Quickdraw McGraw syndrome

Quickdraw McGraw syndrome

by digby

This seems obvious to me, but I guess in the cartoonland inhabited by many gun owners, they are all movie star heroes:

[T]he research on actual gunfights, the kind that happen not in a politician’s head but in fluorescent-lit stairwells and strip-mall restaurants around America, reveals something surprising. Winning a gunfight without shooting innocent people typically requires realistic, expensive training and a special kind of person, a fact that has been strangely absent in all the back-and-forth about assault-weapon bans and the Second Amendment.

In the New York City police department, for example, officers involved in gunfights typically hit their intended targets only 18% of the time, according to a Rand study. When they fired 16 times at an armed man outside the Empire State Building last summer, they hit nine bystanders and left 10 bullet holes in the suspect—a better-than-average hit ratio. In most cases, officers involved in shootings experience a kaleidoscope of sensory distortions including tunnel vision and a loss of hearing. Afterward, they are sometimes surprised to learn that they have fired their weapons at all...

Under sudden attack, the brain does not work the way we think it will. Millbern has seen grown men freeze under threat, like statues dropped onto the set of a horror movie. He has struggled to perform simple functions at shooting scenes, like unlocking a switch on a submachine gun while directing people to safety. “I have heard arguments that an armed teacher could and would respond to an active shooter in the same way a cop would. That they would hear gunshots, run toward the sound and then engage the shooter,” Millbern writes in an e-mail from Baghdad, where he now works as a bomb-detection K-9 handler. “I think this is very unrealistic.”

But hey, I'm sure that wouldn't happen to macho NRA members. They're very special, highly trained warriors. Like this guy:



If he happened to be sitting in a darkened movie theater watching a movie and a gunman started shooting bullets into the crowd, he would have lighting reflexes, quickly draw his weapon and shoot the gunman dead before he had a chance to shoot more than a couple of theater goers. And that would be an awesome outcome. Because only a few people would die instead of a whole bunch.

Of course, if these studies are correct, there would actually be many more deaths because more bullets would be flying in these crowded situations as a person with tunnel vision and loss of hearing is shooting blindly into the crowd.

This is such a good idea. I'm impressed that American culture and human civilization in general has come so far.


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