Tuesday, April 13, 2021

Duplication of Effort

The situation in Minnesota the other day, where an officer apparently drew a gun before lethal force was really justified and then seems to have mistaken it for a Taser reminded me of a force-on-force encounter in ECQC a few years ago.

In that encounter, the student with the sims gun, who we'll call "M", was accosted by the instigator, "J". I can't remember what the details of the shouting match were, probably something vehicle-related. ("Why were you speeding down the street?" or "That's my parking space!" are reliable sources of beef.)

Anyway, M was startled enough by the intensity of J's angry yelling and gesticulating that he drew his sims gun...and immediately realized that he had a gun out in a situation where there was no direct threat or cause for lethal force to be employed.

So now M is stuck trying to do several things: Keep talking, to try and calm J down. Stay out of J's reach. Keep his Beretta in snug against his body where it's unlikely to be grabbed, while simultaneously keeping the muzzle averted, because pointing a gun at someone you ain't got any business pointing a gun at is a crime in pretty much every jurisdiction.

At this point the third student, "S", enters the scene in full "WHAT THE F&%$ ARE YOU DOING? WHAT'S WITH THE GUN? YOU GONNA SHOOT HIM OVER A PARKING SPACE?" yelling mode. That's when M had the presence of mind to fish his (inert) OC spray out and give S a faceful of it and, as J stepped in, he gave J a dousing for good measure.

It was a novel solution and backwards from how these things usually work...

Anyway, I wanted to get a picture of it and so I want combing through the hundreds and hundreds of RAW images I had from my Albuquerque ECQC trip of 2018. I found I had a few dozen images of that particular 2-on-1 evolution, and so I sweated my way through all of them, trying to find the one that would serve as the best illustration.

Having picked one, I cropped it to show just the relevant part, adjusted it to get the horizon level, and fiddled with the exposure and color a tiny bit to make me happy...


Then I went to save the processed pic in my "2018-10-29 ABQ ECQC Processed" folder, only to find this photo already there, from where I'd done the same thing three years ago...


I think it's funny that I selected the same image and cropped it almost identically three years apart, although I seem to favor more saturated colors and punchier contrast these days.

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