One note I’d make is while I see that 3 shot statistic repeated often and it doesn’t seem unreasonable to me, I can never find the source of that statistic.
Not all people who take more than 3 shots to be disabled did so because they were on bath salts. Michael Platt in the 1986 Miami shootout was shot 12 times and kept fighting while he was bleeding out internally and had a collapsed lung. Despite sustaining this injury at the beginning of the fight he eventually killed two FBI agents. The autopsy showed no drugs in his system. He was former military as an Army infantryman.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1986_FBI_Miami_shootout
Then there’s this story of an officer involved shooting where the suspect was shot 14 times with a 45 ACP, 6 of those shots in fatal locations. There was no evidence of drugs or alcohol in his system.
https://www.police1.com/officer-sho...5-rounds-of-ammo-on-the-job-clGBbLYpnqqHxwMq/
In this officer involved shooting the suspect was shot 7 times with a 40SW (in addition to 7 misses) before being disabled and the officer was shot 7 times with a 45ACP (in addition to 6 misses), including a shot to his mouth that knocked out his teeth, a shot to his arm, two shots to his legs/buttocks, and 3 shots to his chest that were stopped by his body armor. The officer continued to fight and survived.
https://www.policemag.com/340305/shots-fired-jacksonville-florida-01-26-2008.
Now am I suggesting we all need to carry 145 rounds? No, and frankly I don’t come close to that (nor do I think I have at any point claimed to be “superior” for carrying more ammunition than anyone else, as was suggested above). My point is there certainly are examples of single suspects that aren’t under the influence of drugs taking many rounds and they’re not entirely uncommon. Now a fair critique is, “But what percentage of all shootings are made up of such cases?”, and my answer is I don’t know. I’ve never seen what seems like a great database of shootings that encompasses all such information.
Carry a firearm is always at some level a matter of measuring the odds. There’s the decision to carry the firearm in the first place, and then the decision about which caliber, what capacity, etc. And those decisions are at some level based on the number of rounds we assume it will take to stop an assailant and the number of assailants we might encounter. There are no doubt people that look at my own choices and consider them inadequate.
What I think is important here is to keep in perspective the actual topic. Given the size and weight differences between a traditional single stack, one of the newer micro-compacts, and a subcompact, into which camp does a person fall? At what point does a person decide what weight and size is too much for a given capacity? And the answer seems to be (from our limited sample here) that that specific point varies quite a lot. I think the variability we see in the responses here in part explains the number of options out there currently and the recent trend of higher capacities in smaller and lighter pistols as compared to traditional double stacks, even if those size and weight differences might not seem relevant to some of us or worth it to some of us.
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