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Interesting past week for me which caused me to think through several things. It is easy to forget that as a senior guy on my team that some of our instituional and experience based knowledge doesnt always get passed down to the young studs. Or if it does, they dont hear the lesson or information because they dont have the experience to actually understand why the information is deadly important.

So cross fire first. Years ago my team was involved in a gunfigh that lasted 4.5 minutes. Not an exceptionally long gunfight by combat standards, but in the police world fairly significant. During that gunfight the suspect had gone into the attic. We had officers in the attic, officers on the floor below the attic and officers oustide at ground level. As this thing developed, the suspect was initially on the floor below the attic while officers were in the attic above him. (This was an apartment building) The suspect was initially engaged  by officers on the ground who were firing UP. This put the officers in the attic in their line of fire. The attic officers alos fired down, putting the officers bleow them and on the ground in a crossfire. Ground level officers fired at the suspect again, again putting attic officers in their line of fire. The same type of thing had occurred to use two years before with an officer in an attic firing DOWN at a suspect in the insulation. There were officers below that location in the master bedroom.

When I teach the TL class we talk alot about mitigating cross fires, but it is the hidden, unseen crossfires that guys cant seem to grasp. If we enter through front door and back door, everybody gets that we will have a link up somewhere in the target. Be careful, could be a cross fire. But I see guys put an arrest in front of and centered on a house all the time and then there backside containment is centered. So if you lifted the house up, you would have two groups of SWAT guys pointing guns DIRECTLY AT EACH OTHER! It’s a crossfire, dont do it.

On cover. We have some really nice armored vehicles. They stop damn near anything a person could get their hands on. They have glass windshields and side windows that have the same ballistic rating as the steel part. So if you are looking over the hood with your entire head exposed, I can shoot you in your head. Getting shot in the head is bad. So instead look through the glass, you can still see and contain the target. If a guy comes out shooting, you can simply roll out from cover and shoot him back. But staring at a window that has sun reflection and the house behind it is dark is dangerous. And it’s dumb. Don’t do that.

Real world shootings. Years ago we ha another team shooting wherein 3 guys fired at a guy sitting in a convertible. The guy was armed with a .357 that he decided he would point at the team. The 3 guys all fired at his head since that is what they could see. We were behind the car and when the guy turned his head to point the gun, one of our guys put a pill in his right eyeball. The other two missed! What the hell?! Two highly trained, competent shooters missed a minute of head shot at the incredible distance of 22 yards!!! The horror.

The reality is that all 3 shots were dead on, at the moment they were fired. However my good friend S.R. fired first, a split second ahead of the other two. This caused his bullet to get there first. When it got there and hit the guy, it caused his head to snap to the right, effectively pushing his head out of the path of the other two bullets that were super-sonically moving to give him a bad day. The investigation and trajectory sticks confirmed this.

The bottom line is that shooting someone in the real world is vastly different than range poker or paper. Shit happens. You never know what will happen in the time it takes you to OODA, and the flight time of the bullet. “Misses” in the real world would often times be X rings on a paper target. I was not concerned with the “misses”, I was glad that three officers on my team proved they had the courage of their convictions, and when they needed to, they did not hesitate to use deadly force.