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Comment by nodea2345 | Hacker News Reader

Full context is police officers often beat protests during arresting. Sometimes they just fight each other. Anyway, I think the officer have better choices than attempting to kill the kid(shot in chest is obvious willing to kill).

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I think anytime you shoot a gun at one someone you are shooting to kill, shoot to maim feels like it would be practically impossible outside of movies.

But I might be wrong, I've never shot a gun.

This concept you can shoot to maim is silly. Hitting a man is hard if you practice shooting. In a chaotic situation with adrenaline its even harder.

Shooting to hit is all you can do.

The police in Sweden is trained to shoot to maim, but only in somewhat controlled situations, such as someone wielding a knife approaching officers from a distance. First warn verbally, then fire a warning shot, then fire at the legs.

When there is no margin left, fire to stop. (Which means in practice, often death.)

https://polisen.se/om-polisen/polisens-arbete/polisens-befog...

The only way this sort of training would work IMO would be with sociopaths or psychopaths who dont have the huge adrenaline jump from emotional attachment to other humans.

I don't understand this notion. The training is exactly to make people just respond with how they were trained, automatically. This is also how the military works. Since you just do it, you aren't as likely to ponder what will happen to the human in the cross hairs. These thoughts come afterwards.

Never had a person in your cross hairs i take it ?

THis might be a stupid question, but where are Warning shots fired?

Are they fired close to the target, but far enough away to miss? Can this only be done if there is no one behind the target, are they shot into the sky? If so is their no danger of bullets hitting people falling back down? Or do they lose enough speed on the downward arc to be safe? Or is the chance of a warning shot hitting someone innocent so staggering low that it isn't worth worrying about?

I live in the USA, and the only place I've ever seen warning shots being recommended was by the military in Iraq when civilian vehicles would drive too close to a convoy. If a gun is used, it's because you feel that your life or someone elses is in imminent danger. Warning shots can ricochet and kill someone, and bullets can still come down with lethal force if a warning shot is fired into the air. Shooting to maim is possible if the situation allows for it, but warning shots can end up killing someone besides the intended target.

I was skeptical in the beginning that "bullets can still come down with lethal force if a warning shot is fired into the air" but I guess you are correct. Mythbusters were testing this in one episode and [1]"Because of this potentiality, firing a gun into the air is illegal in most states, and even in the states that it is legal, it is not recommended by the police. Also the MythBusters were able to identify two people who had been injured by falling bullets, one of them fatally injured"

[1] https://mythresults.com/episode50

The distance has to be very great - 21 feet is often quoted as the minimum distance where a gun wins over a knife. And many barrooms are less than that.

So in theory its a kind idea. But hardly ever significant in practice?

I would argue a sawed off double barrel 12 gauge with double / triple aught buck would reduce that down to a few feet.

Problem would be how you train people to hold their cool

That cavalier attitude is what gets officers killed in bar fights. It takes a couple seconds to cross 21 feet. About what it takes to recognize the danger and raise the weapon.

The shoot first attitude is what gets unarmed citizens and other cops killed in bar fights

https://www.cnn.com/2019/09/30/us/bronx-officer-shot-dead/in...

> 21 feet is often quoted as the minimum distance where a gun wins over a knife

Against an already drawn gun and a trained as well as attentive officer? Do you have a source for that? I have a hard time believing that. Or is this the case after factoring into the US mentality of "there may not ever be any residual risk for a cop"?

I'm not taking a side on this specific situation, but shooting at a limb in a high stress, crowded situation would not be a wise shot. You would likely miss--and hitting someone that was not your target would not be good.

Another comment mentions training for center of mass, and I would assume that's what they do.

Let's say 80% of your shots constitute a "tight grouping", 20% being somewhere other than where you were aiming. Aiming for the middle of the body would likely mean you have a very high success rate of hitting your target individual. Aiming for the shoulder/leg/arm (each one harder than the last to hit) you are looking at a very low success rate of hitting your target. If you choose to use your weapon, I would hope you are confident you will hit your target and only your target.

And yet somehow Slovenian police manages to do just that (shoot to maim, usually leg), on very rare occasions when it has to use a gun and warning shot didn't suffice.

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