Very educational video.
KXAN reports Officer Shane Cunningham responded to a burglary call in August 2013 when suspects Miguel Macias and Austin James Hanlon rammed their vehicle into the officer’s patrol car.
Macias, who was behind the wheel, had pushed the officer’s cruiser back with his vehicle until it hit a tree and stopped, according to KVUE.
Officer Cunningham, in fear for his life, fired 15 rounds into the car after commanding Macias and Hanlon to put their hands up multiple times.
Macias was struck five times by the officer’s gunfire — including once in the head.
Macias is currently on trial for aggravated assault on a police officer with a deadly weapon and burglary charges.
via Video: Austin cop opens fire on man ramming cruiser.
1) Moving targets suck. Yes, it was a slow-moving target but it was moving.
2) Adrenalin dump sucks. First shot was high, second was low and after that the officer seemed to find Goldilocks with some shots touching each other.
3) Glass sucks. Specially windshields shot at such weird angle. Bullet deflection definitely had something to do with Macias still breathing and on trial.
4) Pistol Caliber bullets suck. And no, even if he had a .45, the target would have not died in a very high probability. Windshields will deflect most medium and high-powered rifle bullets too. Which leads us to…
5) Not having a lot of BBs suck. Have enough magazines with lots of ammo makes a lot of sense.
According to the article, the officer shot 15 rounds. Austin PD’s official sidearm is the Smith & Wesson M&P .40 (although they are allowed to carry other guns selected under certain circumstances and from a not very long list) . The M&P comes with a 15 round magazine so we might say that the officer emptied his sidearm and had to go to reload. So lesson #1, practice your reloads a lot and stay on target! Even shot, the suspect was able to get out of the car in a very nimble fashion.
As for shooting through glass & specially windshields? Now that is a toughie to train for. Your average Joe does not have an ample supply of windshields or even a short supply. And there are videos out there, but they seem all to be shooting straight in front of the windshield (Bullets drop some after going through) but on weird angles like this, I could not find anything.
One to scratch our head for and figure out how to deal with it.
Incredible.
I like how he concentrated his fire on the danger and left the passenger safe. I’ll bet the passenger is pretty happy about that.
There’s no possible way to say the cop was shooting indiscriminately.
I hosted a Vehicle Combatives class back in September, at my range near Austin. We had several junked cars on the range that we were able to shoot from and into. What we learned from the instructor (Dave Spaulding) was that in order to get hits shooting through a windshield, you have to use the first shot to make a hole and then shoot the follow up shots through that hole, because the first round is likely to go off course as a result of the impact with the glass.
So even with the laminated layer, it will weaken enough not to be much of an issue. Still, the officer did shoot at an angle and that has to affect trajectory. He did good.
Once or twice in the Sandbox, we had to stop vehicles either at a roadblock or some chap hellbent on taking on us with him to paradise, and even lighting said car up with a SAW and multiple carbines, had a zero net effect of stopping him until a Fifty got in on the action.
I’d hate to be in a position where I was getting rushed by a vehicle and all I had was my sidearm.
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FYI Video is auto-playing for me.
(Win 8 / IE 11)
I can’t figure out who not to do it,