1986 FBI-Miami shootout

Of the two men, Matix served as a MP in the Army. Platt was former Special Forces.

Platt was the FBI's worst nightmare because not only did he have a desire to fight to the death, he more than likely believed he could win the fight and kill all of the agents. These are hallmark traits of someone who would be indoctrinated into the SF community. Hardy men with a drive to win.

The agents hunkered down, took cover and tried to defend themselves. Platt took the initiative and employed common military tactics. He fired from one position, moved and fired again. He also advanced on threats. When you're hiding and trying to defend a position, you're vulnerable to an aggressor that continues to move on your position. Platt always knew where his targets were as they didn't move. Conversely, the agents often lost track of him because when he fired, they would have taken cover. By the time they stuck their heads up again, he had moved to a new location.

I don't know how many of you are former military. In the Marines we were trained to do exactly that. If we walked into an ambush, we attacked the attackers. We turned, and advanced towards the threat while firing and moving. The attackers would be dug in and in the minds of Infantry Marines, vulnerable to our "shoot and scoot" tactics.

The agents were simply overwhelmed by a single shooter who was using military tactics to put them at a disadvantage. It's not easy advancing on a threat, everything in you tells you to do the exact opposite. That's where Platt had the advantage and exploited it.
 
JohnKSa said:
The problem with wanting something that will go through hands/arms and still penetrate reliably to COM regardless of angle is that you're going to have a hard time getting that effect with expanding ammo. If you want to use FMJ/ball then you can do it with any of the service pistol class calibers. If you want expanding ammo then you're going to have to get well into the magnums using hunting ammunition to get that kind of penetration.
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Actually, you can do it with either using a full-weight semi-wadcutter; and making it a hollowpoint doesn't cost you much in penetration. The .38 LSWCHP 'FBI load' remains about the most effective iteration of defense loads in that caliber, mostly because cuts a deep, full caliber hole whether it expands or not.

Hornady made a .44 Mag version of that load for awhile, which pushed a big soft 240 LSWC at about 950 fps from a 4" Model 29. While I never shot anybody with that particular load, I did use it on a number of critters and it left nothing to be desired in that regard.

OF course there's nothing high-tech about a lead bullet, and we won't see a full-page glossy ad in next month's Tactical Combat Pistol-Fighting extolling its virtues. Technology aside, Elmer and Skeeter and Bill knew their business pretty well and there's no doubt in my mind that a LSWC will solve exactly the problem under discussion here.

Socrates said:
Seems to be something magical about 240 grains, or more, when shooting human sized targets...
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No, not quite. The .45 ACP FMJ established an enviable reputation at ten grains less, despite a poor bullet configuration and downright boring velocity.

In the mid-80's my outfit worked a murder; I was off at training but got the 4-1-1 on returning. The perp had showed up at an apartment complex with a cut-down single-shot 12 gauge and a half-dozen Super-X slugs. The confrontation was in the lot and there he killed his ex-GF. Her little female friend (maybe 100 pounds sopping wet) was screaming at him, so he snapped a shot off and hit her, straight-on, about an inch above the nipple. We are talking 437 grains of soft lead 3/4 an inch in diameter, cruising at an easy 1300 fps. She was so impressed with all this bullet weight and velocity that she ran up an exterior staircase, called 911 and passed out. She also survived. This incident, several others and what I have observed while hunting with handguns has caused my belief in stopping power to literally go "up in (gun)smoke".

What I do know is this.

If you disrupt the CNS from about the navel on up, your assailant will be out of the fight PDQ- and probably permanently.

It don't matter whether you accomplish that with 9mm ball, a 500 S&W or a piece of half-inch rebar; but it takes penetration and momentum to do it.

If you miss the CNS, you can't expect immediate incapacitation because some people just won't acknowledge being shot.

At typical handgun velocities, the most advanced bullet technology will not compensate for three inches of lateral dispersion from the centerline of the human torso.
 
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OF course there's nothing high-tech about a lead bullet, and we won't see a full-page glossy ad in next month's Tactical Combat Pistol-Fighting extolling its virtues. Technology aside, Elmer and Skeeter and Bill knew their business pretty well and there's no doubt in my mind that a LSWC will solve exactly the problem under discussion here.
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I agree with that.
 
Sturmgewehre said:
I don't know how many of you are former military. In the Marines we were trained to do exactly that. If we walked into an ambush, we attacked the attackers. We turned, and advanced towards the threat while firing and moving. The attackers would be dug in and in the minds of Infantry Marines, vulnerable to our "shoot and scoot" tactics.

The agents were simply overwhelmed by a single shooter who was using military tactics to put them at a disadvantage. It's not easy advancing on a threat, everything in you tells you to do the exact opposite. That's where Platt had the advantage and exploited it.
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Spot on. Same thing is taught in the Army. Takes training to be able to overcome the natural instinct to duck and hide and Platt and Matix had the training from the Vietnam-era Army.

I am not sure Platt was SF. He claimed to be but the records I saw said plain infantry, but that is enough. The FBI I suspect did NOT train to deal with threats that way and after they failed to stop the BGs with their initial fusillade they went defensive and were caught off guard.

I think your point above all others is why the shootout went bad. Not the ammo or the marksmanship which was good.

Think about it, how do you train if you are a FBI agent? Are you normally going to face such trained BGs? No. You train for the most likely event and that is the average BG who will give up when outnumbered in the open.

IMHO after all the reading I have done on the event and listening to Gordon McNeill interviewed I am with you on this as the real cause.
 
Everything I've been able to find about Platt indicates he was 101st Airborne / Rangers. I've found no information suggesting this was inaccurate or false information.
 
An interesting image that's relevant to the discussion.

platt-shot.gif
 
Bullets do really strange things.

There are many instances where people have been shot point blank with suprisingly powerful handgun rounds and lived to tell about it.

This was a failure of tactical planning and performance on the part of the people in charge of the FBI unit.

Ironically,the shotguns availible to the FBI would have dispatched both bad guys very quickly had a field of fire and a designated FBI shooter been chosen before hand.

But it is very easy for me to make these statements now.

I was never in pursuit of them or had to place my life on the line,these guys did.

But something that really never gets discussed is that the two bad guys had a free field of fire everywhere they looked.

This is because as human dirtbags,they did'nt care at all where their misaimed shots went.

The FBI agents ,through their training,had to wait for the dirtbags to be in a position where they could shot without the bad guys being right in front of a houses glass bay window in the back ground field of fire or in a place where the shot taken would careen into an area that might hurt an innocent civilian.

Most private citizens really never understand the extent that police or other law enforement people will go to-to not make a careless shot.

The idea of a suppression field of fire just run out of a handgun,shotgun or rifle is really against everything they are trained to do.

Meanwhile a bad guy can just pop off rounds at will to keep the police at bay while they make their moves to get a better position to make a kill.

Police think about everyshot they take.

And that is very admirable but also puts them at a great tactical disadvantage if they are faced with people with firearms that have the capacity to lay down a continuous field of suppression fire.

These FBI agents were not and even today are not trained to just kill a guy outright.

And thats the way it has to be but today,most law enforcement people take tactical situations much more seriously and have a large selection of heavy duty firepower and tactical planning and training in place before they do anything.

Sure it looks like overkill when the assailant simply gives up but faced with not being able to pick and choose who they want to kill first without facing five guys with rifles,shotguns and handguns ALREADY aimed right at their head before the 'stuff' goes down,alot of bad guys realize the idea of shooting it out with the cops is a bad idea after all.

This was the worst case scenario played out in real life.

And really,the irony of all that firepower was that it was a revolver that finally dispatched those human peices of 'stuff' to hell where they deserved to go.

For everything that went wrong,the one thing that those FBI agents did very right was that those two sorry -I can't write it without getting banned- did not get away.
 
Sturmgewehre said:
Everything I've been able to find about Platt indicates he was 101st Airborne / Rangers. I've found no information suggesting this was inaccurate or false information.
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Check here on page 21: http://foia.fbi.gov/shooting/shooting1a.pdf No special ops althought he applied for ranger training there was no indication he attended. Back then the only way an enlisted guy went to Ranger school was after being assigned to a ranger unit and only then after Ranger Orientation. I think Mr. Platt was just a MP but as I said before; it was enough. Your point was well written.
 
Amen to B.N. Real. And they also did not get to "lawyer up", and to live a long life at the expense of the public treasury, or to plead insanity, or have kooks and slimeballs coming out of the woodwork to explain how it was all the governments fault or their mothers fault or the fault of post stress disorder, or whatever. They did not get to "tell their story". Nobody worried too much about the importance of "studying them" because we could have learned so much, or any of that other liberal BS that has kept so many violent felons breathing too long. They were just made dead at the scene. So thank God the FBI did at least that much right. Unlike the terrorists who are being held at Guantanamo, but will probably soon be released, bg Platt and bg Matix will never be released by a liberal political administration to kill anyone again. I realize that not everyone agrees with my point of view on this. For example, here are lots and lots of liberal lawyers out there who are just like the lawyer they interviewed on TV just after the world trade center towers fell on 9/11/01. "I just can't wait to get those guys in court", he said.
 
Drac:
The gun without the scope, Jacks .510 Van Horn, recoils around 100 ft -lbs, with 600 grain bullets, at 2200 fps. That combination is THE most that most can shoot for an African stopping rifle. I will never shoot it again without my PAST recoil pad in place on my shoulder. Rifle with the scope was a customers
458 Lott, 500 grains at 2300 fps. Both one step down in recoil, only around 70 ft lbs, and hitting power. Still, it has been known to knock elephants out on missed brain shots.

The snubbie is NOT a joke. One guy in Georgia has had them made in 50-110, .50 Alaskan, 500 S&W, and his latest, Hellboy, is a 36 ounce snubby in 500 JRH, based on a Ruger. I WANT that little gun for around the house, or, a BFR setup similar.

My comments about 240 grains is that all of a sudden, bullets seem to keep penetrating when they are 240 in .429" and 260 in .45 Caliber. One of Buffalobores' best black bear rounds is a 260 grain Sierra at 1450 fps. If it will penetrate and work on Black bear, I would think it would be fine for most bad guys, and get straight through their arms, and targets.

I've often wondered how my old Seville load, 230 grain ball, in 45 Colt, at 1800 fps would have worked on Platt, on that shot, but, I know already...

As to tactics: This is a law enforcement problem, now.
Gang guys are going in, getting trained, and using their tactics on police.
Youtube has a pretty chilling surveillance camera on the issue. A guy using a semi-auto AK-47 to attack police positions.
 
Check here on page 21: http://foia.fbi.gov/shooting/shooting1a.pdf No special ops althought he applied for ranger training there was no indication he attended. Back then the only way an enlisted guy went to Ranger school was after being assigned to a ranger unit and only then after Ranger Orientation. I think Mr. Platt was just a MP but as I said before; it was enough. Your point was well written.
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Thanks for the link. I've never seen any supporting documentation and the majority of the websites out there (including Wikipedia - imagine that) say he was 101st and Ranger.
 
Sturmgewehre said:
I just read that Platt completed jump school and was indeed assigned to a MP unit where he met Matix. That makes sense now.
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Matix' form 2 is there on one of those parts. They were infantry and so received infantry training. Often back then infantry were assigned to MP duty. I think Platt was on the DMZ in Korea as well. Based on what I have read they definitely had the training and as you put it so well, used it to their advantage.
 
Sarge said:
Actually, you can do it with either using a full-weight semi-wadcutter; and making it a hollowpoint doesn't cost you much in penetration. The .38 LSWCHP 'FBI load' remains about the most effective iteration of defense loads in that caliber, mostly because cuts a deep, full caliber hole whether it expands or not.
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I agree that non-expanding ammo will penetrate very well, and LSWC bullets are a good choice in that regard. If you make it a hollowpoint, then to the extent that it expands, penetration will be reduced.
 
Great discussion as there are so many lessons that can be learned from it. Many of the same mistakes are made by LEO's today such as taking just a pistol against a known armed and dangerous suspect when long arms are available. This amounts to deliberate indifference on the part of the officer.

I agree with the statements that Dove's shot was just one event in a series of events that went wrong and not the one thing that caused agents to die. Even if the round had penetrated the heart, Platt may have had another 15-20 seconds of consciousness to wreak havoc. It reminds me of the ball going through Buckner's legs. Everyone blamed that incident for the loss of the series when it didn't lose the game for them and it didn't lose the series (no lightheartedness intended with this comparison).

I agree with the original posters contention that the agents should have been allowed to chamber magnums and to carry longer barreled revolvers such as the 19, 27, and 28. But, as has been repeated many times and will be repeated many more times, someone has to die or be seriously injured before administrators will make a change. It's just the way it is unless you are an administrator and have the foresight or the fortitude to do it before the tragedy occurs.

One other point I'd like to agree with. Platt's actions as well several other gunfights involving the loss of good officers, reminds me of the Marine Corps rifle squad mission-first part. I'm sure the Army's is comparable: To locate, close with and destroy the enemy by fire and manuever. That is exactly what Platt did. And, it worked initially. He was just way outnumbered and eventually fell to the same tactic used by Mireles who advanced on him. Bobby Davis and Jack Twining did it 1970 at Newhall and killed four highway patrolmen. When you go defensive, hunkered down behind a car, you are in deep doo-doo. That maybe your only option at the time, but we have to start thinking about (and training) to take the fight to the bad guy thereby seizing the initiative and putting him on the defensive. In my opinion, once a defense is established it's time to think offensively.
 
One other point I'd like to agree with. Platt's actions as well several other gunfights involving the loss of good officers, reminds me of the Marine Corps rifle squad mission-first part. I'm sure the Army's is comparable: To locate, close with and destroy the enemy by fire and manuever. That is exactly what Platt did. And, it worked initially. He was just way outnumbered and eventually fell to the same tactic used by Mireles who advanced on him. Bobby Davis and Jack Twining did it 1970 at Newhall and killed four highway patrolmen. When you go defensive, hunkered down behind a car, you are in deep doo-doo. That maybe your only option at the time, but we have to start thinking about (and training) to take the fight to the bad guy thereby seizing the initiative and putting him on the defensive. In my opinion, once a defense is established it's time to think offensively.
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exactly,

what do they say:

"You've got to shoot, move, and communicate. If you don't shoot, you will die. If you don't move, you will die. If you don't communicate, you will die."

Or something to that effect.

Now Platt lost his partner early in the fight and wasn't able to perform team based fire and movement tactics (individuals, fire teams, or squads providing cover fire while other individuals, fire teams, etc, advance toward the enemy and assault their position) however due to his vastly superior firepower, he was able to establish fire superiority on the agents and then move against them and kill them.

Not to be Captain Obvious, but like many of you have already said, had the agents had their own semi-automatic rifles, or at least some sub-machineguns, or even just used their shotguns right off the bat, at the very least they could have stood a chance of not loosing fire superiority and been able to pin Platt down. Then he would not have been able to move and would have just bled out, while pinned down. Unless he then chose to go for a kamikaze attack, in which case a short fusillade of expertly wielded shotgun blasts ought to have handled him.

Anyway, as they say, hindsight is 20/20.
 
The snubbie is NOT a joke. One guy in Georgia has had them made in 50-110, .50 Alaskan, 500 S&W, and his latest, Hellboy, is a 36 ounce snubby in 500 JRH, based on a Ruger. I WANT that little gun for around the house, or, a BFR setup similar.
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You are a brave man :) but if I shot something like that, this would happen.
 
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It's really not that bad. the 440's at 950 fps recoil at about 25 ft lbs in a 3.2 pound gun. That's about 25% more then a 240 grain 44 magnum load. Cakewalk.
 
One thing is crystal clear from the reports of this shootout. The bad guys had seriously wounded two, but not mortally wounded any FBI agents before they were themselves both mortally wounded. The head wound to Matix early in the fight ended his participation in the battle after he fired one ineffective shotgun blast. Nevertheless, despite massive injuries, the other bad guy, Platt, was able to continue the fight for another few minutes with at least one mortal wound - time he used to kill two FBI agents and greviously wound one more. No drugs or alcohol were found in his body at autopsy, so the question is how did he continue the fight despite a broken and useless arm, a 9mm slug lodged near his heart, a collapsed blood-filled lung, while he was also quickly bleeding to death? Personally, I think the violence of the car collision - he was in the passenger seat of the car that Matix was driving when it was run off the road by the FBI and hit a tree - put him into that state of shock prize-fighters call "Queer Street" in which he felt no pain and continued to function more or less on auto-pilot, according to the military training that had been instilled into him in the Army. I once happened upon a car wreck in which the only victims were the two drivers. One was pinned in his car and was unconscious when I got there. His is face and head was a mass of blood. I thought he was probably already dead or soon would be. The other guy was out of his car, and was seemingly lucid, and was trying to help the other guy. Before the night was over though, the guy who was out of his car when I got there was dead of shock and massive internal injuries and the unconscious guy who was pinned in his car lived to tell the tale. Go figure.
 
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