Push Forward

More and more is coming out about the Garland jihadi shootings last week, but the undisputed hero of the incident is the officer (as yet un-named as far as I know) who ended the firefight in the parking lot.  You can Google around for background, but this article, by Bob Owens shows that the officer pushed forward during the engagement, moving toward the threat as it unfolded.

The evidence markers at the bottom of the photo above show us a remarkable story, as they denote the final locations of the shell casings ejected from the officer’s Glock duty pistol. While every pistol is different from another in its ejection pattern, and the movement of the officer and the cant of his gun precludes us from knowing exactly where he was, there, is a distinct trial of shells showing that the officer was moving forward from the bottom left of the photo above towards the terrorists at the rear of the vehicle.  He appears to have opened fire from 20 yards away, and fired at least a dozen shots by the time he reached an area near the traffic cones, roughly 7-10 yards from where the terrorists died.

Extreme bravery, absolute dedication, heroic actions under fire.  All these describe the officer, and I don't intend to take anything away from his bravery.  He did it exactly right, but that's the point of this post.

For the past twelve years I've been in an assignment where I'm often alone among innocents, and we've trained for an active shooter scenario.  The best available training shows that when engaging an active shooter, you move forward, toward the threat and violently engage him with fire while maneuvering.  This brave officer did it exactly right, and shows (yet again) the benefit of his training.

I note, with some humility, that the event had a SWAT team on-site for just such an eventuality (and I'm not taking anything away from the SWAT guys here), but by the time they were aware of the threat, oriented toward it, and moving toward the firing, it was over. I'm sure that for the next several hours they were fully employed, putting the site on lockdown, moving innocents out of the way, assisting the crime-scene folks, all the different activities that come in the aftermath of this type incident.

Again, I'm not taking anything from the SWAT guys, but the simple fact of the matter is that these things happen extremely quickly, and if you're not standing there when it happens, you probably won't be in the fight.  If (God forbid) one or both of the jihadis had gotten past our hero, the SWAT guys would have been fully employed, but it didn't play out that way.

Great article at the link in the first paragraph, and I recommend that you go read the whole thing.

I"d love to know what that officer drinks; I'd send him a case of it.