The pretend assailant should be a 16-18 year old white male as they are the most common school shooter, not an older adult.
Yes, there is a clear objective for the training and yes it is voluntary. Good things. To increase effectiveness they need to practice against a likely suspect and very regular practice. I think bullet proof doors, teaching how to use fire extinguishers as weapons and having less access to guns would be more effective.
http://www.cbc.ca/amp/1.4584612
What if the assailants are using automatic weapons?
ReplyDeleteGene Chiu, they run out of ammo faster. Automatic does not equal automatic accuracy. Far from it.
ReplyDeleteThey do more damage while running out of ammo. Isn't that the point of rapid fire? No need to aim accurately?
ReplyDeleteI'm not sure of the amount of training you need to shoot one of your old students in the head, considering that teachers often know of the student's difficult home situation, or mental stability issues.
ReplyDeleteThat seems like a hard thing to train for. I mean, they don't train soldiers by telling them the enemy are just regular people drafted into a war they don't believe in who are just hoping they will make it to the end without dying. Right ?
Cass Morrison, the point of rapid fire was to allow untrained soldiers to have a chance of hitting. A trained marksman only needs one or two bullets per target.
ReplyDeleteI should clarify - the early automatic weapons were created as battlefield multipliers. Squad weapons like the Browning M1917 and M1918 BAR fired much faster than the bolt action rifles of the time, but their accuracy suffered as a result. A similar but much less pronounced effect is seen in modern automatic rifles, especially with hand-held rifles like the M-16 or AR-15. But squad weapons are built with tripods or to be rested on something to reduce the shake, and to have other squad members helping with ammo belts and such.
ReplyDeleteI think that mentality is one reason (aside from ammosexuals wanting more bullets) they came up with 30 round and larger magazines - full auto means you miss more, so you need more shots to have a better chance at hitting. In practice, however, the reality is quite a bit different.
I trained with US Army Rangers and Green Berets as part of my job in Spec Ops, and we never used full auto on a personal weapon. Even the small kick of a light automatic results in so much shake that it just isn't accurate. A three round burst is the most we ever used. After that 3rd round at a distance of 50 feet or so the kick results in bullets going several feet above the target.
And don't let movies with guys like Schwarzenegger fool you - even if you have the body mass and strength to offset the kick, you're not going to be accurate with it, and the farther out the target is the wider that spray will be. Add in adrenaline of a real combat situation and that is pronounced several times over.
Gun proponents normally chime in at this point with "But in a building" arguments about all the targets being close range, but that isn't actually the case. In a classroom? Sure, close range, but tell me how a shooter is going to get in there without someone noticing. Rush him and he'll likely get off 3 to 5 rounds at most. Spec ops will likely get 3 targets before the rest get too close to use a rifle.
Outside of a classroom, distances are longer, and there is a lot of cover with doorways and hallway corners. Of course this depends on the building, but most schools I've seen are set up like that. So an automatic in untrained hands is as likely to hit walls and ceilings as people. Again, add in adrenaline and the shooter's likely to hit people by accident more than intent.