I know Gabe Suarez may not be considered “the guru” for a variety of reasons, but the quote below is a response to some comments Suarez made about “first responders” being irrelevant in Omaha as they are in all mass shootings like this.
I thought it was interesting, and agree with this particular first responder 100% - WE need to be sure we’re carrying all the time, so that WE can off these psychos before they can rack up a body count!
[i]Our first responders were on call in 6 min. the shooting was done in approx 1 minute. I walked though the grisly murder scene today. I know you have seen some nasty scenes in your time as a copper but this was undescribable.
The piece of *** shooter who shall be eternally burning in Hell as we speak made head shots with his AK-47 on the move at 25 yards made kill shots from the 3rd level to the first and second levels shows that he was tacitcally proficient with his weapon system. The weapon was indeed and AK (NOT AN SKS) ( have 7 AKs myself) with 2-30 round mags taped in reverese. approx 38 rounds fire in 1 min. before the coward sat down in front of customer service put the weapon under his chin and offed himself. The blood collatulation was 1 inch thick.
This jackal did a recon unarmed just minutes before he came up the elavatorand shot a female in the head kicking off his bloody rampage. He fired in series of 3 and 4 round sequences. All the rounds were parralell to the floor, no wild shooting into the ceiling. Angels must have been watching over the children as many rounds were fired into the children section. He engaged his targets with rutheless efficiency and even made point blank range head shots into a 64 year old male hunched down covering his wife in a corner at customer service. She lived.
The first reponders were irrellevent as you said but not becuase they didn’t run to the sounds of the gunfire and put themselves in harms way. We had good men on scence in 6 min. That brings up another issue about our sub par 911 system not getting the call out to us until 2 minutes after the first person called in. IT WAS OVER.
I thouroghly believe in the unrreguated Miltia, they should have handled this problem but we live among Sheep as you know. Too many are too afraid to stand up to the communist, facist gungrabbers that are in positions of powers in our country. We need to have citizens armed and ready to address these types of attacks.
I must respectfully disagree with you in saying that first reponders are irrelavent. They weren’t in this incident and won’t be in future incidents of this type but the person at ground zero at the time of the shooting needs to be armed and ready to step up .[/i]
A part of me wants to believe that the shooter could not have been that good of a shot (particularly with a WASR, not to mention the shooter himself must have been under some sort of stress, insane or not, you have to be completely screwy to not have some sort of nervousness when you think about killing random innocent people) but it’s not as if a he could not have done some target shooting on the side could not have gotten his skill to a proficient level.
I think that’s whats so scary about these scenarios. It’s one thing to have a shooter with no experience taking random shots in a generic direction, but to have actual expertise with a firearm, now thats just horrifying. Thank goodness insanity is not conducive to good marksmanship.
Suarez calling the first responders “irrelevant” is just plain nonsense. :mad:
I know officers who are the first guys into a situation like that by choice because of the duty and obligation they feel to protect their fellow citizens. They aren’t irrelevant. They aren’t Superman, but they aren’t irrelevant.
That being said unless there are officers who just happen to be nearby when an active shooter starts flinging lead, you are on your own for a minimum of 4 minutes.
Here’s the thing about the shooter:
You don’t have to be good to wantonly slaughter people. All you need is proximity and ammo, and that goes double if you are using a rifle. A reasonably intelligent chimp can shoulder a rifle, aim in the general direction of a knot of people and open fire making hits.
The shooter here was deliberate and dedicated, and he was accurate enough to kill 8 people before finally doing us all a giant favor and removing himself from this plane of existence.
The person writing that response is correct in the sense that this guy wasn’t just in there aimlessly blasting around. He was determined and efficient. He obviously spent a fair bit of time figuring out exactly what he needed to do to inflict the most carnage.
It’s much easier to murder than it is to stop the hostile actions of someone trying to kill you or kill others.
The shooter already has enough things on whats left of their selfish little homicidal brains, a CCW’er is really going to mess up their plans. Now their worry turns from “Will I kill enough innocent people to make the news?” to “What the hell is that!?”
CCW’ers could easy stop this simply by turning the shooter’s plans upside down. If they anticipated killing until the cops showed up, then killing themselves to prevent engaging in a mano-a-mano fight, then what do they do when the same thing happens before they’ve claimed any victims? Suddenly their little “spree” is meaningless, their homicidal playground fantasy comes crashing down on them, more than likely they will kill themselves once wounded (if they thought getting dumped by a girlfriend was painful enough to die over, just wait till they feel hot lead in their gut), or coming to the realization that they cannot “make the news” like they planned and can only kill themselves.
This can all be accomplished through fairly little on behalf of the CCW’er, simply locate the threat, and send fire his way. From his perspective, any gunshots that aren’t coming from his own weapon are nothing but bad news. Even if you do not hit him, his plans are now completely messed up, and you’ve saved many lives. If the whole incident unfolds in less than a minute, then a CCWer responding to it will pin the shooter down and divert their efforts long enough to save many people.
They weren’t irrelevant at Virginia Tech, or at the recent Utah mall shooting.
The sooner an AS meets armed resistance, the better. Yes, we would all be better off if the armed resistance someone like this little crapstain met was at the hand of armed citizens who shoot him so full of holes he whistles on the way down. Try as they might, the cops can’t be there when something like this starts to go down barring some remarkable stroke of luck. Thus the wise man prepares to deal with bad people on his own because he’s likely to be on his own at least for a few minutes.
It’s amazing to me that there was’nt someone other than the shooter in that mall who was armed. Empower the CCW’er for sure but if the business prohibits CCW’er…you get a “victim rich zone”
Shame on businesses for restricting lawful CCW …they certainly do not help the situation
…or he spins and directs fire on you and kills you.
Missing the threat isn’t really an option in a situation like that. Yes, he may panic and fall to pieces…but odds are he’s going to return fire with a more powerful, effective, and accurate weapon.
That’s what happened in Tyler Texas a couple of years ago.
If you’re going to deliberately engage an active shooter when he’s not a direct threat to you (meaning he isn’t shooting at you) your best option is only to engage when you stand the best chance of putting him down.
If the whole incident unfolds in less than a minute,
This incident supposedly went down inside of a couple of minutes. The shooter did what he wanted to do and then offed himself.
It would have gone on longer if someone had engaged him. It would be incredibly difficult for someone with a handgun to be involved in a sustained firefight with a bad guy armed with a rifle for the other 4 minutes it took for the good guys to arrive.
Remember that “cover” is a relative term. A determined adversary with some ammo can defeat cover by putting some rounds into it. Very little of what you see in a place like a department store truly qualifies as cover.
then a CCWer responding to it will pin the shooter down and divert their efforts long enough to save many people.
If a CCW tries to pin the shooter down, likely he will buy folks more time…but at a very, very high price.
They were only relevant in that they were the timer by which Cho decided it was time to kill himself. Unfortunately, that is the case most of the time.
Are they irrelevant? To those who died up until that point, they are. If a CCW’er would have killed the idiot before he shot the second person, the CCW’er would have been irrelevant to the first person who died. It’s a matter of perspective.
It is much better to have someone respond who is at the scene at the time of the shooting than it is to have to have someone respond to the scene at a later time. Action beats reaction and all that.
If you dont have the jump on the shooter at the first instant shots start flying you’re taking a MASSIVE risk if you decide to engage. Especially when you are talking a handgun vs rifle…in a mall no less so forget the notion of cover.
Its a tough situation. Sometimes there is nothing anyone can do. Crazy people will hurt innocent people.
The “irrelevant” comment strikes me as coming from that “doing God’s work” mindset that some folks in some places seem to have, and that’s objectionable in my view.
Just for the record, I am not a cop nor am I any kind of “hero”. If I had been standing there within a few feet of the guy, with or without my family, then yes I would definitely have pumped rounds into him until one of us was no longer able to pull a trigger. However, if I had been say 50 feet away or more and he was not shooting in my direction…? Honestly I don’t know what I would have done. If I was with my family, I’m about 99% certain I would have simply tried to get them out of the area, and not engaged the bad guy unless he became a more immediate threat, i.e. was moving or shooting toward my family.
My primary job is to be a provider and protector of my own. My duty is to protect THEM, as well as protect myself so that I can keep bringing home the bacon – they need a daddy and hubby, not a dead hero that everybody will forget about in 2 weeks. Most of me thinks, “screw those other people - they should be protecting themselves”.
But there is that little voice in the back of my mind that says that since I have some training and some skill, I also have a duty to put that psycho down if I have the chance, and thus save some other people’s lives… in other words, “get in there and do God’s work”, which is essentially the motivation of the “first responders” who run to the sound of the shots. There’s no doubt that the boys with the badges want to “get in there and do God’s work”, but 5 minutes after the bad guy starts shooting is about 4.9 minutes too late. That’s what Suarez meant when he said they were irrelevant, and I think for the most part he was right. I don’t think he meant to question their motivation or bravery, only to point out the fact that if there’s ever any kind of effective way to lower the body count in an incident like this, it’s to have somebody return fire immediately, not 5+ minutes later.
Oh yeah, speaking of the whacko in Salt Lake City - wasn’t it an off duty SWAT guy carrying concealed who immediately engaged the bad guy and thus drastically cut short his spree? Of course, the average guy with a CHL isn’t as capable as a SWAT shooter, but I still think Salt Lake City was a good illustration of the point Suarez was trying to make.
It comes from certain individuals who post things like, “I would run toward the sound of gunfire 'cause it’s the only thing I know how to do.” It comes from guys who talk about how they keep their carbine and their plate carrier in their car and sincerely think that they are going to run out to their car, get jocked up, then run back in “to do God’s work.”
These people are not living in reality. The reality is that there is going to be a few moments of total confusion, followed by screaming and chaos. In those few seconds, you will need to make a determination of how feasible you think it may be to attempt to engage the threat. An incredible number of variables come into play to make this difficult determination.
Is your wife/family right there with you?
Are they somewhere else nearby?
What is your level of training?
What is your level of fitness?
What is your armament?
Is there ANY usable intelligence on the threat? (“A lunatic with a shotgun!” or “Three terrorists with Ak-47’s!”)
Unfortunately, sometimes the best course of action will be to get you and yours the hell out. Sometimes the best course of action will be to get on your cell phone and try to provide the best possible intelligence to 911. Sometimes the best course will be to hunker down and take a shot if you can get one.
And sometimes the best course of action is to go on the hunt.
Sometimes the best course will be to hunker down and take a shot if you can get one.
50 - 75 feet seems like a lot of room to be off line, or out of sight of the shooter, and very well could be…
It’s only 17 - 25yds though…if he is not directing fire my way, 17 - 25yds is a God send for getting the first unannounced shot in this guy’s torso or head.
I would hope that I had the courage to conceal myself and take proper aim to end it right there. I am certain I could kill him without much remorse, just not sure my nerves would cooperate with me and allow me a perfect sight picture.
You know, I’ve been thinking about this a bit the last few days.
For me, if I were to find myself in that kind of situation, getting my wife and/or other family members to safety would be my first concern. After that, who knows.
At the rate and speed that these things go down, unless someone was in the line of fire, they probably would have had a difficulty responding in time to be of help. Malls are big, even on site armed security could have had a very limited role to play.
That aside, the second ability that would really come into play would be your ability to administer first aid. I think this is really where the ‘saving someone else’s life’ scenario would come into play.
It is really easy to play the ‘what if’ game and Monday morning quarterback these types of events. It only takes a short time to drastically alter an event, and there are so many ways for something to go down. I would just hope that it doesn’t happen to me, and from there hope that if it does, my performance would in some way help the situation.
