by Rory Miller
Improvised weapons:
Almost anything can be used as a weapon BUT not all of these weapons are actually an improvement on no weapons at all, unless they give confidence. And confidence based on inferior stuff is really close to superstition.
Recap:
-Knife is more of an emotional skill than a physical one
-Knives are not used to win fights. They are used to kill people.
-Thrust, hack, slash, draw cut, press cut, trapping with quillons, pummeling
-Pre-fencing sword work was very different than later styles
-Swords, and many other weapons can be used infighting
-Spears were the primary weapon on early battlefields
-Axes are versatile and cheap
Chapter 11: Firearms
There is so much going on with firearms and so many details that I am going to skip and gloss over a huge amount. Here’s the deal: if your character is going to use a specific weapon, go to a range, rent one and shoot it. Make notes so that you don’t make really stupid mistakes, like putting a safety or a silencer on a revolver (or having a detective pick up brass from a revolver).
If your character is a professional, she will know her weapons. They keep her alive. She doesn’t need to know about all weapons, but she will certainly know about hers.
To demystify things a lot: a gun is a nifty machine that throws a rock in a straight line. Sure, the rock is usually made of lead and comes in a number of configurations and goes really fast… but the idea is dead simple.
An excellent source for little details, like whether you can shoot a lock off, is the Big Box O’ Truth.
First breakdown:
Handguns are small, portable and concealable. They don’t have a huge amount of power, range and accuracy. That’s a balancing act—if you ever need a gun, you want a rifle or shotgun, but handguns are quicker to get into play and you can take them almost anywhere.
A revolver has a cylinder. When you pull the hammer back (required on a single-action pistol) it rotates the cylinder so a fresh bullet is under the hammer. You pull the trigger and the hammer falls. A double-action revolver, like most modern ones, the trigger pulls the hammer back, rotates the cylinder and lets the hammer fall. With a DA, you can cock the hammer separately and it makes for a shorter, smoother trigger pull (and hence more accuracy) when you fire, but just squeezing the trigger is faster. Common calibers are .357, .38, .45 long colt, .44 magnum.
A semi-auto has a magazine, usually jammed into the butt of the gun. Each time a bullet is fired the expanding gasses push the slide back, kick out the old casing and slam the next round in the magazine into the chamber. A semi can shoot as fast as you can pull the trigger. A single action semi, like a colt 45 requires the hammer to be pulled back on the first shot (pulling the slide back and releasing to load one in the chamber also cocks the hammer.) After the first shot, the action cocks the hammer. In a double-action semi, the trigger can cock the first round. Common calibers are .45 APC; 9mm; .40; 10mm. There are also .357 and .44mag semi rounds but they are not compatible with revolvers of the same caliber.
Rifles are shoulder-fired weapons. They have threading in the barrel to spin the bullet and make it more accurate. They are more accurate than handguns, and hit harder.
There are a variety of actions. Actions are how the bullets get into the chamber. Examples are semi-automatic, automatic (as long as the trigger is held down the weapon keeps chambering and firing) bolt action, lever action and pump (rarely pumps—they are considered unsafe in center-fire rifles.)
There are many types of sights. Scopes; variable power scopes; night-vision scopes; thermal scopes; open sights (a vee notch in the back and a post up front) sometimes called iron sights; peep sights (a circle in the back like a peep hole and a post in front, common in military weapons) laser sights (an after-market addition that shoots a laser along the barrel. The bullet will hit about where you see the dot. Available for handguns as well). AimPoints and Eotech sights look like a short scope but show a red dot on the target point. One of the main advantages is that you don’t have to be exactly aligned with the weapon to shoot accurately.
There are a huge variety of calibers. Rifles range from .22 used mostly for training, plinking at bottles and cans or shooting squirrels and rabbits up to elephant guns and .50 sniper rifles. Modern sniper rifles in Afghanistan have hit targets at over 1.5 miles.
Shotguns are big-bore weapons with smooth bores (which differentiates them from rifles). With the exception of the .410, shotguns are sized by gauge. 12ga is the biggest common shotgun today, but in the past 10, 8 and 4ga were built and used. The 4ga must have been like a cannon. Gauge is a weird number. It is defined as the number of spherical shot you could make of the same size as the barrel from a pound of lead… so a 4ga ball would weigh four ounces.
Shotguns don’t shoot single balls today. The most common rounds are shotshells and slugs. A shotshell has a specific number of pellets inside. In buckshot, the pellets are about the same as a .30 caliber bullet. In dove shot, about the size of a BB. The larger pellets travel farther and hit harder than the smaller pellets.
A slug is a single big round coming out of a shotgun. It will blow a big hole, roughly the diameter of the barrel of the weapon. Most slugs are ‘rifled’ meaning that there are grooves in the side that compensate for the lack of grooves in a shotgun’s barrel. The slug spins and its accuracy increases.
One of the cool things about shotguns is that they are extremely versatile. Rounds have been made for them to pierce armor; to cause fires; to deliver chemical munitions, like pepper-spray; to not harm (rubber bullets and baton rounds); to shatter locks and, recently, as grenades.
Machine guns are rifles that fire continuously as long as the as the trigger is held down. Some are reliable, some are not. Most have problems under continuous fire in that the barrels get too hot to touch and may even bend. Most heavy machine guns today are belt-fed, meaning that rounds are linked by little bits of metal and feed through the action with the cases and the links being ejected.
Assault rifles (like the M-4, M-16 and AK-47) are designed to be light weapons that are easy to carry. They tend to use smaller caliber ammunition than hunting rifles or what used to be called “Main Battle Rifles” because ammo weighs a lot. Most are select fire, which means that they can either be fired semi-auto or, with the flip of a switch, set to full auto (the M-4 and some of the later M-16 A-2’s have a ‘burst’ setting that fires three rounds instead of a full auto).
Some are accurate (like the M-4), some are durable (like the AK).
Submachine guns (SMGs) are basically pistol-caliber weapons with slightly longer barrels, more accuracy; much greater magazine capacity and usually the option to select fire between single shot and full auto. They are the preferred weapons of many entry teams and groups that specialize in close quarters hostage rescue.
Caliber is done in millimeter diameter of the bullet, e.g. 9mm; percentage of an inch, designated by “cal” e.g. .45 cal is 45/100 of an inch across. .357 and .38 caliber are actually both .38, but a .357 has more powder. So you can fire .38 rounds from a .357 weapon, but if you try to do it the other way around, the weapon may be damaged or even explode.
Wounds. Don’t go overboard with handgun wounds. Physically, a .45 bullet does about as much damage as a half-inch stick being pushed through you. It’s not always that simple, of course. The bullet hits a bone and fragments of bone can go slicing away in different directions. Bullets often follow the path of least resistance and sometimes go between tissues instead of penetrating.
Some bullets are designed or modified in an attempt to do more damage. The "Glaser safety slug" is described as ‘frangible’ and the bullet breaks into small pieces on impact. A ‘dum dum’ is the idea that if you cut a cross in the top of the bullet it will expand and make a bigger wound channel. A hollow point has a scoop in the tip of the bullet designed to help the bullet deform. A wadcutter is flat across the top and originall
y designed for target shooting—the clean holes it punches in paper are easy to see. Wadcutters in flesh create wound channels that don’t close by themselves and bleed profusely. The flat tip means that they do not feed well at all in semi-automatic or automatic weapons. Some new rounds are designed to ‘star’ when they hit flesh and the soft lead core will force a split outer jacket into a jagged star that lacerates tissue in a bigger wound channel. Armor piercing rounds, the so-called cop killers are designed to punch through armor. They also have a tendency to punch through the body without deforming or deflecting, and so do slightly less damage than a regular bullet. Jacketed bullets have a layer of harder metal, like copper, around the lead bullet. It makes for a cleaner hole and also feeds better.
Note I said designed in an attempt to do more damage. Actual results from the field are less positive. When I have called the manufacturer to ask why an expanding ‘star’ bullet didn’t expand they said it probably got clothing stuck in the nose and didn’t expand. Well, duh. People wear clothes.
The other factor in bullet damage is speed. Gun nuts argue about this ad nauseam: for some reason a bullet going over about 2300 feet per second does a lot more damage than one going slower. No normal handgun, by the way, gets to anywhere near that speed.
People don’t fall over or get knocked back or knocked through the air by the impact of a bullet. Many don’t notice it and quite a few that feel the impact never even consider that they were shot.
Sometimes those that know they were shot curl up and die from wounds that aren’t physically lethal. A lot of gunfighting, any fighting really, is psychological.
Shots to the pelvis and stomach can be excruciatingly painful. The chest is rarely that painful. Bones can be broken. People bleed.
Except for a shot to the head, specifically the brainstem, people don’t die quickly.
Gunfights are fast, dynamic affairs. They go bad quickly.
An real-life example:
Analysis of an Officer-Involved Shooting
3 Officers
1 Threat with knife, charging
Distance: 10’ closing to 5’ from the nearest officer (C); maximum of 15’ from farthest officer (A) at start of incident, but A did not fire until threat was closer
Officer A armed with a 9mm estimated firing 1-2 shots.
Officer B armed with a 9mm estimated firing 5-6 shots.
Officer C armed with a .45 estimated firing 3-4 shots
Criminalists found eight (8) 9mm shell casings and four (4) .45 caliber shell casings. This adds to twelve, but in the criminalist report they say that thirteen cases total were found.
The officers entered the building with weapons drawn. The suspect was sitting on the floor through a doorway on their right. He was ordered to show his hands and drop the knife. He charged, screaming, weapon extended.
Officer C, the closest, opened fire while attempting to step back and create distance.
Officer B fired his first shot through the wall. He says he did not see the knife at first and fired because hearing another officer fire was sufficient indicator that it was a deadly force situation. As he explained his reasoning, it appears to be a clear example of time dilation- he remembers more conscious thought than there was time for.
Officer A distinctly remembers his point of aim as center mass between the hip and the armpit. This is the bullet that probably struck the threat in the side of the head, the only shot that clearly came from the side, which is where A was positioned.
Of the twelve or thirteen rounds fired, there were seven hits, two of which were deemed fatal by the medical examiner. In two of these the bullet was recovered.
One bullet entered the side of the head (9mm)
One bullet hit the center of the neck and did some damage to the spine
One bullet entered the rights side of the chest and would have proved fatal (9mm)
One bullet hit the right upper arm/shoulder
One bullet grazed the left hip/thigh
One bullet hit the left groin/lower abdomen
One bullet hit just above the left knee
All officers have been trained to fire center mass. Weapons were out and in hand. Ranges were approximately ten feet or less.
These were guys who were good shots at the range. They were responding to a call, a teenager who thought that someone was in her house. Her grandmother had already been stabbed to death outside.
Geeks
Everything has geeks. There are computer geeks and martial arts geeks and tactical geeks and definitely gun geeks. Getting really upset or picky about word choice to me is a sign of a geek, and geeks are rarely operators. So some people will get excited that a revolver isn't a pistol (but semis and flintlocks are)... it's a geek game. A pistol in standard usage is any firearm designed to be held and fired by one hand (despite the fact that most times you shoot two-handed.) In geek terms, a pistol only applies if the breech (where the bullet goes in) and the barrel are contiguous. Whatever. The same kind of issue comes up in 'magazine' and 'clip'. The only people likely to care are geeks (but stick with magazine).
Don’t use this as an excuse for error of fact. 'Revolver' for instance is specific because it is a description of the action. If you make the mistake of calling a .45 semi-automatic a revolver, it’s roughly equivalent to someone talking about typing a manuscript on a 'manual’ laptop.
The 'hydrostatic shock' thing. I already mentioned that for some reason, bullets above about 2100-2300 fps (feet per second) do a lot more damage than slower rounds even when they don't break up. 'Cavitation' is one of the theories- that is the idea that a wave of air, like a sonic boom follows the bullet and causes the tissues to explode away from the wound channel. Hydrostatic shock is another theory, that basically kinetic energy travels through the liquids in the body and can cause damage distant from the wound channel. So it's not a myth, per se (though hand gun calibers don't get to the speed where it happens) but it is one of the theories to explain an interesting fact about terminal wound ballistics.
One more note on wound ballistics. Outside of war, rifle (high velocity) wounds are extremely rare. Most of what ER docs and coroners deal with are handgun wounds. When it is a rifle, often it was used at very close range (ala suicide) and the muzzle flash can do more damage than the bullet. Makes it hard to figure out cavitation vs. hydrostatic. It also allows for a lot of 'twilight zone' effects with rifles.
A very experienced coroner said that he had no problem with the so called 'magic bullet' in the JFK assassination because the people questioning it were comparing the behavior to low velocity (handgun) ballistics and, simply, outside of war, not enough people are shot in the head with rifles to have any feel for what can happen...and in a war, people are too busy for that kind of research.
Soft Body Armor (SBA)
Soft body armor are the “bullet resistant vests” currently issued to most officers.
Details: My first couple of sets had white inserts, the later had blue. The inserts are the Kevlar part, the armor. They blue ones feel like slick plastic, the white ones felt like stiff cloth--you could see the weave. They have Velcro circles at the very top where they go up the shoulders.
The inserts are slipped inside a carrier that was black. The top of the carrier had matching Velcro circles on the inside to keep the actual Kevlar from slipping. The carrier was in two pieces, adjusted with Velcro straps at the top for length/height and Velcro on elastic at the side for width. A well-fitted vest went down to just above your belt buckle, had a slight v-neck and the layers would over-lap slightly on your lower ribs.
The armpits have no protection at all and that is one of the primary reasons that very few people teach the Weaver stance anymore. The carrier has an extra pocket for the 'trauma plate,' which is just another very thin piece of Kevlar that fits in the pocket over your heart. Many officers keep a laminated card in the trauma plate pocket with blood type, allergies and next-of-kin information. (For what it's worth, ever since Iraq I've wanted to g
et a tattoo: O+ NKA. Most people won't get it, the people that do will derive all kinds of information). There are cloth panels hanging from the front and back so that you can tuck them into your pants and keep the vest from shifting.
Can't speak for everybody, but mine smells like cat piss when I've been sweating in it for eight or twelve hours. It's not super heavy or that hot, but you definitely notice it and it doesn't breathe. You can wash the carrier like any other Velcro and elastic clothing. It washes fine but it's a mess when it comes out of the dryer. The panels can be sprayed with Windex and wiped off (or water, I guess). A lot of guys kept Febreeze in their lockers.
The stuff degrades over time and has an official shelf life of five years.
This article has more detail than most street cops know about ballistic vest failures and ratings. I used the link to the Google quick looks instead of the PDF download, so let me know if it doesn't work.
Theoretically, the vests are rated to stop:
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I .22, .25, and .32 caliber handguns, .38 Special lead round-nose
II-A .38 Special high-velocity, .45s, low-velocity .357 Magnum & 9-mm, .22 rifles
II Higher velocity .357 Magnum and 9-mm
III-A .44 Magnum and submachine gun 9-mm
III High-power rifle: 5.56mm, 7.62 mm FMJ, .30 carbine, .30-06 pointed soft point, 12-gauge rifled slug
IV Armor-piercing rifle bullet, .30 caliber (1 shot only).