One further word about the police academies. Some of you might know from news reports that in these academies, officers are TRAINED to shoot to kill. That is when they pull their gun they are TRAINED to shoot in the area of largest mass, that is the chest. In other words at the heart, which obviously will kill someone. That needs to change.
I have been over this very issue with you at least a couple times.
First, police are trained to Stop The Threat.
Let's talk about that. If the use of potentially lethal force is justified it is because someone posses an imminent threat to the life or limb of another person. In that situation there is only one correct option, which is to stop the threat as quickly and safely as possible. So the training is and will continue to be to stop the threat because that is 100% the right thing to do.
You might imagine that police officers are master marksmen. Let me help you shed yourself of that concept. They are not. Not all of them even have the capacity to become master marksmen even if they dedicated every second of their police training to shooting drills. Obviously using a firearm is a tiny fraction of a police officers job, so we cannot have them focus solely on their firearm skills.
Police shooting situations happen in all sorts of circumstances. It might be dark, you might be in a person's house in tight quarters, you might be standing next their car window, etc.. The decision to use lethal force will often be one that is made literally in a split second. This is not a situation where the police have the time to have an internal debate as to which fingernail they want to shoot off the subject's left hand. This is a binary decision of do I fire my gun or not. Period. That's as complex as you can reasonably make this decision in the timeframe it needs to be made.
Once that decision to fire is made it needs to have the intended effect of stopping the threat as safely and quickly as possible. So let's talk about doing this safely, ok? Every shot that misses goes somewhere else, which has the potential to hurt innocent people or property. That's a chance you have to accept to a certain degree, but it's not a chance that you should multiply on purpose. So you MUST take the safest shot possible, which is the shot most likely to strike the threat and only the threat, which is center mass.
You are also trying to stop a person from harming life or limb of another person. So it is absolutely essential that you stop that threat and do so as quickly as possible within reasonable safety concerns. So again, shots that actually strike the threat are of the highest importance. Shots that strike the threat in a way as to eliminate the threat they pose to others is equally important. This means that the best place to fire is at center mass.
Second, let's talk about the nightmare that shooting a knee or hand or arm would be.
These "disabling" shots are going to miss frequently, very frequently. Which means the threat has not been stopped. If the failure to stop a threat that could otherwise be stopped results in an innocent person being seriously injured or killed I think the officer who did not do everything in their power to stop the threat, opting for a much lower probability higher risk shot bares some blame for that.
Even if a leg or an arm is shot the threat may continue.
The bigger issue, in my mind, is that when you try to use a firearm in a "less than lethal" way you open up a very messy can of worms. Police may now be MORE inclined to use their firearm, even in situations where deadly force is clearly not justified, because afterall they are only trying to disable a person. That is completely unacceptable. We need a clear bright line between situation where lethal force is justified or it is not. That's an ideal and not entirely possible, but we certainly don't need to intentionally blur that line to such an extreme by allowing the use of firearms for less than lethal purposes.
Finally, guns have the potential to cause death when they are fired at a person. Shots do not always land where you intended them to, especially in a stressful, potentially life or death situation where there are a lot of moving parts. You may think that you are simply trying to disable a person by shooting them in the leg, and you might actually just hit them in the leg... and they still might die. Firearms are always a form of lethal force.
So by not shooting center mass you have several potential worse outcomes. First, you dramatically increase the reaction time of the office. You reduce the accuracy of their very dangerous projectiles. You increase the risk to innocent people of both being injured or killed by errant police shots, but also from an assailant who has not been stopped. You have the potential that use of firearms becomes a more casual decision and one that could be made in a situation where lethal force is not justified. You have the potential to still kill a person even if the intent was to disable.
So please STFU about this. Please let this be the last time you suggest this absolute nonsense.
P.S.
@Eenie-Meenie my post telling you to stop with the DMs
WAS NOT an invitation for you to DM me. I've asked you several times to not DM me. I meant it. I did not and will not read your DMs, ever.