Why don't police “shoot them in the leg”?
Episode 2 of "Wokeness, Public Safety, BLM & Antifa" w/Matt Thornton
Appropriately, police officers receive scrutiny anytime they use a weapon, particularly if someone is injured or killed. In Episode 2 of “Wokeness, Public Safety, BLM & Antifa,” Matt Thornton proposes that public scrutiny would be more legitimate if people understood how violent situations are controlled.
Matt Thornton has taught functional martial arts for more than 30 years. He holds a 5th-degree black belt in Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu and is the founder of Straight Blast Gym International, training champion MMA fighters and world-class law enforcement instructors. His latest book is The Gift of Violence: Practical Knowledge for Surviving and Thriving in a Dangerous World.
Episode 2: Why don’t police “shoot them in the leg”? A good example of a naïve notion would be when Joe Biden was running for president, he talked about "maybe the officer could shoot the guy in the leg.”
Joe Biden: “So instead of anybody coming at you and the first thing you do is shoot to kill is you shoot ‘em in the leg.”
Anybody that has any experience with firearms understands that's a ridiculous notion. But there's probably many Americans who looked at that and thought, "Well, that makes sense. Why didn't he shoot him in the leg?" Then they're going to have misguided opinions about what a particular police officer did or didn't do in a given situation because they don't understand how violence works. Just to give you a brief overview on that: most gunfights, most exchanges with firearms, occur at very close range and most of the shots miss. So a police officer who doesn't even get that much training with his weapon to begin with—it's not like we're dealing with a SEAL Team six member—is looking to hit center mass on the target.
The reason they're shooting is not to kill anybody. They're shooting to stop. They're shooting to stop the threat from other people, like recently happened when that police officer had to shoot the girl who's about to stick the giant steak knife into another child. He shot that girl because he had to stop the threat. If he hadn't shot her, she would have stabbed that young lady.
They're shooting to stop and they're shooting center mass. The idea that in a conflict like that, your adrenaline's going, you pull your firearm and you're going to shoot the gun out of his hand or shoot him in the leg is stupid, number one. Number two, there's big arteries in the leg. So it's just as deadly to shoot somebody in the leg as it is anywhere else. And number three, you can shoot someone in the leg and they can be on the ground, and if they have a weapon on their person, draw their weapon, shoot and kill you, or shoot other people and kill them. You have to stop them and stop them from accessing whatever tool they have on their body at the time so that they don't hurt anyone else. That means in any given situation, officers are going to be shooting to hit the target center mass.
Joe Biden's been around long enough that he should know better. He doesn't. I think he said it out of ignorance. That's fine. Unfortunately, he obviously has a big platform and people might listen to that and think, "Oh, that makes a lot of sense." The more people are educated on violence, how violence works, how these conflicts work, why officers are actually doing what they're doing, the better able they are to vote on public policy.
Watch the series Introduction.
Excellent article. I have always heard the police are trained to shoot to kill because, if they don't, they will be ruthlessly killed by the law breaker, who will then go on to harm or kill other people. The police need the best possible training in law enforcement. The public need to be educated about how to support and assist the police. In particular, cooperation with the police is the best way to avoid harm. Conversely, fighting with law enforcement officers will predictably be a fatal mistake.
If officers are only "shooting to stop the threat from other people," then why do they always empty every bullet in the clip? They literally unload on people even after they're no longer a threat. Or, they unload on people who are fleeing - who aren't a threat.
Police officers in the US are inadequately trained and it shows. They consistently and needlessly escalate situations that could be de-escalated if the officers didn't possess oversized egos, which they almost universally do. The over-abundance of firearms in the US makes officers nervous whenever entering a new situation, making the officers aggressive, belligerent, and trigger-happy.