New York Marksmanship

So the blogosphere is pretty well flooded with posts about the shooting in Harlem on Sunday where an individual was struck 21 times, and expected to live.  Crazy indeed, and a paltry display of why the NYPD needs to increase their training budget or take some guns away from some of their own guys.

The big problem is that not only where none of those 21 rounds fired good center-mass fight stoppers, but those 21 rounds account for less than half the total shots fired by the police.  Pretty much anybody who has spent more than an afternoon doing any serious shooting knows you are responsible for every single projectile sent downrange.

As more information becomes available, more and more of those rounds are being accounted for, and it's not helping their case one bit in my mind.

The police said that the man, Luis Soto, 21, was shot during a frenzied encounter — they said he was fighting with another man when one of the two drew a revolver and witnesses reported hearing one or two shots. The man Mr. Soto was fighting with turned and fired on a responding officer, and four officers returned fire, the police said.

 Apparently they can't definitively say who's rounds struck Soto, as they all passed through.  However it is highly likely that some, if not all, of those were fired by the police, as witnesses say they only heard one or two shots before Alvarez fired on the police.

So the guy gets into a fight, the guy pulls a gun on him, and the cops show up and simply light everybody in the neighborhood up.

Three other people, believed to be bystanders, also received minor gunshot wounds. Although it was not immediately clear who fired those shots, all but 4 of the 50 shots fired in the melee came from the police, officials said.

 Oh, wait, not just the locals, but hell, each other.

The first officer to fire was Douglas Brightman, 31, a uniformed officer who has been on the force eight years. He fired two rounds, one striking the bullet-resistant vest of a plainclothes officer, Michael Tedeschi, who was shot in the chest.

Another officer was struck in the hand as well.

I would be appalled to be part of that Charlie Foxtrot.  You show up because a couple guys get into a fight and one of them pulls a gun, and rather than protect, you go ahead and off the guy for the shooter.  Apparently if somebody pulls a gun on you in NYC the last thing you want is for the police to show up.

All I can think of is the scene in The Cat Who Walks Through Walls where Richard gives the HKL cop his gun back after flushing all his rounds down the toilet.  (Paraphrased, the book's at home) "It still serves the same purpose, and if I would have let you keep the bullets you probably would have hurt somebody."