A SWAT cop’s take on guns in America
Over the past several months, whether by chance or just a recent trend, I have come upon many articles written on the topic of guns in America. The interesting, and yet likely not surprising thing they all have in common, is that the viewpoints of the authors are highly one sided. I have read articles from both sides of the discussion, and in doing so I have found some troubling ideas that have reached mass media and are being widely disseminated. Unfortunately, we live in a world that is very rapidly trending towards polarization, where we tend to huddle in groups of people that share our own perspective and ideas; too often we find ourselves unwilling to have rational, open minded discussions in which we respect one another’s viewpoints and concede that perhaps as an individual, we may not have all of the answers. It is from this place of understanding that I wish to submit to you, my thoughts and experiences regarding the incredibly sensitive topic of guns in the United States.
First, a little background. I am a military veteran, and am a veteran police officer. I spent a little over a decade in the military, and approximately just as long working for a municipal police department. I spent 5 years on the SWAT team, and held various leadership positions within that assignment. I operated as the team leader of our SWAT/Sniper squad, and have attended certifying schools in police sniper operations. I worked on the department’s firearms staff and held the position of lead firearms instructor and was certified as an armorer in various weapons systems employed by the department. I wrote and executed training curriculum and was responsible for training officers in firearms skills. I have attended tactical training with various local and federal agencies including the FBI, ATF, DoD, Army, Navy, and a handful of others. I have also been certified as an active gunman instructor by the National Tactical Officer’s Association.
The metropolitan area in which I worked has a population of over 1 million people. The city I worked in is the second largest city in the state, and the police department I worked for handles more calls for service per officer than any other department in our county. I worked in a city that is largely still considered to be a high crime city. The per capita income in my city is 33% below the per capita income of the county as a whole. I only provide this information to help the reader understand that as a police officer, I was busy.
Throughout this article I’m going to use some statistics, some analogies and some anecdotal evidence and in the end I hope I can convey a perspective that I have been unable to find within our popular media outlets.
I love guns. I own many. I own assault rifles. I own hunting rifles. I own custom firearms that I just think are plain cool. When I joined the military and was trained with the M16, I was in sheer heaven. The idea that I was carrying this super cool weapon that I’ve seen in countless movies, and got the chance to shoot it, was just… ahhhh. I love the controllability, the ergonomics, the smell of shooting, the challenge, the self mastery, the discipline, and the overall experience. Ive since had the chance to be trained on, and use, many, many different firearms. Shotguns? Check. Machine guns? Check. Grenade launchers? Check. Precision rifles (sniper rifles)? Check. I have my favorites of course, but the reality is that I just love shooting. Its fun. It’s a skill that requires constant practice and honing. Not just anyone can make difficult, precise shots. I have a natural talent with firearms, and to be honest, I’m a really good shot. And I’ll be the first to admit that the 8 year old boy inside of me still thinks assault rifles are cool.
I am also here to tell you, that they must go.
The article I read that finally made me decide to voice my opinion was published on the website Medium, written by Jon Stokes, titled “Why I need an AR-15”. When I first read his opinion piece, I found myself at an utter loss. I browsed around the site and read a few other articles, one by Benjamin Sledge (who, by the way, offers up at least some interesting and well thought out points), called “Honest thoughts from a veteran about gun control”. I read the article by Heather Sher, originally published on The Atlantic, called “What I saw treating the victims from Parkland should change the debate on guns”. I scoured the internet and was sadly unable to locate any articles written by cops, who are our society’s front line combat soldiers in the epidemic that is gun violence. How is it possible that we are not offered the opinions of those who deal directly with the problem, on a regular, consistent basis, on mass media sites?
Let me begin by addressing Jon Stokes.
There are a number of problems with the assertions in Jon’s article, some of which I feel are imperative to address.
It is widely accepted as day one information in police training that handguns are primarily defensive in nature, and rifles are primarily offensive in nature. Jon, make sure you’re paying attention here. A handgun is defensive, a rifle is offensive. Period. This is fairly intuitive. To illustrate, lets examine two different common handgun rounds and two common rifle rounds, all of which would be considered very popular and easy to find in any sporting goods store that sells firearms. For comparison, lets look at the 9mm and .40 cal handgun rounds, and the .223 (AR-15) and 7.62x39 (AK-47 or SKS) rounds.
The handgun rounds both have a maximum effective range of approximately 150 feet. At that distance however, both of these bullets drop by about 12”, and accuracy goes to hell. This is laboratory data however; any street cop will tell you that the real world maximum effective range of either handgun round is about 30–40 feet. The .223 has an effective range of between 1200–1800 feet. The 7.62x39 has an effective range between 1300–2600 feet.
Both of those rifle rounds are accurate at ranges of more than 40 times the distance a handgun round is accurate to. Jon, this begs the question, “what in the world are you defending that requires 1200+ feet of space between you and your attacker?”
The claim that an assault rifle is needed to defend a hilltop, or fortified position on a mountain side, or maybe a castle, can be argued. However, in an urban setting, on a city street, or inside your home, what kind of possible scenario exists where you need to “defend” yourself by shooting someone 1200+ feet away? Do you walk around in front of your living room window strapped with your AR-15 just waiting for a home invasion robbery, with the hopes that you can pick off your assailants before they exit their car at the end of your street? Fairly recently in my city, a homeowner had been the victim of several car burglaries in a short period of time. In the middle of the night, he heard noises outside, and decided that instead of calling the police, he would walk outside and defend his castle. He was armed, but guess what? So was the parolee who was lurking in his yard. A confrontation ensued, both parties pulled their firearms, and both fired. Both died. I can tell you from my experience, that it is my opinion that firearms give their owners a false sense of invulnerability, and often the consequences end with the firearm owner dead.
Police officers are required to put themselves in harm’s way on a daily basis, and deal with the worst of society’s worst. All. The. Time. One website states that the deadliest distance for police gunfights is 3–6 feet. My experience on the street corroborates this. Police officers use handguns in our interactions with criminals the majority of the time, and we do this for a living. What in the world is happening in Jon’s life that he “needs” an assault rifle for “defense”? In fact, his article, and many of the arguments from gun rights advocates have no real application in day to day life. There is no example I can think of which would allow a citizen an opportunity to flee from the scene of an active crime in progress, retrieve their assault rifle, and then return to engage the bad guy and save the day. Let’s just think through this for a sec… unless you’re carrying your rifle with you at dinner (wtf??), this scenario implies that your rifle is constantly held at the ready in the trunk of your car. That exponentially raises the consequences of a vehicle theft or vehicle burglary (where now a real bad guy has your super tricked out AR). Are you really going to grab your super cool black modular rifle and go back into the scene of a crime in progress? The other possibility is you’re sitting around at home and see an active shooter situation unfold on the news and you grab said rifle and run right on down to get into the fight. What is really going through the heads of gun rights advocates in regard to their interest/ability/intent to engage in a street level gun battle using a rifle? Can anyone provide me with a scenario in which an assault rifle is necessary on a day to day basis for a citizen who goes to work in an office building?
Let’s say, for arguments sake, that this exact scenario does actually unfold. Jack Citizen is at dinner with his family and sure as shit, someone comes in to shoot the place up.
A 2008 Rand study examined success rates of police shootings at NYPD between 1998–2006. It found that police officers hit their targets 18% of the time in active gunfights. That’s one in five folks. In cases where suspects did not return fire, officers were 30% accurate. For shootings in which the bad guy was closer than 7 yards, the rate rose to 37%. In the LAPD, between 2012–2016, the average hit rate for officer involved shootings was 33%.
I attended a SWAT school where instructors attempted to simulate the stress of a gunfight. The test involved a static, run of the mill qualifier, with officers shooting at stationary paper targets from no further than 15 feet away. We happened to have a number of crack shots on our team at the time, and we were all expecting to show off a little, given that we were standing so close to the target. As we began to shoot, the instructors (who were standing off to the side of us on roughly a 45 degree angle) began throwing tennis balls at us, and they weren’t just lobbing them in our direction. We were hit several times in the face, torso, hands, etc. We were outfitted in full tactical gear, so with the exception of the hits to the face, none of them hurt. The interesting thing is, everyone’s shot groups went to hell. We were supposed to be shooting only head shots, inside a defined area in the center of the head of the paper target. Many officers failed that qualification. The psychological impact to our shooting skills was profound when we had to worry about objects coming at us. Our team of crack tactical officers failed during this training scenario, and it was just tennis balls.
Back to Jack Citizen. Jack bought his AR-15 from a sporting goods store, and he goes to the range every once in a while to shoot for funsies. Hell, lets give Jack the benefit of the doubt and assume he has even paid for some expensive classes on rifle shooting. An active gunman is now in the restaurant, shooting the place to hell and back, and Jack decides to leave his family sitting at the table and engage with the bad guy. Take just a moment to re-read the previous two paragraphs. NYPD officers, cops from the largest department in the entire U.S., are averaging somewhere between 18–30% hit rates in gun fights. The LAPD, the third largest agency in the U.S., is achieving only about 30% hit rates. Members of my own tactical team, many of whom had a combination of military, law enforcement and SWAT training, couldn’t hit their target when tennis balls were being thrown at them, and they were only 15 feet from the target!
The idea that Jack Citizen is going to be able to save his family, and himself, sounds really good! The only problem is that the reality of that scenario, based on statistical information and anecdotal evidence, ends up with Jack either dead, or having killed an innocent civilian. For trained police officers there’s a 70% chance they’ll miss. Lets be conservative and estimate an untrained civilian will miss 80% of the time. That means 8 out of 10 of Jack’s .223 rounds are zipping around, passing through walls, and killing his fellow citizens.
One of the other issues at hand, as exhibited by Jon’s article, and by many other gun rights advocates, is that those in favor of gun control don’t understand the term “assault rifle”. The gun rights group thinks, “Theres no such thing as an assault rifle”. The idea is that black, scary looking tactical firearms scare gun control advocates and it will make them feel better if we get rid of just those ones. Raise your hand if you’ve heard these arguments from the gun rights group. “Guns don’t kill, people do”. “You could kill just as many people with a handgun”. “If someone wants to kill people, they’ll find a way”. “Why don’t we ban knives next”. On. And on. The statements from gun rights groups, and authors like Jon Stokes drone over and over again, repeating the same pathetic statements.
Folks, there ABSOLUTELY IS such a thing as an assault rifle. The definition of an assault rifle is not determined by the ability to fire fully automatic or single fire like many gun advocates claim, but by the number of rounds that weapon can fire before it needs to be reloaded. Any shoulder fired weapon that can lay down more than 5 rounds at a time qualifies as an assault rifle in my book. Jon Stokes makes a ludicrous argument in his article. Jon says that the fact that police departments use AR-15’s reinforces the idea that they were not intended to mow down massive numbers of people.
Jon clearly has no idea what the evolution of the patrol rifle has been within the policing community, so let me take a moment to educate him. I am unaware of, and cannot find any evidence of, a single police department authorizing the use of an AR-15 rifle prior to the North Hollywood Shootout in 1997. One of the major lessons learned from that incident was the need for patrol officers to have a weapon that can defeat body armor. Shotgun and handgun ammunition won’t penetrate body armor, and police that day found themselves incredibly outgunned. It was in response to this incident that departments nationwide began authorizing armor defeating patrol rifles. Let me say that again. This was in response to a critical incident. Not one Chief of Police, prior to 1997, said to themselves, “Wow, AR-15’s are such a great rifle that I think I’ll outfit my patrol division with them.” Indeed, we have seen the militarization of our police departments nationwide, as a result of, and in response to, the new threat that we face. That threat is a highly armed criminal element. Highly armed, and increasingly outfitted with, body armor.
Jon, the police do not use an AR-15 for defense. Let there be no mistake about it. When a police officer deploys an AR-15 it is always offensive. The intent of that police officer is to use that weapon to hunt down, and potentially kill, an offender. We do not sit on the battlements of the police department building, defending our property from a rogue group of meth heads who want to take us over. Quite the contrary, we utilize the AR-15 specifically because of its offensive nature, its accuracy at distance, its ability to defeat body armor, and its ability to support lengthy gun battles due to high capacity magazines when facing highly armed criminals. Do you honestly believe that if the only weapon criminals had access to was a handgun, that police departments would authorize the use and deployment of AR-15’s? The answer to that question, is a resounding no.
Let me get this clear. Everyone understands that humans kill. No one believes any policy or legislation will end that human deficiency. The issue at hand is not the fact that people kill, it’s the fact that we have created a mechanism that is exponentially more lethal than anything our society has ever been confronted with before, coupled with the fact that this class of weapons is now being used against us. By our own citizens. At a rate that has become an epidemic. Do gun control advocates want to ban all rifles? Of course not. “But, a hunting rifle can kill just as easily as an assault rifle”. Obviously. What a hunting rifle cannot do however, is meet the same scale of lethality that an assault rifle can. If the Las Vegas gunman decided to use a sniper rifle, there is no doubt he would have successfully killed. The concept however is, the number of casualties would not, could not, have been as great.
The reality of the nature of a rifle round is this: it carries substantially more kinetic energy than a handgun round does. In reference to AR-15’s and AK-47’s, that number is approximately 3–4 times more energy than a 9mm or .40 caliber bullet. For those readers who don’t know anything about bullet behavior, it is the energy in the bullet that makes it lethal, not necessarily the size. Yes, a bigger bullet will leave a bigger hole, but a smaller bullet with more energy will do more damage. Here’s how it works. When a bullet enters living tissue, it has to expel its energy into the surrounding tissue as it slows (not all bullets stop). This dump of energy causes the surrounding tissue to expand momentarily (called the temporary cavity). This explosive expansion of tissue results in massive tissue damage/destruction and bleeding. Although the tissue will contract after it has absorbed this energy, the damage done to the blood vessels, organs, and anything else affected by the energy dump is permanent and catastrophic. The handgun rounds have around 350 ft/lbs of energy, while the rifle rounds have approx. 1200 ft/lbs of energy (at 50 yards). “According to Dr. Rhee, a trauma surgeon at the University of Arizona, the high velocity rifle round fired from an AR-15 will cause a body wound that looks like a grenade went off in there”.
Please take a moment to read the article written by Heather Sher, a radiologist, which I mentioned earlier. Ordinarily, with a handgun wound which “she examines almost daily”, Sher states that the bullet “leaves a laceration… which to a radiologist appears as a linear, grey bullet track through the organ”. In examining a victim struck by a .223 bullet of Marjory Stoneman Douglas H.S., she stated, “the organ looked like an overripe melon smashed by a sledgehammer, with extensive bleeding”.
Consider the following two images. The first is an image of a series of handgun rounds through ballistic gelatin. Notice the cavity appears to be fairly linear, with some initial expansion at the point of entry.
Now look at this image, of a .223 round after striking ballistic gelatin.
Look at the massive expansion damage done to the ballistic gelatin. The two images are not even remotely similar. Referring back to Sher’s article, she states, “One of the trauma surgeons opened a young victim in the operating room, and found only shreds of the organ that had been hit by a bullet from an AR-15… There was nothing left to repair, and utterly, devastatingly, nothing that could be done to fix the problem. The injury was fatal.”
What Heather Sher, and Americans in general who are scared shitless of the prevalence of mass shootings are saying, is NOT, “We as a society can end murder”. There has never been a more absurd idea, and yet gun rights advocates throw around memes and jokes that imply people who want a solution to our uniquely American epidemic think that we can stop murder in totality. This is not at all what the argument is. No one is pretending the shooter at Newtown would not have decided to kill on that day if an assault rifle was unavailable to him. No one is even claiming that there would not be multiple casualties. But what if he had been armed with only handguns? Re-read what Sher has to say.
“Routine handgun injuries leave entry and exit wounds and linear tracks through the victims body that are roughly the size of the bullet. If the bullet does not directly hit something crucial like the heart or aorta, and they do not bleed to death before being transported to our care…chances are we can save them”.
What if he, or any of the other dozens of active shooters in the U.S. had only handguns? What if he only had bolt action hunting rifles available to him, that had to be reloaded after every 5 shots? Would the damage inflicted by each of the rifle rounds be as devastating? Undoubtedly so. Would the delay between operating the bolt, and reloading the rifle repeatedly provide an opportunity for police to arrive and engage him? I believe any common sensical person can say yes. Would that have likely led to fewer casualties? The answer is obviously yes.
Ok, so if an assault rifle is anything that is shoulder fired, and can carry more than 5 rounds at a time, couldnt a shooter just go out and buy 100 (5) round magazines and still kill mass amounts of people. The answer is absolutely. This is one of the reasons I am not advocating for a magazine limit, or magazine ban, but a ban of the weapon itself.
One of my complaints about the human condition is the overabundance of the inability to learn from other people’s tragedies, until we ourselves experience that same tragedy. I think there are some lessons that others go through that should be able to be applied to not only our own lives, but to our social fabric, without requiring every single citizen to experience the lesson itself. In this particular dilemma, I believe I can draw consistencies from DUI laws that we can apply to our current gun debate.
I have handled many fatal DUI caused traffic accidents. In one particularly grisly event, the victims of the crash burned alive, until there were literally only charred skeletal remains left of them. I not only witnessed the crash itself, but interacted with the families afterwards. Multiple families lost their children that night, and their lives have forever been impacted. I witnessed first hand the grief these families felt. As I interacted with them over the years I witnessed the coping mechanisms they used to cling on to some semblance of happiness. I saw families destroyed in an instant, but the lasting effects went on in a downward spiral for years afterwards. All of these lives impacted, and for what? Just so the offender could have some fun at a bar for a little while? Was the benefit worth the cost?
I like to drink. I particularly like craft beers. I have had the opportunity to drink relatively exotic wines. I love a great whiskey. I also have seen the devastating effects of drinking and driving first hand. Will I ever drink and drive? The answer is no. Will I convince other drinkers, after telling them my story, that they shouldn’t drink and drive? Maybe some, but some undoubtedly will have to learn the hard way, on their own. They will not learn a lesson from someone who has experienced massive tragedy from a singular event that never touched them. The argument will be “Why should I, I’ve never hurt anyone yet”.
When the very first DUI accident fatality took place, we as a society did not cry out for legislation or a social policy. It was only after DUI’s became an epidemic, and the loss of life was substantial, that we as a society agreed to say, “Maybe the fun we have drinking just isn’t worth the lifelong consequences of driving afterwards”. We enacted legislation, because it was in the public interest to do so. All of us gave up a little bit of our individual freedoms, in order to better serve the collective good.
I have to ask myself. Is America’s gun violence epidemic similar? Would any of the gun rights advocates speak out as strongly if they had children murdered at school? Can we look at the example of DUI’s and apply it here? Hopefully throughout this article I have illustrated that there simply, absolutely, and positively is not a need to own an assault rifle.
If its not a need, and its simply a desire, is there a similarity to alcohol? I desire to go out and drink, but I also recognize that I live in a society in which we have implicit duties to one another, and we as a collective whole have said my few hours of fun at the bar is not worth the price of the loss of life resulting from a DUI related accident. I love my assault rifles. I have fun with them. I think they’re cool, and I like the hobby of shooting. BUT… I also live in a society, one with social contracts and duties to one another. Is my enjoyment of shooting worth more to me as an individual than the cost of having these weapons available to our society? I have to answer, no, it is not.
My fellow American citizens, I am a military veteran, a law enforcement veteran, a highly trained firearms instructor and SWAT team leader, and it is my opinion, that we must remove assault weapons from our American society. There are many speculations as to what is causing the epidemic, and I do not propose that removing assault rifles will cure that ill. Something is deeply wrong with our social fabric. All I propose, is that by removing a mechanism for destruction, we are giving ourselves a fighting chance.
Are there any alternatives? Is an outright ban, or a mandatory buyback program the only option I believe might work? I’m open to ideas. Thoughtful, rational ones, not random spewings of the Jon Stokes of the world. Benjamin Sledge has written a thought provoking article which I find intriguing, if only because he does not take an extreme position on one side or the other. To Ben, I would like to propose the following responses to your ideas:
1. To requiring training and orientation prior to a firearms purchase- YES.
2. To require that weapons be registered- YES
3. To require a mental health and background check prior to purchase: I don’t see how a mental health evaluation will help, when those who suffer from mental health often swing widely from one mood to another, and the efficacy of the screening would be highly dependent on the disorder of the applicant, but hey, it’s a start. To background checks- YES.
4. Report mental health patients to a database, and only allow them to purchase firearms when a practitioner has cleared them: I see tons of problems here. What practitioner would ever release a previously diagnosed person who was found to be unfit, now fit to own a firearm? Do you see the liability with saying someone who was previously mentally ill is now mentally stable, only to find out they shot up their workplace after you gave the green light and now the families are all suing? Even if legislation was enacted that protected the practitioner, the courts have a funny way of overturning that stuff. The court is currently allowing families to sue a gun manufacturer for liability from a mass shooting although a 2005 federal law protects the gun maker…
5. Let military veterans and Law Enforcement carry assault rifles- after leaving the military, what need does a veteran have for an assault rifle? How do we ensure proficiency? What happens when vets don’t train often enough? How do we create a qualifying shoot to show proficiency and who would administer it? It is my opinion that only law enforcement should have the ability to have assault weapons.
In closing, Jon’s article illustrates a deeply disturbing trend among the gun rights groups. Jon states, “The AR-15…can be customized for a whole range of applications, from small pest control…to urban combat”. This is less a critique of Jon, but more of a broad statement about what is happening in the minds of Americans. Urban combat? Do we really believe that we are going to go to war with one another inside our cities? Has our American discourse become so divisive, so assaultive, and so destructive that we may actually be considering using these weapons to kill one another for one reason or another? Are Americans actually contemplating using their assault rifles in an end of days scenario?
I am horrifically shocked by this concept, and you should be too.
