The authorities owe the public just a little clarity by a confirmation or denial of this rampant rumor, given they were willing to describe in a press conference the victim’s hand wound and gun shot entry points.
Apparently Officer Williams did not suffer a blown eye socket, a reason I, for one, attributed to him for an “excessive” number of shots needed to fell the guy, because the officer perhaps couldn’t see if he was striking Brown, until he fell.
This is a damaging development for defending the number of shots used to land the victim.
With all the investigation and a reported 40 FBI investigating would think marksmanship is being investigated too. Don’t know it to be true but perhaps Officer Wilson is an expert with a handgun?
So you are an expert on lethal force incidents, to be able to judge how many shots one should need to take down a man pushing 300#?
Tell us more.
I am not an expert, but will tell you that from what I have read, six shots is not that many. Guns don’t work like they do in the moves, and there are many cases of men continuing a violent attack long after suffering a fatal gunshot wound. Long enough to get you dead if you stopped to assess efficacy of your shots after firing one or two.
From what I have seen experts on surviving a lethal force incident generally recommend to keep firing until the threat has stopped, as here. Realize that many shots are made in just a few seconds, and that thought processes and reactions after a full adrenaline dump are not what they are sitting at a computer keyboard.
Shooting until the threat is over is standard practice. Most gunshot wounds that kill do it over time, by someone bleeding out for instance. Plenty of guys in the military can testify to having been shot and not even realizing it until the situation is calmer. Shooting someone does not stop the threat; there have to be other signs that the threat is over, like the guy going down or something.
If, as I suspect, the one to the top of Brown’s head was the last shot, AND if the cop had more ammunition in his gun, then he quit shooting sooner than most. It’s quite common for people to accuse cops of “shooting someone in the back”, and for there to be bullet wounds in the back, not because the cop shot someone facing away, but because the cop kept shooting while the guy lunging at him was twisting around as he fell through the field of fire (the twisting generally due to a natural physical process set going by the first shot). If the cop in this case had more bullets, he stopped shooting soon enough that didn’t happen.
Depending on the gun and the shooter, six shots can be less than two seconds of Real Time. Studies done in the eighties showed that an average running man can cover 21 feet in 1.5 seconds; bringing a knife to a gun fight can work just fine if the knife wielder is close enough before things start. Cops since then are often put through the “Tueller Drill,” just to drill that point home. Mythbusters puts the cut off point at 20 feet (over twenty feet, guy with the gun may win; under twenty feet, guy with the gun gets knifed).
Six shots are not excessive.