It was an efficient morning…  I walked the dog, mowed the yard, and got ticked off, all by 9:00am.

After my early morning activities I turned on Fox 4’s Saturday morning news, where I found myself shouting at the TV because of a story they were running.  Fox 4 isn’t good about putting their stories online, so here’s the rundown from the Dallas Morning News.

A convicted child molester who was wanted on a new charge was fatally shot Friday after fleeing from police into a Duncanville park and pointing a gun at a Dallas detective, authorities said.

Douglas H. Blackstone, 24, died about noon Friday at a Dallas hospital from gunshot wounds. He was convicted of the aggravated sexual assault of a 12-year-old girl in 2004 and ordered to serve 10 years’ probation.

Friday morning, two detectives from the sex offender apprehension unit were trying to arrest Mr. Blackstone on a warrant alleging aggravated sexual assault of a child. They were also seeking him because he had moved without registering his whereabouts as required by state law.

The fact that this guy was shot (provided that the facts were reported correctly) didn’t bother me.  It was the way the Fox 4 reporter treated the incident.  He interviewed a relative of Blackstone, who thought that the police were wrong to shoot him.  She thinks they should have shot him in the shoulder to make him drop the gun and that they should have brought his mother in to talk to him.  I can almost forgive a relative for thinking that, but the uncritical way that the Fox 4 reporter treated her claims is what bothers me.  He didn’t appear to make any effort to ask the police about this sort of situation, nor did he appear to have done any research on tactics for dealing with an armed person. 

All of us who have ever considered the issue of confronting an armed person know that shooting to wound is impractical at best, and deadly stupid at worst.  But, let’s consider a few of the issues and myths surrounding the concept of shooting to wound:

• Myth: shooting someone in the shoulder will make them drop the gun.

  While this might work in some cases, not all bullet wounds are equal.  Depending on entry angle, distance from the shooter, clothing, and the phase of the moon, the bullet might do serious damage to the shoulder, just go through, or ricochet off a bone and hit the heart.  It’s unpredictable.

• Myth:  shooting to wound is better legally, since it shows you weren’t trying to kill the other person. 

  Not true.  Commonly, the law only allows the use of deadly force when confronted with someone else using or attempting to use unlawful deadly force.  The use of less than deadly force could be construed by a DA as a sign that the shooter wasn’t really in fear of his life (it would also open up a huge liability issue in civil court in the hands of a plantiff’s attorney).

• Myth: it’s better to shoot the gun out of someone’s hand.

  Unfortunately, there was one case where a police sniper did just this, and it’s been seen a lot.  That was a special case, where the guy in question was sitting in a chair and not pointing his gun at other people and the sniper had plenty of time to line up the shot.  In the heat of the moment, and with handguns, this sort of policy would end up getting officers killed, and possibly cause injury to innocent bystanders.  Most cases of police shootings where the gun was shot out of the offender’s hand seem to be the result of the officer focusing on the gun, rather than the offender, causing him to shoot the gun.  This is an accident, and not part of any official policy.

But the ultimate myth is the very concept of shooting to wound.  While popular in movies, it’s stupid, deadly, and legally risky in real life.  When adrenalin is flowing and people have to make split-second decisions, the best that anyone can do is shooting to stop the threat, which may or may not end up in the death of the threat.  Further, shooting to wound often involves shooting at extremities, rather than center mass, which carries increased risk of missing the target, which could result in innocent bystanders being hit.

Contrary to popular conception, neither the police nor private citizens who carry guns set out with the intent to kill people.  However, if that is the side effect of stopping someone from using unlawful deadly force against yourself or another innocent party, then so be it.

This seems to be a common thread with reporters.  They have no idea about tactics for armed defense and credulously accept whatever the “poor victim’s” family has to say.  Police departments probably need to look into giving an intro to tactical shooting for reporters, so that they can have a better understanding of why officers react the way they do.  It seems simple enough to me that if you point a gun at a cop you’re going to get shot.  Why more people don’t understand this has always been perplexing.