What if an IPSC guy goes crazy?

[commando552]

Originally Posted by Excalibur

Point taken about the first situation. But I have read many articles about how cops can be taken surprised by a lone gunman. A really good gunman that can shoot faster than a cop drawing his pistol is a scary notion. If he's a psychopath, returning fire wouldn't phase him. To him, they'd just be moving targets.

Granted a skilled competition shooter will be more likely to kill the first guy, but after that the police wouldn't be sending in one or two guys at a time with holstered pistols. There would be dozens of SWAT guys going after him with heavy body armour and assault rifles, with stuff like ballistic shields and sniper rifles which has no analogue to IPSC and is something he would be totally incapable of dealing with. Shooting people who are moving, ducking in and out of cover, coming from any direction and can engages you effectively from a couple of hundred meters out is a lot different to shooting stationary targets along a predicted course of fire within ten or so meters.

[funkychinaman]

Send in the SWAT team. And since a lot of police departments are now equipping patrol cars with AR carbines, maybe just take him out from long range.

[Yournamehere]

First of all, there will always be a point where ability is weight out by the number of opponents you face. This is called disparity of force. One expert can't outgun 20 amateurs with roughly the same equipment. This is exactly why we have and to some extent trust a police force; there can be more cops than bad guys, and they may just happen to have the equipment and training to deal with such a problem in a timely fashion (but the "may" in that sentence is why some people like us choose to take personal responsibility for our lives and carry).

It doesn't even have to be SWAT. If you have one man armed to the teeth, perhaps even armored significantly, enough patrolmen with sidearms and the occasional longarm can make a difference, if not stop the perpetrator. Citing North Hollywood, though I hate to do so, Phillips was a juggernaut, but was eventually brought to the point of suicide by the sheer volume of police firing on him with relatively ineffective weapons.

Furthermore, competition shooting is not tactical shooting, and if your aim is to kill people effectively in a short time, skill in competitive environments is just one variable in a more grand equation, and would not necessarily translate into a combat or even a mass shooter scenario. In combat, there are so many other things to consider besides marksmanship or speed.

The real kicker isn't one or two competition shooters starting something, it's a relatively strong and cohesive fighting force with knowledge, strength and courage to actually cause a long string of damage and effectively defend themselves from police. Thankfully you need to be ex-military, as well as contain a large amount of stupidity or sociopathy to be that effective and apathetic towards others, which is why we don't see this too often. You have stupid ex-mil guys who aren't sociopathic, you have stupid ex-mil guys who are, you see moderately intelligent ex-mil who still aren't smart or strong willed enough to apply their skills toward such goals for whatever reason (no desire to commit crime or kill, whatever). And then you need many of these intelligent, sociopathic ex-mil men to join forces, and they just don't exist or co-exist. We appreciate enigmatic serial killers and criminal masterminds in the movies for the same reason we like mysticism and unicorns; they don't really exist.

[Jcordell]

Here is an example from history. Okay it's a very thin example, but it works. In my opinion in WWII the Germans were better warfighters than we were. We being the allies. We learned and got better, but in the end we won because there were more of us and we just had more of everything. It might hurt some folks pride, but for the most part we simply crushed the Germans - and Japanese.

An IPSC shooter gone Active Shooter? Yeah he would be formidable, but in the end he would just be one man. It isn't perfect and it isn't very movie cool, but he would go down. However there would be some casulties. Fortunately all the IPSC folks I've met over the years are very stable people who are more likely to be on the other side in an active shooter situation.

[funkychinaman]

If it was just a shooting spree, yes, the law will always win, like in the 1986 Miami shootout or the North Hollywood shootout. I guess the nightmare scenario would be if a sniper went on a spree, like the Beltway Sniper. Those guys were caught by sheer luck. Who knows how long they would've kept going? You replace John Muhammad, who had qualified as a Expert Rifleman, and his AR-15 with an actual scout sniper and their whole array of toys, and you have a crime spree and reign of terror that can last for months. I suppose the only limiting factor would be the fact that there would only be so few shooters who would have that kind of training, and it wouldn't be too hard to come up with a list of suspects.

[Jcordell]

Originally Posted by funkychinaman

If it was just a shooting spree, yes, the law will always win, like in the 1986 Miami shootout or the North Hollywood shootout. I guess the nightmare scenario would be if a sniper went on a spree, like the Beltway Sniper. Those guys were caught by sheer luck. Who knows how long they would've kept going? You replace John Muhammad, who had qualified as a Expert Rifleman, and his AR-15 with an actual scout sniper and their whole array of toys, and you have a crime spree and reign of terror that can last for months. I suppose the only limiting factor would be the fact that there would only be so few shooters who would have that kind of training, and it wouldn't be too hard to come up with a list of suspects.

Yep that would be a very bad situation. Very bad.

[SPEMack618]

Actually, he only shot Sharpshooter, the step below Expert, but I still get your point.

Thankfully, in the Army at least, the battery of psychological tests one goes through before sniper school is intense.