Originally posted by The Verminator
I don't think the FBI really did so bad if you consider all the facts.
There was one key thing about the whole crazy episode.
There was a unique adversary--an amazingly determined guy.......a tough and aggressive guy who was armed with a highly superior weapon.
Analysis of the 1986 Miami-Dade Shootout could easily be a thread in and of itself, but here are just a few of the highlights in how the FBI did very poorly in the incident:
Had Manauzzi retained his revolver in a better manner than laying it on the passenger seat of his car, he might not have lost it in the car crash and been able to participate in the event in a more meaningful way than getting shot.
Had Grogan put a nerd strap on his glasses, he might not have lost them in the car crash and thus been able to shoot more accurately.
Between the eight agents involved, at least 78 rounds of ammunition were fired at the two suspects, yet Platt was hit 12 times and Matix 6. Had the agents managed better than the 23% hit rate they achieved, the incident might have resolved more favorably. Additionally, Platt, who did most of the damage, while shot 12 times was only shot in vital areas twice one of which was the final shot fired by Mireles which ended the fight. Had the other 10 shots that hit Platt been in vital areas rather than his periphery, he likely would have been incapacitated sooner.
Also, the notion that Platt was armed with a "highly superior weapon" is laughable when you consider that in addition to more Remington shotguns, the other six agents involved in the stakeout that didn't participate in the fight also had in their cars HK MP5 submachine guns and M16 rifles. Platt's Ruger Mini-14 was not a "highly superior weapon" but a commonly available one and arguably inferior to what the FBI had access to but didn't have the forethought to have ready and available when confronting two heavily armed suspects who were already known to have committed multiple violent felonies including armed robbery, grand theft auto, attempted murder, and murder.
The biggest, to my mind, failure of the 1986 Miami-Dade Shootout is that the agents involved were not ambushed or caught off-guard, but failed to adequately arm and prepare themselves when they knew ahead of time that they were pursuing two very nasty and very dangerous individuals.
And MANY, MANY who were not.
That's why the "One Shot Stop" is a myth........and it happens for, as you say, a variety of reasons........and these reasons are hardly ever due to the power of the handgun.
Something that is known to have happened multiple times across a wide variety of situations, by definition, cannot be a "myth". We may not be able to accurately predict what will cause a one shot stop or reliably replicate them, but we know that they do happen and can even correlate factors which make them more likely, so they're certainly not a "myth".
The FBI found that no handgun could be trusted to stop with one shot--therefore they went with the best compromise--the 9mm.
It offered sufficient power and fast repeat shots.
That's the formula for success.
Science of the FBI Labs rules.
The FBI found that no handgun
that they wanted to use could be trusted
to meet the one shot stop criteria they chose to adopt; there, fixed that for you. The FBI was not interested in any and all handguns, they made the conscious decision to completely abandon revolvers thus eliminating cartridges like .357 Magnum, .41 Magnum, and .44 Magnum from even being considered despite the fact that .357 Magnum in particular had an excellent reputation amongst law enforcement for one shot stops. Likewise, while the 10mm might have been capable of providing magnum revolver-like performance, the FBI instead chose to water it down to the ballistics we would eventually see with the .40 S&W because they decided in the testing phase that full-power 10mm (Norma at the time) had too much recoil.
Also, the FBI chose to take the work of Martin Fackler, who posited that permanent crush cavity was the
primary and
most reliable mechanism of injury in handgun rounds and grossly over-simplify it into "energy does not wound". Certain handguns in certain loadings with certain bullets can and have caused wounds and incapacitation out of proportion to their permanent crush cavities, but it's difficult to do that with the power level of cartridges that the FBI was interested in adopting with bullet designs that would work reliably in the types of guns they were interested in shooting them through.
Here's the problem with laboratory testing, while it's good at telling you how bullets react to being shot into a tissue simulant, it's not very good at telling you how a living organism will react to being shot. You cannot measure incapacitation times on a block of gelatin. The FBI's lab can tell you that, in the real world, a bullet will likely penetrate approximately x inches and expand to y diameter, but it doesn't tell you if x inches of penetration and y diameter will equal z seconds/minutes until the person/animal you've shot is incapacitated. Laboratory testing, by it's very nature, strives to be verifiable and repeatable and thus to eliminate as many uncontrolled variables as possible, but a real-world shooting is full of uncontrolled variables. This is why things like the old Winchester 147 gr Subsonic JHP's that the FBI went to immediately after the 86 Miami incident, while great in the laboratory, didn't work well in the real world.
And the funny thing is that the 9mm round they were using, the old Winchester Silvertip, performed quite well.
One of today's improved 9mms wouldn't have done much more than that one did.
It penetrated the heavy muscle of an upper arm, then the rib cage, took out a lung and stopped just an inch short of the heart. That's about all the penetration and damage that one can expect.
The fact that even with a wound like that......the perp continued to aggressively press the fight and kill and disable his adversaries was simply due to his mental and physical capabilities--his physical strength and his will and determination to win the fight and--of course--his vastly superior weapon.
Blaming the 9mm was just due to some of the same ignorance that exists today.
A lot of people still don't understand the 9mm.
And here is the crux of my problem with taking the FBI's "wisdom" as gospel: blaming the 9mm is just ignorance of today and not understanding history, it was the chosen scapegoat of the FBI all those years ago and now all these decades later they're trying to gaslight us into forgetting it. If you look at the document "10mm Notes" written by Special Agent Patrick Urey when the FBI adopted the 10mm, you find this little gem:
"The 9mm has been in existence since 1902. It is actually an older cartridge than the .45. In that time, so many variations and designs have been tried that it is hard to imagine anything new that could be attempted. (goes on to site specifics)"
http://www.w0ipl.net/FBI-10mm
Wow, good thing Urey didn't go into fortune telling
What happened, and what the FBI doesn't want to admit to is this: The 1986 Miami shooting got two agents killed and five more wounded because they underestimated their opponents, didn't adequately prepare, and weren't good enough marksmen. Rather than admit that
they did something wrong, the FBI instead chose a scapegoat in one single 9mm Winchester Silvertip among dozens fired by seven agents. Unfortunately for the Bureau, the bullet they chose to scapegoat actually performed exactly as designed and advertised, so they came up with this theory that if it had penetrated
just a little more it would have stopped Platt before he murdered Grogan and Dove. The problem with this theory is that a heart shot isn't guaranteed to be immediately incapacitating. There have been many people over the years shot through the heart who not only survived, but continued to fight.
Due to their theory/excuse of "if it only reached his heart" they not only adopted penetration standards that, in many cases, are probably deeper than they really need to be, but also downplayed or completely ignored several other factors in handgun wounding. Thusly due to what I will as politely as I can call "intellectual dishonesty" on the part of the FBI, many very good calibers and loadings which enjoyed decades of successful use and good reputations for stopping fights are not labeled as inadequate or sub-par. The dogmatic adherence to actual myths perpetrated by the FBI like "energy does not wound" have led to all sorts of mental gymnastics on the part of those trying to patch the holes in it. Probably half of the caliber wars we've seen on this forum and other over the last few decades can trace their roots to the opinions of the FBI; opinions born out of cherry-picking the data that supported a preconceived idea which was itself was adopted to support scapegoating one bullet in order to avoid admission of fault.
The fact that a little over 30 years after using it as a scapegoat to cover up their own shortcomings, the FBI does and about-face and says that the 9mm is "just as good" as the very cartridge that so many adopted based on the Bureau's guidance, in my opinion, simply adds insult to injury.
?