2003-04 Mach 1 Registry Owners Club - View Single Post

Low Drag · 04-08-2006, 02:01 AM

In addition to the legal reasons for not shooting to wound there are physical reasons as well. If you check out the statistics, most people, police officers included shoot very poorly in high stress situations. Take the guy who can stand on the line at the range putting bullets in the 10 ring all day long and then put him in a gunfight or physical confrontation where he believes his life is in danger and in most cases you will see a totally different outcome.

The biggest reasons for this are physical factors. When someone is put in a life threatening situation the body undergoes a lot of changes. Adrenaline dumps into the system and your heart rate starts to skyrocket even if you are not under heavy physical exertion at the time. Once the heart reaches about 150 beats per minute you start to lose fine motor skills i.e. being able to make slight adjustments in aim, or being able to gently squeeze the trigger instead of jerking it. By the time the heart starts to pass 180 beats per minute the changes get to be major. Smaller blood vessels in the extremeties contract and force blood to the center of the body in order to keep a person from bleeding to death quickly from a large wound. At this point fine motor skills are pretty much out the window. You also start to experience tunnel vision and auditory exclusion.....meaning you can hardly hear anything and all you can focus on is what is directly ahead of you. Once you get to this point, trying to hit anything other than center mass of a target is almost out of the question. Even that is extremely difficult which the statistics show.

About the only way to do anything about this is to try and train someone to shoot under very stressful situations to get them used to it. Most departments do not do a very good job at this. As long as they can get an officer to stand on a line and put enough rounds on paper to pass a test they are happy. Anything more than that to them is money wasted out of the budget. Other departments do try their best to give additional training and raise the stress levels but no matter what you do, it's pretty much impossible to make the training as realistic as a real life situation.

04-08-2006, 02:01 AM	#427
Low Drag Registered User Join Date: Apr 2003 Location: Illinois Posts: 144	Re: Ask A Police Officer In addition to the legal reasons for not shooting to wound there are physical reasons as well. If you check out the statistics, most people, police officers included shoot very poorly in high stress situations. Take the guy who can stand on the line at the range putting bullets in the 10 ring all day long and then put him in a gunfight or physical confrontation where he believes his life is in danger and in most cases you will see a totally different outcome. The biggest reasons for this are physical factors. When someone is put in a life threatening situation the body undergoes a lot of changes. Adrenaline dumps into the system and your heart rate starts to skyrocket even if you are not under heavy physical exertion at the time. Once the heart reaches about 150 beats per minute you start to lose fine motor skills i.e. being able to make slight adjustments in aim, or being able to gently squeeze the trigger instead of jerking it. By the time the heart starts to pass 180 beats per minute the changes get to be major. Smaller blood vessels in the extremeties contract and force blood to the center of the body in order to keep a person from bleeding to death quickly from a large wound. At this point fine motor skills are pretty much out the window. You also start to experience tunnel vision and auditory exclusion.....meaning you can hardly hear anything and all you can focus on is what is directly ahead of you. Once you get to this point, trying to hit anything other than center mass of a target is almost out of the question. Even that is extremely difficult which the statistics show. About the only way to do anything about this is to try and train someone to shoot under very stressful situations to get them used to it. Most departments do not do a very good job at this. As long as they can get an officer to stand on a line and put enough rounds on paper to pass a test they are happy. Anything more than that to them is money wasted out of the budget. Other departments do try their best to give additional training and raise the stress levels but no matter what you do, it's pretty much impossible to make the training as realistic as a real life situation.