Horror

By now, all my readers (are there three of you?) have seen the video.



A Palestianian rams a bus stop full of people with his cars.  Gets out of his car and goes to town chopping at the wounded like Paul Bunyon, killing more folks.  Just awful

A gun toter of some flavor arrives on the scene and engages the assailant.  This is inside of 10 seconds.  Two people have been chopped of before someone engages back.  In ten seconds.  Good thing this wasn't New York or LA.  You'd have to wait for the cops.  Minutes away.

The terrist has a lot of fight in him, charging a man with a pistol.  We can't hear anything so there is no notion of how many rounds are fired at the bad guy but some connect because he collapse to the ground and writes in pain.  But the fight is not out of him.  He throws the knife at the shooter!  It even bounces of the fence next to the shooter and close to the terrist.  The shooter has to kick it farther away, holding his pistol on the bad guy.  Other help arrives at the scene of chaos.  There is quick negotiation with the new arrivals "are you a good guy or bad guy?"   The shot up terrorist STILL has enough gas in his tank to get up and try to flee.  Looks like he takes another round in this scuffle and goes down, then gets up and maybe takes another round and goes down, doesn't go any further.

Lessons for Joe Schmoes.

Shoot to stop.  If the bad guy is throwing knives at you you didn't stop him enough.

The whole 9mm v. .45 argument reared its head in some discussions.  And that leads to the 'all pistol calibers suck' argument.  8 rounds of .45, or 18 rounds of 9mm or 5 rounds of .38...  Get hits, repeat until the threat is stopped.  Reload if you have to.

Getting hits is easier said than done when you are adrenaline amped to 200 heartbeats a minute.  And you only have so much spare ammo on you.

What if there were 3 guys in that car as motivated as our single bad guy?  Then this pistol toter was gonna get some hits in and get overwhelmed.  Doesn't matter his caliber or magazine capacity.

So, what lessons are there for use armchair quarterbacks?  "Be calm, and get good shot placement and have enough reloads," is easier said than done.   Run away?  Sometimes that is not an option.  But if toter had been hit in the femoral artery with that knife throw then hindsight suggests he should had done that.  Only a few more strangers would have been killed, maybe.  But he didn't.  And you might not have in that situation.  And thank God for people that intervene like this, but, sometimes it won't turn out ok for that volunteer.

It's a bad scene all around.  But you may want to think through such things for you, in case fate puts you in such a place