El Cajon police say unarmed black man pointed vape at officer before he was shot to death

What? Who? Dude, no one trains to shoot guns out of hands. That is a TV and movie trope to sanitize violence back in the 50s and 60s. Stop the bad guy with out having to kill him.

If they are running away, you aren’t supposed to shoot them at all.

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Huh. Okay, I’ll tell the cops I know that they’re doing it wrong. For all I know, they were making stuff up or sharing an inside joke when they told me those things. This was back in Cincinnati.

I’m curious where they are? I’ve never read about this ever being a trained tactic.

It might not be. They’re friends of friends, and may have just been fantasizing, or giving me a pretend scenario. I apologize, I’m most likely quite incorrect.

It strikes me as totally bizarre that in 2016, with all of our fancy tech and suchlike, a cop’s options to stop a bad guy who means business are basically either to pull a gun and kill them or to pull out a taser to shoot barbs with wires on them and electrocute them. Either there hasn’t been much work in the field of domestic hand-held non-fatal weaponry or it’s very difficult to get new items approved for field use. Where’s our goop guns to encase bad guys in purple splurge or bubbles or something?

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The problem is we don’t know if this is a recent phenomenon, or if it has been like this awhile, as they don’t get good data.

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Oh dear.

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It just doesn’t seem practical to me. They are trained to shoot center mass because compared to extremities, the center is relatively static, large, and easy to aim for. If you shoot someone in the leg you could end up with the bullet hitting bone, fragmenting, and hitting bystanders. Also unlike what you see in the movies or on TV, hitting extremities can be just as deadly. There’s lots of arteries there and you can pretty quickly bleed out if one of them gets hit.

For more information (with sources!), see bullet point #2 in this article:

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Yep, I was most likely the butt of an inside joke. I doubt they knew whatat they were talking about. I apologize.

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You’ve not done much handgun shooting have you? They’re very inaccurate weapons. You can’t snipe with a pistol. And shooting someone’s hand at any reasonable engagement distance is the kind of skill you’d need to practice every single day to make it consistent.

None whatsoever. I’m not a fan of guns and don’t desire to shoot them.

I’ve apologized several times above for my ignorant statements fed to me by police friends-of-friends who were apparently fantasizing about what they would do as TV cops.

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I shot a handgun for the first time in my (late?) twenties. A .38 Browning and a .40 magnum. Both my uncle’s. He’d brought my brother and me to an outdoor range on Thanksgiving Day. The experience itself was an education. Recoil? Yeah, that’s not a minor thing, especially with a high caliber revolver.

I’ll never own a gun myself but I’m glad I had the opportunity to understand them through something other than the news.

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I lived with a Marine for five years, so while I’ve never shot a handgun (I have used shotguns), I feel like I have at least some first hand knowledge of them and have most definitely seen them demonstrated inside and out.

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You win. Shotguns still scare the hell out of me.

It was at a Boy Scout camp, of all places – they gave us actual shotguns to shoot targets. I guess you could get away with that in rural Ohio in the mid-80s. I remember the recoil gave me a nasty bruise.

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Sorry for getting on your case like that. I should have read all the responses first.

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No worries, I should know better to spout off on things I don’t know much about!

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If you look through patents, there are many (usually)non-lethal inventions they could use. From the well-known beanbag guns and rubber bullets to sonic cannons, nets, and glue-guns. There is a crazy amount of variety they have to choose from.

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Oh, I believe it. I’m more wondering why those more exotic items never seem to see any use. I wonder if they’re, ironically, worried about liability if someone gets hurt.

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Don’t you mean Klantee? (Sorry, couldn’t resist)

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