearby, "acting
strange" and seemingly "on something." When challenged, the man peeled
off an outer shirt, claimed he had a gun, and picked up a 40-lb.
landscaping rock and hurled it at the guard. As typical, few of these
details were included in the barebones dispatch Peters and Alvarado
heard, but the dispatcher did make clear that the suspect had thrown a
rock and claimed to have a gun.
Alvarado should have gone off-duty about 15 minutes earlier and Peters,
"a very assertive patrol officer" who was about to be transitioned to an
elite street-crimes unit called HEAT (High-Enforcement Arrest Team), was
nearly 3 hours past his normal shift. But they were busy trying to
locate some suspects who'd fled from a stolen car and other crimes.
The repair complex was only a mile or so away and the description of the
troublesome subject there was a general match to one of the suspects
they were looking for. Alvarado, driving a K-9 SUV, was assigned as
backup for the call. Peters, who was in uniform but driving a black
unmarked unit, decided to respond too, intending to surreptitiously
check out the vicinity.
Following closely behind Alvarado on the 6-lane thoroughfare that runs
past the repair complex, Peters noticed the K-9 officer make a U-turn
near the property and head toward a driveway. Then apparently having
spotted something, Alvarado abruptly stopped, blocking 2 lanes of
southbound traffic. Simultaneously, Peters saw a shadowy figure run
across the pavement from the opposite side of the road and approach
behind Alvarado's SUV.
Then as the K-9 handler was stepping out of his unit, Peters saw the threat.
The figure, a white male with a substantial build, was clutching an
18-in. length of pipe with a square metal plate welded to one end, like
a stanchion. He moved fast around Alvarado's rear bumper, raised the
pipe with both hands over his head, and swung with full force down at
the officer.
Alvarado saw the attack in time, back-peddled, and dodged the blow. He
drew his sidearm but didn't shoot for fear of striking traffic whizzing
by in the background.
Peters slammed his car into PARK in the northbound lanes, bailed out,
and started shooting "all in one move," he told Todd Larson. Later his
car door was found to be so badly bowed by the force of his thrusting
exit that it had to be repaired before it could be closed. "He was in
immediate fear for Alvarado's life," Larson explains.
At the sound of Peters' Glock 22, the suspect, initially more than a
lane-and-a-half away, turned toward the officer, raised the pipe back
over his head, and charged. Peters kept shooting, 4 rounds in all. The
first 2, it is now believed, missed the suspect and hit the wall of a
storage building in the background.
The assailant had closed to within 7 feet of Peters' when he suddenly
stopped. The pipe slowly dropped to his side in his right hand, then to
the roadway. The suspect himself went down, his face thudding against
the pavement. "I knew I'd hit him," Peters said, but he wasn't sure how
many times.
Twice, as it turned out. Between the 2 rounds, the suspect's aorta was
penetrated, the major artery in his body, as was the vena cava, the
major vein. One round lodged in his spine, having bored into the C-6
vertebra.
The medical examiner told Larson that if the suspect had been on an
operating table at that instant with surgeons standing ready, his life
could not have been saved.
He should have been dead right there. But instead he was struggling on
the ground, trying to get up, "licking blood off his lips," and
continuing to rant that he had a gun and would kill the officers.
Peters was covering him while calling in the shooting and praying that
the traffic oncoming at 50 to 60 mph in the southbound lanes could brake
or swerve quickly enough to dodge the sudden crime scene.
He looked up and saw that Alvarado had released his K-9, a muscular
Belgian Malinois named Rocky, from the SUV. In an apparent flash of
confusion, the dog was charging hell-bent for Peters. "I knew I was
going to take a bite," he told Larson.
The dog clamped his jaws like a vice on Peters' left hand, which was
supporting his Glock in a 2-hand hold. "Peters stayed unbelievably
cool," Larson says. "He knew if he struggled or pulled away, the dog
would just chew harder. So he tucked his hands in close to his chest to
better steady the gun and let him bite."
As soon as he realized what was happening, Alvarado ran over, got Rocky
to release, and put him in a down position. Peters' hand was bleeding
from the dog's sharp teeth and he wanted to avoid blood-to-blood contact
with the wounded suspect, so he continued to cover while Alvarado
started handcuffing.
Alvarado got the right cuff on when the suspect suddenly threw his left
elbow back so fast it caught the officer off-guard. Alvarado was
fighting to get the suspect pinned when, Peters later told Larson, "I
could hear the K-9's claws on the pavement coming toward us." He saw the
dog "launch"--and sink his teeth this time into his handler's triceps.
Two years earlier, as a member of Scottsdale's SWAT team, Peters had
attended a class that taught non-K-9 officers how to take a dog off
bite. As Alvarado continued to fight to get the tenacious suspect under
control and into cuffs, Peters grabbed Rocky's collar used what he
remembered to get the dog to let go.
Alvarado finally got both cuffs on. The suspect persisted in resisting,
spitting and kicking. He alternately shouted threats to kill the
officers, demanded that they kill him, and babbled gibberish. Brakes
screeched around them as near-misses in the roadway traffic multiplied.
"I've got to end this now," Peters decided. He spotted a patch of bare
skin near the suspect's hip. Placing his foot on the handcuff chain to
keep the man's arms down, he grabbed his Taser X26 and delivered a
drive-stun to the bare spot.
The suspect went limp long enough for the officers to bind his legs with
Ripp restraints. When paramedics and other officers arrived, he
struggled anew, trying to sit up, spitting blood, and claiming he had a
derringer he intended to use. Of course he was thoroughly searched
before being placed, squirming, in an ambulance. No gun was ever found.
He was pronounced dead at a hospital 38 minutes after Peters and
Alvarado responded to the initial radio call.
Investigation revealed that the 31-year-old suspect, Mark Wesley Smith,
was a petty criminal with a persistent history of methamphetamine use.
He'd been out of prison just 4 days after serving a term for drunk
driving and drug possession. Much of that time, according to a relative,
he'd been up on meth.
As part of the investigation of any officer-involved shooting in
Arizona, a case file is submitted to the county attorney, who convenes a
deadly force review board to assess the matter. In addition, in
Scottsdale findings from both internal affairs and criminal
investigations are brought before a departmental use-of-force review board.
To compile as complete a dossier as possible, the PD's investigators
thought it important to explain how Smith had been able to maintain his
remarkably high level of resistance after being so gravely wounded. Even
the medical examiner seemed at a loss to comprehend it.
A sergeant in the investigative circle remembered reading reports about
excited delirium that have been published in Force Science News, the
free newsletter emailed biweekly to LE professionals from the Force
Science Research Center at Minnesota State University-Mankato. Smith
seemed to match many of the indicators described in those articles, from
breaking glass and running in traffic to exhibiting colossal stamina and
immunity to pain.
Investigators contacted the Center's executive director, Dr. Bill
Lewinski, for more information. He referred them to Chris Lawrence, a
trainer at the Ontario Police College at Alymer, Ont., in Canada.
Lawrence is recognized as one of the preeminent law enforcement
authorities on ED and is a member of FSRC's technical advisory board. He
agreed that the shooting had strong overtones of an ED confrontation,
and he provided extensive research materials that helped explain the
role methamphetamine abuse could have played in provoking the delirium
phenomenon in Smith.
In consultation with Lawrence, Todd Larson crafted a PowerPoint program
on ED that he presented both to the county and the departmental review
boards as part of his investigative report on the shooting.
Last April, after Peters' shooting had ground through the investigative
process for some 6 months, Scottsdale police finally announced that
Peters had been cleared of any wrongdoing or use of excessive force in
the encounter. Any doubt that deadly force was the only reasonable
response to the circumstances he faced were officially laid to rest.
Similar findings had been made in Peters' 2 previous shootings. In the
first, he was one of several officers who fired rounds at a threatening
suspect during a SWAT call out for a domestic. In the second, he shot
and killed a disbarred lawyer who was creating a public hazard by pacing
the banks of a canal and pointing a shotgun.
Less than a week after his exoneration in the Smith case, Peters was
back in the news with his fourth shooting. This time a young gunman had
hijacked a donut delivery truck in Peoria, AZ, and had led police on a
40-mile chase into Scottsdale. With officers lose behind, the frantic
truck jacker ran into a supermarket and grabbed an elderly butcher
around the neck as a hostage.
He was trying to escape out of an emergency exit while using the hostage
as a shield when Peters, who had responded from another assignment
nearby, fired 2 shots from a rifle and killed him. The rounds tore his
face away. Police established his identity through fingerprint analysis.
Without a doubt, the grateful hostage told the media, he would have been
killed by the gunman if Peters had not shot first. Like Larson, he
termed Peters a hero.
Meanwhile, Larson has asked Lawrence to conduct classes for Scottsdale
personnel on ED and effective response tactics for dealing with it "so
we can train for the future."
At this writing, James Peters' shooting remains under investigation.
Peters remains on patrol with HEAT, targeting felons and other high-risk
offenders. And in his personnel jacket remains a sheaf of
superior-performance citations collected from his days and nights on the
street.
"Obviously," says Larson, "he's an officer who can make the right
decision under pressure."
================
(c) 2006: Force Science Research Center, www.forcescience.org. Reprints
allowed by request. For reprint clearance, please e-mail:
[email protected]. FORCE SCIENCE is a registered trademark of
The Force Science Research Center, a non-profit organization based at
Minnesota State University, Mankato.
================
--
Stephen P. Wenger
Firearm safety - It's a matter
for education, not legislation.
http://www.spw-duf.info
