Double Action Only

After you've gotten past the gun grabber's twisted rhetoric used to support their desire to ignore the US constitution, you may find yourself wondering how the NYPD can have so many terrible shots. What do they do, train to miss?

And this is not the first case where it looked like the NYPD practiced how to shoot with their eyes closed.  Remember Armadou Diallo? Believing Diallo had aimed a gun at them at close range, four officers fired forty one shots, more than half of which went astray as Diallo was hit only nineteen times. As in the most recent case, the officers were not returning fire.

In the Empire shooting, the Boys in Blue blasted out sixteen shots. Whilst they did kill the alleged perp, they also wounded nine bystanders. Now you might argue some were hit by thru and thru-s, but don't you think these should have all been center body shots? Yet witnesses have complained that the officers appeared to "fire randomly". The anti-gun crowd spins this nicely, claiming if well-trained LEO's can't hit the broad side of a barn just imagine how bad an untrained licensee would be when they go "all OK-corral" on you.

This slyly lays out the proposition that all LEO's are well trained and no law abiding licensees are trained at all. Yet some states (GA is not one) require training to obtain a firearms license and many gun owners train without any government inducement or requirement. Some have even claimed that is the primary reason they own a gun--range time. And not every licensee goes "OK-corral" at every opportunity. Remember the Giffords shooting? Turns out that alleged perp was taken down by an armed, legally carrying licensee who chose to physically restrain the shooter--not gun him down.

But these left-wing-nuts do touch on an interesting topic: are all our police adequately trained? Probably not. Some officers are certainly capable marksmen who would not feel the need to empty the magazine thru the barrel when confronted just as there are folks from a variety of other walks of life who are well trained and just as, if not more, capable. Do yourself a favor and visit the Sandy Springs Gun Club and see for yourself.

It is unlikely we will ever know how well the NYPD trains its officers, but we do know one thing, the NYPD ensures it is virtually impossible for their officers to fire their weapons with any kind of accuracy.

How do they do this? Glad you asked.

First they require the service sidearm be Double Action Only. If you need a description, use Google, but the impact on accuracy is as well known as it is destructive. Since this can be overcome with thousands of rounds of training, NYPD is forced to go the extra mile requiring that all service sidearms be adjusted to a twelve pound trigger pull. Most manufacturers, shooters and gunsmiths recommend no less than four and no more than six pound pull--YMMV.

Law enforcement agencies, NYPD being the most notorious,  require a very heavy trigger on their issue service pistol for liability reasons. The silly reasoning seems to revolve around the notion that if it is hard to pull the trigger, you won't shoot so much. If you believe taking guns from law abiding citizens and leaving them only in the hands of criminals makes the world a safer place, then this logic probably resonates. For the rest of us...not so much.

When it takes six times the weight of the loaded weapon the pull the trigger it becomes virtually impossible to maintain accuracy under stress, leading to misses and the "spray and pray" tactic demonstrated recently in NYC. Ironically this increases the danger to the very citizens the police are sworn to protect. This is why over half the bullets fired missed Diallo and nine bystanders were wounded taking down Johnson.

All the NYPD has done is prove once again that a mechanical device is a poor substitute for ongoing training and safe gun handling.