Muzzle Up or Depressed? Pt 2

Rule No. 2
Every police officer knows (or should know) the four rules of firearms safety by heart. My versions of them have been:

1. Treat all guns as if they were loaded until redundantly proven otherwise.
2. Never let the muzzle cover anything you are not justified in shooting at that moment (I now think this rule needs to be modified, as I explain below).
3. Keep your finger off the trigger until the moment you want the gun to discharge.
4. Be sure of where your bullet is likely to end up.

Being law enforcement officers doesn't give us license to flout these rules. If we could, they wouldn't be so heavily stressed at the academy and make so much objective sense.

I know of no firearms instructor or gun-competent person anywhere who does not preach these four rules strongly and repeatedly. If Rule No. 2 means what it says, and we allow our officers to point guns at people they aren't justified in shooting at that moment, then we are contradicting ourselves. So either we stop preaching Rule No. 2 or we adhere to it in practice. Pick one. You can't have it both ways.

This is a serious concern. If we train our officers to cover with the muzzle those people we aren’t shooting in simulations or targets on the range, or tacitly allow them to do so in practice, and one of them has an unintentional discharge and wrongly shoots someone who he or she was covering with the muzzle, then all a prosecuting attorney has to do is get a photograph of the safety rules posted at our range or a copy of a department manual that contains them, and we have a serious problem. We can't say something to officers and then say it's OK for them to ignore it.

In fact, I believe that Rule No. 2 can't be applied 100 percent of the time, as I explain below, so we probably do in fact need to modify it, for liability reasons if nothing else. However, I see it disregarded in too many circumstances in which it should apply.

There is a too-clever-by-a-half argument that proposes that by keeping our muzzles up and therefore muzzling everyone we come upon during a search or challenge we are actually not violating Rule No. 2. It goes like this: "I'm not violating Rule No. 2. If I find someone during a search then I do intend to shoot them until I have determined they are not a threat." Obviously this is a semantic twisting of Rule No. 2, and in any case it ignores the risk-management part of our jobs.

Intimidation
You might give up a tiny bit of "intimidation" with the muzzle slightly depressed as you challenge a suspect, but any cop who can't compensate for that with intimidation from his or her presence and verbal commands probably lacks a vital skill necessary for the profession. Also, consider that Col. Jeff Cooper said covering a man with muzzle depressed (actually, not just slightly lowered, but at a 45-degree downward angle) might be more intimidating and deterring than covering him with the muzzle "on target," as it communicates a trained professional, confident that he is in charge of the situation. I'm not sure I agree, but the colonel's opinion is always worth considering.

Do you give up time?
How much time do you give up by depressing the muzzle to the suspect's feet? That is really at the heart of any objection to the muzzle-depression suggestion. A drill to measure this was done with hundreds (if not thousands) of law enforcement officers at the Smith & Wesson Academy during the 1990s. It was run at five to seven yards, with the arms straight and the muzzle depressed to something like a traditional low ready. The average time difference to get the first shot off on a Smith & Wesson Bobber target compared with starting with the muzzle on the target (fingers off the trigger in both cases) was usually 0.14 seconds. When I tried the same experiment on the range, I got times of 0.33 to 0.35 seconds both ways at five yards - that is, there was no difference in time. Running the same experiment at 12 yards, I found a difference of between 0.05 to 0.15 seconds (and a better shooter would be faster). I'll use my results here because they are from an experiment designed expressly to measure the time difference between the specific postures I'm talking about in this article.

Of course these time penalties are being calculated from experimental measurements in a very simplistic setting: responding to a buzzer and firing as fast as possible onto a target. That doesn't begin to reflect real life, in which you are making shoot/no-shoot decisions by trying to take into account many stimuli and suspect cues. The Force Science Research Center has found that adding just a little complexity to a shooting decision - again, in a simplistic laboratory setting - doubled the reaction time to making a shot. That is, making even simple observations and decisions greatly affects your "lag time" to making a shoot/no-shoot decision.

Obviously this time increase is consumed with decision-making and not muzzle movement or trigger pull. When you consider the entire context in which shots are made in real law enforcement situations, the zero to one-tenth of a second lag time induced by the lowered muzzle is usually less than the decision-making time required to make the shooting decision. Thus, if the muzzle is depressed to begin with, it will usually have ample time to come onto the suspect before the final decision to shoot will be made.

Does this mean that we might sometimes muzzle people about whom we have not yet made a final decision to shoot, but whom we think may pose an imminent or immediate threat? Yes, but that is probably not something we can stop ourselves from doing, and it's perfectly reasonable. More on this point below.

Remember, in the real world you are reacting to cues that the suspect gives you, and you have to identify those cues as posing imminent danger before shooting. Is he drawing a gun or a cell phone? Is that student running around the corner actually the shooter or an innocent civilian? To do this, you usually have to see the suspect's hands and identify what's in them, which takes time.

Seeing the hands
I expected comments on my original video post (see the POSA section of videos) saying that I'd forgot to mention that a good reason to keep the muzzle slightly depressed during a search or challenge was so we could see the suspect's hands. Many if not most instructors teach this, and many tactical shooters believe it. If this is a good reason to depress our muzzles, and one that's practiced, I have a hard time understanding the negative responses I received to the suggestion that we should keep our muzzles lowered unless shooting (or, as I didn't say in the video, if we perceive an imminent threat, as I explain below).

The irony here is that I don't really subscribe to this theory. When I hold a gun on someone at chest height, I can almost always see their hands pretty well. I believe this is a natural consequence of the fact that both eyes are open.

Just keep your finger off the trigger and there's no problem
It seems like plain common sense that getting bumped, startled or losing your balance can cause an involuntary convulsion of the gun hand, sometimes involving the trigger finger coming off the frame and convulsing the trigger. This results in a true accidental discharge, not a negligent discharge. That anyone can doubt this just amazes me, but apparently many do. However, now we have scientific proof.

A recent study published in the journal of the International Association of Law Enforcement Firearms Instructors proves that officers' involuntary muscle contractions can in fact accidentally discharge a gun. I won't grind through the study details here - you can easily read the article yourself - but the bottom line is that police officers can indeed unintentionally discharge a gun when startled, jostled, or when they lose their balance, despite their training to keep their finger off the trigger and despite their finger really being off the trigger. A earlier paper by Dr. Roger Enoka explains the biological, neurological and physiological reasons for the results of the German study.

Recall how easy it is to get bumped, or to fall, or to get startled in the real world. Many of the places we raid are full of detritus on the floor. In a dynamic situation it's easy to have a half-ton of cops behind you moving in a hurry, and people - most of them no threat - appear out of nowhere, surprising the hell out of us, all the time.

A related conclusion of the study confirmed what many stateside trainers - including Dave Spaulding, who published his observations a few years ago - have long noticed: that even well-trained officers will unconsciously make sporadic trigger contact with their finger during a high-stress event, and they have no memory of so doing afterward. We call this phenomena trigger affirmation. Trigger affirmation is probably some hard-wired primal response to stress, and we probably can't train it out of people, given that we see it in so many well-trained people. The good news is that there appear to be very few if any ADs as a result of this alone. (Ironically, if we were to try and mitigate ADs from trigger affirmation alone, then a cocked and locked 1911 would be the safest gun!) Nonetheless, when an officer is trigger affirming, he or she is at great risk of an unintentional discharge if bumped or startled, or if he or she falls.

Rant all you like about "Just keep your finger off the trigger and there's no problem," but the science is against you.

Let's finish this discussion and close all points of dispute in Part Three of this series.