Wednesday, October 26, 2016

Tam Goes A-Training

Training is a wonderful thing, and I recommend it to everyone.  It makes you think about things that you might not otherwise think about, and it makes you think about stuff that you could have done better.

Her post this morning talks about one scenario that went "pear-shaped" (her words) in the aftermath of a shooting scenario.  So, let's look at it, shall we?
Guy in the plaid shirt walked up on our hero (in white) and said "Hey, you gotta phone? I need your phone. Gimme your phone and your wallet."
Our hero drew and the bad guy stopped, arms out to his side, and asked  "What're you gonna do? Shoot me?" He must've twitched the wrong way, because the good guy promptly did.
It was at that point that things went pear-shaped with the arrival of the Good Samaritan bystander who immediately started Samaritan-ing the wrong dude: "Hey, man! You just shot this guy!" Good Guy tries to explain what happened, while not letting Samaritan get too close. Samaritan interprets Good Guy's refusal to let him get close as being a sketchy guilty dude trying to get away.
Good Samaritan decides he's going to play hero and detain Good Guy for the cops. A tussle for the gun erupts, likely because of Good Guy's understandable reluctance to shoot Good Samaritan, and so Good Samaritan ends up stabbed fuckity-eleven times in the retention fight for the gun. It was ugly.
It often is ugly, but I have a few observations.

Plaid Shirt Guy was obviously about to commit a robbery.  I don't know what he did to have Good Guy bust a cap in him, but that's not a problem, as long as Good Guy can explain later.  I can think of a half-dozen different explanations for popping Plaid Shirt Guy.

But, Good Samaritan is sketchy.  In my experience, when someone pops a cap on a city street, the next thing you hear is the flap-flap-flap of feet running down the street.   Good Samaritan isn't going to hang around unless he has an attachment to Plaid Shirt Guy.   It just ain't gonna happen.

So, if Good Guy, having shot Plaid Shirt Guy, is approached by Good Samaritan,   Good Samaritan says "You just shot this guy ".

Good Guy should reply, "Yes I did, and now I'm calling the cops."  Good Guy's motivation should be to get the cavalry rolling as fast as possible so that he can tell his side of the story.

This is where the story really gets weird.  Good Samaritan decides to detain Good Guy, and goes for the gun.  Somehow,  a fracas evolves where Good Samaritan gets cut repeatedly.  That's not a good deal for anyone, especially for Good Samaritan, who should have butted-out when the gunsmoke was still hanging in the air.  I am impressed that Good Guy had a knife.  I'm a big fan of carrying a knife and a gun.

And, here is an important point:  If you're going to carry a shank, it should be carried on your off-side, and be available for one-handed use.  If someone is trying to get your holstered pistol, you want to be able to secure the pistol with your gun-side arm/hand/body, while you go to work with the knife that you can use in the other hand.

I'm sure that Tam will tell us the rest of the story.  In my mind, Good Samaritan is sketchy and Good Guy should have already made the call to the police.

But, I'm sure that she'll explain it all in future installments.

8 comments:

plblark said...

In general, I would expect Good Samaritan guy to beat feet the other way.
BUT ...
For the Scenario, it made for an interesting interaction AND it could reflect someone of the "sheepdog" persuasion misreading the situation
OR
I've been noticing people filming events and getting more involved in catching the cops doing wrong ... There's video of an Edina, MN officer detaining a man for walking in the street where the cop buster is right in there filming and interrogating the officer. Perhaps the Good Samaritan angle could be spun to where the "good samaritan" is a copblocker?

Old NFO said...

That's a strange one... No question. And good point about knife availability!

Tam said...

You know what else is sketchy?

Copy-pasteing the entirety of someone's post instead of using an excerpt and a link. Are you trying out for TTAG? ;)

Tam said...

Also, no, I'm not going to be writing anything more about this particular scenario. There were a couple dozen played out that afternoon, each one improvised. (In this one, the Good Guy in question was yelling for the cops to be called as the Good Samaritan showed up and started sheepdogging.)

I was just providing the barest of thumbnail sketches and I would avoid trying to MMQB the scenario from the handful of details I gave. My point was that, in relatively free-form scenario-based force-on-force training, it's easy to discover that stuff doesn't go down in the happy, clean cut way people seem to think it does on the gunternet. We had twenty strongly pro-gun people there, including cops and lawyers, and there were plenty of incidents where there was a lot of debate about how various scenarios would look in front of a jury.

Pawpaw said...

Good points all, Tam,

And I wasn't trying to be critical.

And, I'll try to do better on the copy/paste next time.

Eaton Rapids Joe said...

Pawpaw: You are a gentleman.

Tam: With all due respect, your comment seems out-of-character. You give the appearance of holding Pawpaw to a higher standard than you apply to yourself.

In this corner of the internet your name has more recognition than "Madonna", "Beyonce" and "Kardashian" combined. He has you on his blog roll. He corrected the issue with linking to your post. Carping about lack of attribution seems small.

You, on the other hand, do not attribute the source of the story within your post. The trainers spent time and effort developing this "story". It is one of the tools they use to put money in their wallet, food on their table. You threw it out on the internet, thereby diluting its value without returning any value to the originators.

Furthermore, "sketchy" has several meanings. Your post was so skeletal, so devoid of extraneous detail that it defies meaningful excerpting. THAT IS NOT A BAD THING! Pawpaw was not disrespecting your writing.

Everybody has a bad day now and then. I want to think you were having your's when you made that comment.

Retired Spook said...

Yeah, that's kinda what I was thinking. It would have been hard to get a meaningful excerpt from what Tam posted. And I can't imagine PawPaw doing anything "sketchy" on purpose.

Stingray said...

The source of the story is that she was there.