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PaperclipPerfector  1yr ago (text post)   26880 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of September 4, 2023

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There is no such thing a shooting someone's legs. First of all, leg shots are often fatal anyway because of the femoral artery. But more importantly, if a situation justifies deadly force, it is imperative to maximize likelihood of neutralizing the threat. That means rapidly putting shots center-mass until the threat ceases.

This one in particular infuriates me. I've spoken to so many otherwise intelligent people who seem to think "why didn't they just shoot him in the arm/leg?" is actually an effective or useful suggestion. I've tried to explain to them, very patiently, why this is nonsense, but it never seems to sink in.

I'm sure most of the people reading this already agree with me, but I'm going to reiterate it anyway:

  1. When a person is running (e.g. towards the police officer whose gun they are hoping to wrestle away from them), their arms and legs are moving rapidly. If they are running directly towards the police officer, the centre of their torso is effectively stationary relative to the police officer, and growing larger the closer they get. It is vastly easier to hit a large stationary target than a small moving one, even if you are an exceptional marksman. Firing and missing the target vastly increases the likelihood of accidentally hitting an innocent bystander.
  2. Even if the officer succeeds in hitting one of the limbs, the arms and legs are very narrow relative to the torso, which makes it far more likely that the round will penetrate all the way through, potentially hitting an innocent bystander (or ricocheting and hitting an innocent bystander).
  3. A sufficiently high crackhead or tweaker will shrug off a bullet wound to the arm or leg. To decisively put them down, there's no option other than centre mass.
  4. As you point out, even if the officer deliberately aims for the legs, the thighs are far larger than the calves, making it disproportionately likely that the officer will nick the femoral artery, in which case the target will likely die of exsanguination at the scene anyway.

For all of the above reasons, American police officers are trained to aim for the torso rather than the limbs in the unfortunate event that they determine gunfire is necessary. You might disagree with the priorities of the training, but you can hardly blame the officer himself for reverting to his training in the heat of the moment.

It’s TV and movies. Which I think is the truest statement you can make about the way most Americans understand worlds they have not personally entered. The TV or movies show things being a certain way, and unless the given American has significant experience or knowledge that teaches them otherwise, they assume it’s true.

And movies love to do leg shots because it’s dramatic. They’re not worried about the realistic problems with doing that. They care that it looks cool and therefore sells more tickets. Most movie and TV fights are generally fantasy based on looking good and not based on the method being realistic to the type of fights depicted.

The same could be said of almost anything. Ask any computer programmer about the ridiculous hacking scenes, doctors about medical shows, or scientists about any depiction of working scientists in their field, or what can and cannot be done. But because of the way most people live without interaction with those things outside of personal friends or high school, most people just assume the movies are accurate.

This is another reason why Terminator 2 is such a great movie. The T-800 abides by his directive not to kill any humans by shooting them in the legs instead, but then again you'd expect an advanced robot assassin to have that level of firearm precision.

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