3-4 rounds average per gunfight. Still true?

shots vs hits

Isn't the number of hits far more important than the number of shots. :)

What is your average number of hits per shots? Oh no I didn't ask that did I?:eek:
 
I don't want to argue statistical methodology, and I'm the first to say that ten incidents is not enough to establish a trend or a statistical probability. However, my school has a lot of private citizen students who are involved in shootings. At the Tactical Conference this year I gave a Power Point presentation on ten representative incidents from our files. They are just that-- typical examples of private citizen self defense shootings. Here are a few tidbits from the summary.

5 of the 10 incidents involved an armed robbery by 1 or 2 suspects.
3 occurred on mall parking lots, only 1 occurred in the student's home.
The lowest number of shots fired was 1. The highest was 11. The average was 3.8. There were 3 cases which involved 4 or more shots.

In 2 cases, the defender fired 8 and 11 shots. These were above the average, and neither would have been able to do that with a five shot gun.

Here is my take on "averages". If you have one foot in a campfire and one foot on a block of ice, on average you're comfortable. Since needing more than 4-5 shots is a reasonably forseeable problem, I carry a gun that holds more BB's. YMMV
 
Scattergun, we will just have to disagree.

I stand by what I said about considering the extremes of the distribution and not basing carry capacity on the mean - which is what the OP asked.
 
Averages

Just thinking about averages.

So far, I've met two sharks in my first thirty dives... no monsters, the biggest was an 8 footer, but that still trumps the average.

I've had close encounters with a water moccasin and a rattlesnake.

I've had fairly close-up looks at a lot of 10 and 12 foot alligators (luckily, I was in a canoe at those times, not swimming).

My mother once got chased by a moose.

My father was wakened from a nap outside by a black bear.

My family seems to have a knack for running into problems that are outside of statistical norms. Ergo, I tend to try to prepare for Murphy. This means that when I carry, I do carry a spare mag.

Murphy could gift me with multiple B/G's, or a single magazine failure.

Cheers,

M
 
Do people really carry around a medium size glock, 2 to 4 mags and a backup gun:eek: I mean really how the heck do you hump all that around on a regular basis.
 
Mr. Smith

I seem to be the focus of living on some average when it comes to life threatening event.

Please re read post #18

"You have again played right into FerFAL and his continued crusade for high capacity handguns. I see the wisdom of Mr Benzene, Mr Raimius, Mr Meyer, and Mr Raytracer. HOWEVER, gentleman in your rush to agree with FerFAL you overlooked the true issue. Is the data that supports officer involved shooting "and it is current data" valid in relation to civilian shooting incidents? The answer is no, ...."

I am having a private debate with a man on a public forum because he is not willing to post his e-mail address and is not what he professes to be. I know that this method is wrong and I apologize.

However, what I was hoping for is that someone would know that this myth presented by NYPD is a classic case of "RANGE DRILLS DEFINING LIFE ON THE STREET" 3 or 4 shots per perp, was the training drill taught in officer survival at the range. In a nut shell "shoot 2 evaluate your target, shot 2 more", ring a bell! NYPD was not gathering data on real life events, they were gathering data on the effectiveness of their firearms training. Of course the average will equal 4 if you are taugt to deliver a basic response of 4 rounds!!!!

The point is that anyone whom professes to be "on the job" or work in the field knows this is a classic error, right along with the poor folks in Hollister looking for the brass bucket. At yet all that was talked about was My guns bigger and I carry more ammo! or incessant yapping about averages. So, for those who professes to be "on the job" or work in the field, I suggest a little re-read, Street Survival documents this well, or perhaps we aren't what we say we are, right Mr. Meyer!

Sorry when I first checked aboard this site I was told it was serious, so tell me when do we get past 101 my gun is best. John Browning solved the problem of firepower in pistols for FerFAL before my time, guess this isn't the right place for me.

So Long & Be safe
 
I remember when I was a youngman going hunting with my dad. He would take 6-8 shotgun shells for his single shot 20 gauge. For years and years this did just fine for him.......... Then the day came we were hunting and had a mixed bag of squirrels, grouse and rabbits. He brought 8 shells and shot all of them long before the hunt was over. I kept on hunting until I reached the legal number of animals I could gather for the table. As that was I almost ran out of ammo myself and I carried a light load of a mere 35 rounds.

Now he carries atleast a box (25) and a 22 pistol for that rabbit that sits there thinking "he don't see me" and 50 rounds for the pistol.

I might only need 3-4 rounds, but I sure as hell aint going to carry 3-4. Minimum I carry 29. If I have the BUG (always have it) on me, I have 22 for that and if I travel long distance add a 14 round mag of ball and a box of 50 somewhere in the car. Seems like alot but it realy is not. It is 2 mags extra for the primary and two for the BUG at max. Typicaly it is one extra for the primary and two extra for the BUG
 
longcoldwinter wrote:
Do people really carry around a medium size glock, 2 to 4 mags and a backup gun I mean really how the heck do you hump all that around on a regular basis.
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A Glock plus two mags and a snubby or mini Glock in the pocket isn’t that big a deal.

The issue discussed is delicate to say the least, people feel strongly about their choices.

Just for the sake of clarity and to avoid some of the common clichés
“High capacity autos make you shot more and hit little”
At least for this discussion here, lets assume that the person is indifferently mature, relatively smart, and posses a certain degree of skill with firearms. Meaning: When discussing hypothetical situations, our hypothetical guy wont go blasting away like a fool just because he has more ammo.

I’ve even read people say that those that carry autos are inherently more violent compared to revolver guys, and more likely to choose to fire before it’s really the last option, just because they have an auto.

Lets just assume that autos don’t magically make you an idiot and revolvers don’t have mystical forces that automatically make you this wise, deadly accurate marksman with nerves of steel.

You can be a fool, you can be an awful operator, or the other way around, and the weapon of choice wont make any difference whatsoever.

While we are at it, there’s a common cliché that comes to mind right now, and does have relation with the ammo capacity your weapon posses.
“Only hits count”
We hear that and we nod silently, in respect to the wise, letters written in bronze.
Hold you horses my friends!!!
Only hits count does not mean you are not going to miss!
It can happen. Actually, statistically peaking you are very likely to miss more than a few rounds. So that’s one more reason for having extra ammo, even if you are hoping to need just a couple of shots, supposing you are lucky and fall within the favorable part of the statistics.

Another point regarding the good old “only hits count” .
Say I fire a bunch of rounds against and attacker. That attacker fleas.
Didn’t those rounds achieve their intended objective? I’m not advocates inaccuracy in any way. Just saying, at the end of the day, if you managed to achieve what you wanted, those shots fulfilled their purpose in my book.

Now for the real world case to use as an example.
Something similar happened here with a politician, ex military guy called Rico.
He was taking his girls to school early in the morning, and just as they exited the garage the daughter notices a suspicious car, which was waiting for them full of armed men inside.
Rico’s reaction? Draw his gun (Beretta?) and start firing into the vehicle.
We never knew if anyone got injured or killed, but they did leave and that’s what matters.
More ammo allows you the luxury of putting down range a certain limited amount of suppressive fire, enough to brake contact in some cases. Doing this with a revolver leaves you with an empty gun soon, but with an auto you can put one round per second against them for 10 seconds, and still have 5 or 6 left if more problems arise or if you need more accurately placed shots.
More ammo means more options, more possibilities, more chances of making it through.
No, in no way does it replace awareness and training, but if you have those, more ammunition gives you more options to work with if the situation calls for it.

FerFAL
 
So, the question is pretty simple; do you think that it is wise to expect to shoot just 3 or 4 rounds,
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NO

or should you have a weapon with more capacity just in case that average no longer holds truth, or you just happen to be one of those that don’t trust luck when it comes to falling within favorable odds.
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The average doesn't mean squat. Mutually exclusive historical data mean nothing to your particular shooting situation. What happened to somebody else, say Tom Givens' students (or any other shooting data), doesn't mean squat. The data are interesting, but can't be used to predict what will happen to YOU in YOUR SITUATION.

You have a 50-50 chance your shooting will be average. Either it will be average, or it won't.

So do you have an issue with preparing for more than 3-4 rounds? It isn't like preparing for more will utterly destroy you if you train for a higher round count. What is wrong with preparing for the worst and hoping for the best?
 
Wow. My head hurts now.
I worked with statistics quite a bit in college.
Statistics can help you understand some things, but I don't believe they are suited to this discussion. Especially averages.

I carry 27 rounds total. One extra clip.
I feel comfortable with that.

3 or 4 shots? No, I wouldn't feel comfortable with that.

You NEVER know what's gonna happen. Period.
Be prepared with what you think prepared is.
 
Ancidotal Evidence

Take this for what it's worth - one person's episode.
Went into a cafe with six family/slash friends. New Year's eve so we waited on a table. As our table was being cleaned, two guys walked in and sat down at the table. I went over and politely told them they must have missed us waiting. One guy pulls up his shirt (drunk or doped up) and showed me a large auto. I turned around and not wanting to yell fire in a theater, told the people we would go to another place. The big guy at the end of the our line said something to the perps and I told big guy to shut up and leave.
As we were going back to the lot, the big guy knocked on the window (still not knowing he had a gun) and said something that sent BG#1 outside to confront me. I held my hands up and told him I did not want any trouble. He turned and walked toward the car BG#2 had retrieved and #1 was pulling his pistol at the same time I pulled a North American 22 mag out of my pocket, firing at the same time he started shooting. He shot several times wildly at the big guy as I shot at him (10 yards). He wheeled around and shot at me then, seeing he was not the only one in the fight with a gun. I got off another shot as he ducked and got in the car.
My wife in the mean time had ran to two cops she had seen next door and alerted them (before the shots rang out). The car passed them and then me as I got a .38 Colt snub nose six shot out from the car. The Police fired their glocks as I shot.
End of story - the perp shot 8 shots, I shot 2 from the N.A. and 5 from the Colt (yes, I had two speed loaders), and the Police shot 7 times apiece. NO ONE HIT ANYONE IN 29 ROUNDS (no blood in the stolen car that crashed 500 yards from the cafe and they left on foot never to be found). Start to finish 45 seconds max.
TO FALs POINT, the N.A. did it's job, causing the BG's to break contact but I think about it 15 years later. I now carry a few different small auto's but the hot weather keeps you from carring anything heavy. I constantly second guess myself.
Yes I am proficient with all my guns as I am sure the Police were. Moral to long story, IT AIN'T EASY SHOOTING SOMEONE WHO DOES'NT WANT TO BE SHOT.
 
The report that I brought forward in #3 does not suggest that only 3 or 4 rounds were fired. It suggests that gunfights are fluid and that each shot string measure 3 or 4 shots. every time a lag occured such as a reload or movement it was measued as a new incident.
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And I think that illustrates a big part of the problem that Glenn identifies with "Criminological stats are all over the place and very suspect." Your report makes one suggestion. Another report will suggest something totally different. Maybe we are measuring different things. Maybe the way we measure is different. For example, I've run across 4 different ways of counting "gunfights" in the literature. Thus, the stats are all over the place. I do believe you find certain trends and commonalities, which goes to the issue of the shape of the curve and the extremes of the distribution and so on.

NYPD was not gathering data on real life events, they were gathering data on the effectiveness of their firearms training.
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Sorry, but that is just blatantly incorrect. By gathering data on real life events they used that to develop their firearms training. In fact, the NYPD was rather straightforward with the early SOP 9 documents in saying that there was no correlation between the training and the success in actual shootings.

"If you have one foot in a campfire and one foot on a block of ice, on average you're comfortable".
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Actually, Tom, I'd suggest that on average you are not at all comfortable<G>!

In 2 cases, the defender fired 8 and 11 shots. These were above the average, and neither would have been able to do that with a five shot gun.
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But that is of so limited use, Tom, that it becomes virtually meaningless, as you said. A dataset of 10 cases literally has no significance in discussing this, IMO, other than to present an anecdote. Anecdotal information is nice, but for analysis purposes it means little or nothing, and I think that is the point others are trying to make.
 
Maybe the way we measure is different.
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DA brings up a valid point. I have seen studies where they determined hit ratio by dividing the total number of rounds fired by the total hits scored (I believe SOP 9 was and may be still done that way). While on the surface that seems the way to do it, it is not the most accurate. The most accurate way to do it is to look at the participants and take the number of hits/rounds per participant.
 
Scattergun,

Most people do not want to trade emails. It's a good way to have a nutjob start bothering you. That is the reason for whom ever you are having the discussion with being reluctant to sending a email address.

As for Street Survival, right now I'm looking at that book in one of the book shelves in my office! It's a very good book.

I'm sure the NYPD is TRYING to read the tea leaves from what they get from their stats. Weither they go by average (50 percent) or 80 percentile or 90 percentile I dunno. I do know they tend to win most of their gunfights. But times change so they keep recording what they do.

The sad part is they have so many officers and so little time to train. And add the anti-gun atmosphere then you find it difficult to see many well trained officers.

Nothing is perfect.
 
Mr Smith, thank you for the post

First let me say that I am in no way discrediting NYPD, God forbid that Ron Ice should hear of that, he is far to serious for me to offend. I know for a fact that this department has much refined training from the mid 1980's to which I was speaking. OK

This subject has generated some fire and maybe that is good? I am not really interested in being a confrontational individual over electrons in space, just got carried away, couldn't hold back the fire. Some of the most famous battles happened just so.

What I really wanted to convey was for us to look at the report correctly, and understand what it was defining, not whether on not it was correct.

Good Luck & Be Safe
 
Ive been taught and told to shoot until the threat stops. No matter the amount of shots it takes you shoot until the threat cease's
 
bad shot!

Had a shooting in the city of providece yesterday, my buddie was on the scene,found12 ,9 mm empites, the guy who was shot took 1 (one) rd. to the leg, and drove himself to the hospital. I dunno how many is enough or anything ,but I carry a 45 and two extra mags.
 
Years ago, our Department switched from revolvers to automatics. The transition course was given by a representative from the company that built the large-capacity automatics.

After officers had a familiarization course of fire and demonstrated basic proficiency with the pistols, the last drill that the company representative had officers do was to fill their pistols with 15 rounds, chamber and hold their pistols at the low ready.

He then told the officers that, when the threat charged at them, they should empty their pistols into the target before it got to them. Being a state firearms instructor and already having done semiautomatic transition, I operated the range equipment. When I tripped the "return" button, it took the life-sized silhouette targets about 5 to 6 seconds to go the 50 feet and reach the officer. All officers emptied their pistols at the targets.

When the shooting stopped, we checked targets. Almost every officer got 3 hits in the target.

I asked the Company Representative for his indulgence to conduct another drill. We repaired targets, sent them down-range, and I instructed each officer to load their pistols with 3 rounds. When everyone was ready, I told them to put 3 well-placed hits in the target before it got to them, and tripped the target return. Every officer successfully placed 3 hits in the target.

I then told them to write a Department Inter-Office Report explaining where the 12 missed rounds from their first course of fire went.

I'm not pointing this out to insult anyone who believes in high capacity pistols. Working plainclothes narcotics, I had a 10-round Glock 26. After reading some of Fer-Fal's excellent observations of the need for high capacity pistols in a highly volatile civil environment, it seemed prudent to get a few 17-round magazines to have handy, just in case.

It's a fact of life that virtually all agencies that have gone from revolvers to high capacity automatics have experienced a decline in the percentage of hits in live-fire situations. This seems to indicate that it's human nature to think that, if you have lots of ammo, you can use lots of ammo.

A person can train himself to take single, well-placed shots, but this requires discipline.

We later designed an outdoor combat course with traveling targets, pop-ups, and "pie plates" behind a car's engine compartment that simulated a bad-guy's head. Each officer had to neutralize each target before going to the next.

Each officer started with a 12-gauge pump shotgun, his pistol with 15 rounds in it, and a 14-round spare magazine. We ran about 120 officers through the course.

When the officers went through the course, about 2/3 of them expended all of their ammunition and still had 2 bad-guy targets not-yet engaged.

1/3 of the officers neutralized all of the targets, and still had between 12 and 15 rounds remaining.

Now here's the heresy:

The officers that did best on the combat course participated in a pistol league that fired NRA Bulls-Eye type competition.

Most points in the bulls-eye course are gained (or lost) in the slow-fire event. This is 6 minutes to fire 10 rounds. The target is engaged at a distance of 50 feet, and the 10-ring in the slow-fire event is about the size of a nickel.

Also, ironically, the bulls-eye shooters actually finished the course faster than the non-bulls-eye shooters, because they would neutralize each target with 1 or 2 rounds and go to the next. The non-bulls-eye shooters were losing more time on the targets, because they were expending more non-productive shots.

The best rapid-fire combat course shooters were slow-fire bulls-eye course shooters.
(Just something to think about.)
 
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Truth Lon308, you speak the truth!

In a perfect world the high capacity simi-auto should be the answer to all prayers... in the real world, a very high precentage of users use it to spray-n-pray!

Not saying to take away all the 17 shooters, but alot of the users depend in high output instead of high hit rate. And high hit rate takes skill and nerve.
 
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