Targets: Please tell me this is a joke

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My God man how could you live with yourself shooting a pregnant woman or kid?
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How could you live with yourself if you had the means to stop the murders of a dozen people, and you didn't?

A law enforcement officer might be called to the scene of a school shooting -- one where the murderer is himself just a child. That LEO should have thought their own ethics through ahead of time. The other option is for the LEOs to stand there watching children get murdered while they sort through their own inner demons about using a weapon against a child murderer.

Remember the awful Andrea Yates case, a woman who murdered all five of her own children. If a woman like that was pregnant, and threatening the lives of her children -- would the life of the baby in her womb somehow be worth more than the lives of the toddlers she would murder if the responding officer did not stop her immediately? Sometimes, the best course of action, the one with the least-horrible outcome on some coldhearted scale of injustice, is still a horrible situation that leads to pain for everyone involved.

Saving lives does not always come without cost.

If you carry a concealed weapon and have ever pictured yourself being the hero and saving the day, try putting yourself in one of those situations. Think it through.

  • If you took a job where you would have a duty to act, and might get called to such a scene, would you just stand there with your ethics spinning wildly while people are getting killed?

  • Would you deal with such questions ahead of time as much as you could, so that you would have the capacity to save lives in a nightmare situation?

  • Would you ignore such questions, figuring that you'd somehow steel yourself to do the necessary thing even though you literally could not even bring yourself to even think about shooting a paper representation of that thing?
We send law enforcement into situations like that. We expect them to deal with whatever they encounter, whether it's a domestic crisis, someone gone insane, a school shooting, a schizophrenic killer who happens to be barely into puberty... Every single person who has been through law enforcement training should know where their limits are on questions like that. Their training should have forced them to confront their own nightmare scenarios, so that they do not freeze, unable to act, when innocent lives are at stake.

We aren't talking about training officers to "just automatically shooting a target because it has a gun." We are talking about giving them the ability to make that choice in time for the choice to do any good. That's why those targets are so upsetting on such a visceral level. Nobody wants to make that choice. Nobody wants to picture making that choice. Everyone wants to live in a world where such choices are never needed.

How old will the next school shooter be?

pax
 
In regards to kids...

In the big sandbox, I saw a kid, who according to Doc was about 14/15, after he had been hit by us. His AK was at his feet and the old man with him, I'm guessing he was his Dad or Grand-dad, didn't drop his Enfield until there were four M-4s pointed at him and Doc was approaching slowly with his hands up and big bag with a red cross on it visible.
 
These targets appear to depict only caucasian people. The DHS has presented caucasian people as a threat to national security in the past few years. Veterans and other legal gun owners have been referred to as domestic terrorists. Political beliefs leaning to the right have also been demonized as of late. These targets seem to depict a similar thought pattern. Personally, I find them disgusting. How many cases have there been of innocent people killed by LE "because they had a gun", only to find out that the person in fact had no gun. I feel that these targets will only lead to more incidents of this type. Did Lon Horiuchi mistake the baby for a gun through his scope when he blew Vickie Weavers head off? There is good and bad in every walk of life. Not all LEOs are good people with a solid moral foundation. My .02.
 
These types of targets are very useful for target or threat identification.

LE Targets offers (may include) sets of cover up hands to paste onto these types of targets. Some cover up hands are empty, holding cell phones, grenades, etc to yield almost limitless variations.

Much better to train a guy to shoot an appropriate threat than to shoot only sillohuettes and hope for the best when he is under stress, would you not agree?
 
I could possibly see an advantage to targets depicting "normal" gun owners for use in shoot/no-shoot drills.

As in a guy with a gun, but the rifle held down as if he is walking back from his truck after hunting. A target mixed in with an obvious hostile target would make for good training, me thinks.
 
^^^^ yes. This. Not everyone holding a firearm is a threat. Although these targets, at least the ones I've seen, depict all the subjects as threats.
 
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This is reprehensible, and disgusting. You do NOT train to shoot children, no matter the situation. If I saw someone shoot at paper targets with pictures of children without hesitation or protest, I would assume psychopathic tendencies. If I were in a profession - military, police, whatever - where I was asked to shoot at these targets I would seek to terminate my employment immediately and begin some sort of protest process.

I would rather be shot and killed by a child than to kill one, even in cases of self-defense. I used to be a kid, and therefore can say with experience that kids are dumb. They lack life experience. I can personally recall many, many things I did as a stupid youth that probably should have killed me dead. I was fortunate to survive long enough to get wise to how the world works. When you shoot and kill a kid, you're shooting and killing an innocent who really doesn't know better.

THAT SAID

In the field of warfare, morality is shifted, because the conditions are also shifted. That kid with the gun is no longer a personal problem, he's an enemy combatant that threatens not you, but everyone around you. You may be willing, as I am, to die rather than to shoot a child, but are you going to hesitate to shoot him (or her) when he/she is threatening to kill everyone around you?

My answer is this: Deal with this problem if/when it occurs. DO NOT TRAIN TO SHOOT CHILDREN (who could be holding toy guns) ON SIGHT!!! Why on earth would you train to desensitize yourself against shooting children?? This sort of thing should ALWAYS be a difficult decision one makes in a difficult situation, NOT something you actively train for. Historically speaking, if you find yourself fighting a war in which children and pregnant women are shooting at you, (ahem, Vietnam) it's probably time to rethink the reason you're there. How did it come to this? How did it come to a situation where I'm shooting at expectant mothers and children?

Let me be clear - I would shoot a pregnant woman or child if they ever demonstrated that they were about to kill my own children or loved ones and there was no other way to stop it. It would haunt me to the end of my days and provide plenty of psychological damage. BUT YOU DON'T TRAIN FOR THIS! YOU DON'T DESENSITIZE YOURSELF TO THIS! Because one day - mark my words - someone WILL kill an innocent due to this frakked-up training method. Someone, after spending hours at a shooting range putting holes in pictures of children and expectant mothers, will put real holes in real people that may or may not be actual threats, but they put holes in them anyway because they were trained to. This sort of thing should be the unfortunate, horrible choice that one has to make in the field - not something that becomes standard operating procedure.
 
first Id like to say, thanks to pax for keeping this civil...

Many folks (from reading this thread) tend to view the appearance as an indicator of if the target is a threat or not. No a pregnant woman is not always a threat. Now a person pointing a firearm at another may be considered a threat. (Need I go back and search threads that how pointing a firearm at another is a threat?)

A threat is a threat, plain and simple... A threat can take many different forms. Male/female. Adult/child. Pregnant/Not-pregnant. Black/asian/white, etc. A threat is still a threat.

I would prefer a realistic target that depicts different type situations. Sure, some of them are not fun to think of or consider, but do happen.

pax said:
Plenty of people caught up in a domestic violence cycle turn around and attack the responding officers.
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It doesnt just take a domestic violence case to do that. It could be something as simple as a citation, or heck, even a verbal warning to make someone flip out against their view of "government" and it doesnt matter how right or legal the officer is.

While I know some folks find defending yourself against a child (less then 18) as wrong, Wait till you have one who is assaulting you violently. Dont think a child under 18 could not kill you? Your fooling yourself. Same with a pregnant woman, or a grand-dad. Its the threat that matters.

For all the folks complaining about these targets, I havent read a reply yet that discusses how to tell an innocent person from one who would kill you. Is it race? No. Is it tats? No. Is it age? No. Is it pregnancy? No. etc....

As to
North East Redneck said:
These targets appear to depict only caucasian people.
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You evidently havent heard the repeated complaints from african americans about how a b-27 target is racist against african americans....Yes, a B-27 comes in black, but also comes in a blue sillouette too. I dont see too many blue folks walking around either...

Unfortunatly a target only shows a glimpse of what may be happening. I dont see it as "wrong" having various types of targets depicting various things
 
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SpectreBlofeld said:
When you shoot and kill a kid, you're shooting and killing an innocent who really doesn't know better.
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Yes. Sometimes the best choice SUCKS for everyone involved.

Here's something from a blog I read today. It's about emotionally disturbed persons (EDPs), including people with mental handicaps or impairments. I think it applies here, because you're right: the person holding the gun, killing people, might be someone who "really doesn't know better." That stinks and it's horrible to think that there might not be another way to stop such a person.

Chiron Blog said:
We all face the possibility of using force and most of us have thought about the ramifications of using force and come to terms with our own ethics. But on some level, if we ever use force, especially deadly force, we want it to be against a bad person. A murderer or rapist.

A true EDP is not a bad person. With brain chemistry out of balance, his actions are not under his or her own control. Killing an EDP may be necessary for our own survival, it may be justified, but there is no element of justice in it…and we want, maybe need, that element of justice. We want the threat to, in some way, deserve the force.

... Remember here most of all, that self-defense is not about justice. It is about stopping bad things from happening.
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It's not about justice. It's about preventing more murders in the only way that will work given the realities of the situation. And it's about making the decision to act, quickly enough for it to do any good.

pax
 
Pax, I get what you're saying here, and I agree. The hard choice must be made, even if it is a horrible choice. This I understand. However, the idea that people would choose to practice on a range shooting at cutouts of children, pregnant women, etc., is still reprehensible to me. To desensitize yourself to this is to dehumanize yourself.

I know most debates here concern legalities of gun ownership and tend to shy away from these sorts of ethical quagmires, but I feel strongly enough about this sort of thing to 'go there'. We don't need this. At no point in the United States' long relationship with private gun owners, military, and law enforcement ever require exercises that simulated shooting children and expectant mothers (until now apparently). The world may have changed in the past few decades in terms of how threats are represented, but it hasn't changed THAT much.
 
It is a sad world where we must train to desensitize ourselves to shoot non-traditional "bad guys", but its driven by real-life experiences that those who've carried a weapon have faced.

In May 2012 when I showed up in Kabul for my turn in the sandbox, I had to deal with the prospect of shooting suicide bombers who were kids. And in a lot of my outside the wire time, there were a LOT of kids! They always wanted your pen or pencil or water or candy. But each time, I got nervous and really paid attention and kept my grip just a little tighter on my M-4.

And it happened. We think he was about 15, blew himself up trying to gain access to one of our facilities along a path I had been on numerous times before. So, the threat is real.

And as a dad with both sons and daughters, I saw some of my kids in those young faces looking at me. But I resolved that if it came to it, I would shoot a kid, if it was a threat, so I could go home and see mine. A tough decision as a dad to make, but something I found I had to do. Gratefully, thankfully, I NEVER had to do it, and find myself detesting the fact I had to mentally "go there". But some targets depicting the scenarios would have been helpful to test that resolve.
 
These targets to me are disturbing, yes LE do have to be trained to defend themselves when confronted by anyone threatening them with a gun. That could even include little kids and pregnant women. But at the same time it looks to me as a way to desensitize the officers from refraining to shoot citizens.

After all DHS has issued statements classifying gun owners and returning veterans as potential domestic terrorists, so to me it seems that these targets were made in response to that. That possibility is just a little scary to me and i don't like the thought of DHS training to shoot American gun owners.
 
I've spent a bit of time poking around the "split second targets" section of the LET website. These are the ones with sort of generic images closest to those in the "no hesitation" series. The "modal demographic" (don't you love it when I talk dirty?) depicted on the targets is a clean-shaven, white male, aged maybe 20 to 40, casually dressed. There's a black guy, an Asian guy, a couple of (white) women, and a couple of "all-purpose ethnics," but the majority fit that description. Oh yeah, there's also that kind of nutty-looking pregnant woman.

I thought the most interesting, from a split-second decision-making standpoint, was the photo of a smallish white woman holding a gun to the head of a large black man. I bet he gets shot a lot.

Fishing_Cabin said:
For all the folks complaining about these targets, I havent read a reply yet that discusses how to tell an innocent person from one who would kill you. Is it race? No. Is it tats? No. Is it age? No. Is it pregnancy? No. etc....
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Yep, I'm still waiting, too. Still no takers, barring that clownophobe.

Won't someone please explain what a bad guy looks like, and how to tell him from a "citizen" or an "American gun owner?"
 
I think the issue here, at the most base level, is that these targets are teaching the idea that anyone holding a gun - or what looks like one - is a target, to be shot. Not a threat - subtle distinction - but a target, which must be shot at. Because these cardboard cutouts are literally that - they are targets, made for shooting. You put them up at the range and you put holes in them. In the real world, there are threats. Threats MIGHT be manifested in the form of pregnant women and children holding guns, or things that look like guns. It doesn't matter. What DOES matter is that you shouldn't automatically kill anything that looks like a target. They only become a 'target' if the threat level and situation calls for the action.

So, what are the purpose of these range targets? They're not for accuracy - a plain old bull's eye pattern is better for that. They only exist for one reason - to encourage you to shoot people you'd normally not want to shoot. The problem here is that it turns problems into targets that must be shot.

In my opinion, this shouldn't be a part of range practice. When shooting at the range you should be focusing on your accuracy, form, and technique. There are other training exercises in military, law enforcement, and civilian applications that will cover the questions of WHEN and WHY to shoot. But these things we're talking about are cardboard cutouts of expectant mothers and children that only exist to be shot, which implicitly reinforces the idea that you should automatically treat these sort of people as targets. This isn't right. See a kid or a mother with a gun? Try talking to them. "Hi, how's the weather, that's an interesting tattoo,... say, is that a gun you're holding? 'Sup with that?"

These sort of 'range targets' bypass any real-world scenarios and teach you to just put holes in them, and I think this is not a useful thing.
 
So, what are the purpose of these range targets? They're not for accuracy - a plain old bull's eye pattern is better for that. They only exist for one reason - to encourage you to shoot people you'd normally not want to shoot. The problem here is that it turns problems into targets that must be shot.
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I would not say they exist for one reason, to be shot. I would say they can used in various ways in different training scenarios. Shoot-Dont shoot. Have various pasting items (firearm, knife, phone, wallet etc) and use them for a shoot-dont shoot and then debreif as to why it was a shoot-dont shoot. Not all targets are meant to be shot. Except for the pictures (more detailed now)they are using now, there have been different targets depicting various people over the years. I havent known of a big outcry before now.
 
With respect to the comments about huge ammo purchases by DHS.

DHS operates training facilities available to ALL federal LE organizations. I recently read an article indicating that in one recent year, over 70,000 federal LEOs, from 90 different federal LE organizations trained at DHS facilities.

It's also typical for the government to make large consolidated purchases, and the organization doing the purchasing may only be one (although perhaps) the major user of the end product being purchased.

Finally, the ammunition contract was to run over 5 years, and the figures quoted are MAXIMUM/UP TO figures. In other words, the contracts give the government the OPTION to purchase the UP TO the quoted figures over the next 5 years.

There are something like 140,000 federal law enforcement agents in the U.S. who are authorized to carry weapons and make arrests. That's a huge figure, and training all of them, and keeping them in issue ammo takes a LOT of ammo. Like maybe a couple of billion rounds every 5 years or so.

As far as the targets go, I wouldn't like to think that every federal LEO in the U.S., or even the majority of federal LEOs were training against targets like that. However, I'm not starry-eyed enough to believe that none of them have a need to desensitize themselves to shooting armed threats, regardless of how benign they may otherwise appear. Given that DHS operates facilities open to all federal LE organizations, it makes sense that, for such a wide variety of training needs, they would have at least some targets of virtually every kind made.
 
There are something like 140,000 federal law enforcement agents in the U.S. who are authorized to carry weapons and make arrests. That's a huge figure, and training all of them, and keeping them in issue ammo takes a LOT of ammo. Like maybe a couple of billion rounds every 5 years or so.
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Let's also keep in mind that US ammo manufacturers are cranking out 1 billion rounds per week as of right now. At the peak of the Afghan and Iraq wars the military was expending about 55 million rounds per month so let's just say they are buying 1 billion rounds per year. A little quick math puts Federal government purchases at around 1.5 billion rounds per year. Call it 2 billion just for fun. That leaves 50 billion rounds per year for state/local LEO and civilian markets. Sounds a lot less scary now doesn't it?


As for the targets, meh... Doesn't bother me even if they do use them, I probably would use them too if they were easily available. Threats aren't walking around with a sign hung around their necks and this ain't the movies, nobody cues creepy music when bad stuff is about to go down. Take the guy who shot up the movie theater in Aurora or this Lanza fool at Newtown. If I had met either of them walking down the street I doubt my spidey sense would have been screaming that either was a mass murderer.
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