"L'audace, l'audace, toujours l'audace"

 
Pop quiz: you are minding your own bidness as you walk around the corner at the Just Around the Corner Elementary School, and you come across the situation depicted above. The woman is your daughter's teacher. There are no children outside, but through the glass to the right, you can see other sinister figures with weapons herding terrified tots into what you know is the gym. You hear screaming and automatic weapons fire coming from inside. Back to the bad-guy: you have a clear shot at his head. You also have the weapon necessary to pull off such a shot, if you choose to take it.  Immediately you realize this man has been in the news lately. He belongs to a group which has sworn to kill at least 2 million American school children and, in fact, his group has already murdered hundreds if not thousands of children in other "restive" parts of the world. But his belief system and associations don't matter at the moment and this guy isn't somewhere else in the world, he's about 10' away and about to turn and face you.

The bad-guy is shouting his intentions at the unarmed school security officer: Whether you call the cops or not, I'm going to kill you in about half a heart-beat, then I'm going to take this woman and rape the shit out of her and give my partners sloppy-seconds and then we're going to slit her throat and let her bleed out, kicking and twisting, on the floor. And we're going to do that to every girl and woman in that gym behind me.  And we're going to shoot in the head any boy or man in there who we think will try to stop us.

Depraved eyes dart to the right as the gun still points at the guard, and then the bad-guy comes back on target and shoots the old man once in the throat.  You feel the bloody mist hit you after the shot. 

Tick, tick, tick... What do you do?

Can't decide, troopers? Pop quiz: How many of you thought back in '94 ~ or any other time you've seen Speed ~ "What a fool ~ that's a tactical no-no" when hot-shot LAPD SWAT operator Jack Traven says "Shoot the hostage" to his partner?  I think the reaction most people had was; Hey, he's a handsome, cool guy... uuuum yea, that'll work.  The truth is that then and now you're right to opine that Jack was not wrong.

But SWAT operator Harry Temple says Jack is "deeply nuts". 

Well, while you might be on the horns of multiple tactical options, in my view there is only one moral choice: save as many innocents as possible. How would I do that? Me? By stopping as many bad-guys as I could before they got to any hostages. If "stopping" means they die because I shot them, that's their fault, not mine. They made me shoot them by killing and threatening to kill innocent people. And since I was carrying my handy-dandy P35, loaded to the max with 9mm Pow'RBall and toting at least two more hi-cap mags, I came prepared. You?

In the scenario described above the first response cannot be, must not be, to begin talking to the hostage-taker to set him up for some "deal" you're going to miraculously cut with him where he lets the pretty teacher go and you put your arm around her and tenderly walk her over to the ambulance to have that nasty scratch under her chin be treated by the dutiful EMT as the credits roll up the screen and the bad-guy's picture is captioned with where he is and what he's up to now... since you saved his life and made him a better man.

 
Doo-dah, doo-dah...

Here's the deal: the bad-guy is going to smoke you because you hesitated. He's going to put a magnum round into your chest or neck or head and then move on to complete the rest of his mission, whether you like reading it here or him doing it there or not. So, what are you going to do?  

What I'd do is put a bullet in that thug's brain. Then, keeping my P35 on his dead, stinking body, I'd move quickly to get the teacher out of the area and to medical help. I wouldn't take her to medical help, I'd point her to it and tell her to go there now. If she couldn't, I'd move her to cover ~ something which will stop bullets ~ and then I'd keep my eye on the school entrance from behind that cover. I would not shoot the bad-guy and then rush into the school after the monsters inside ~ the terrorists, not the kids.

Hang in there with me and watch this video.  At 3:00 the former SEAL says,when it comes to your safety, it's always better to over-react.  Well, he's echoing what I've said and trained for many years and written here for a few. So, how does that truth marry up with your decision to shoot or not shoot the murderer dragging Miss Muffet toward the gym?  Does it mean it's also better to over-react when it comes to someone else's safety? Or just your own? Is it okay to under-react when others are in mortal danger as long as it looks like you will be okay?

In the video, at 6:10 Courtely says cops "will not take a shot as long as you're in the way."  How would he know that unless it's SOP for most if not all police departments in this country? And if he knows it, then the junkie in that kitchen knows it. If the junkie in the kitchen knows it, so do real hard-core bad-guys. 

Then you see in the video that one of the cops has a perfect head-shot on the bad-guy, but he doesn't take it even though the junkie could slash the victim's throat with just a hiccup.  Once the good-guy escapes the knife-hold, though, the cops shoot the bad-guy. But he's less of a threat at that point than when he had a knife at the good-guy's throat. So, um... why did they wait, not shooting when the good-guy was at greatest risk and at least one of them had the perfect shot? That junkie needed to die about one second after either of the on-scene-with-weapons-drawn cops had an open shot to his cranium.

Police officers in situations like these do not hold their fire because their bosses don't want hostages to be emotionally traumatized by a police bullet whistling past their heads into the hairy temple of a hostage-taker. Nor are their bosses concerned about cop bullets wounding/killing hostages. Why do police "leaders" hammer into their warriors that they must not shoot if a hostage is in the way of a bad-guy? Boil it all down and it's simple: because then the mayor a/o police chief will be, as the Brits say... sacked. They don't want the peasants heading for city hall with torches and pitch-forks, ready to put "official" heads on pikes up and down Main Street.  It's all about their reputations and job-security. That's their first priority ~ keeping their jobs ~ not the safety of citizens. Not people. Not you.

 
Too-oo-oo many police "leaders" have willingly subjected themselves to years and years of sheep-think in order to stack up academic bullets on their CVs so they can get promoted and end up with cozy pensions. They have willfully stepped out of the warrior ranks and become hand-holding, over-rationalizing, vapid, faux intellectual babysitters and managers to be righteously bitched about behind closed doors and out in the open, not leaders who have earned the respect of their troops. These are "leaders" followed only by the curious, to see what they'll fuck up next.

As a perfect example of what I'm saying, we have the sheriff in Jacksonville, Florida ~ story here ~ who, rather than know the truth and speak it plainly in defense of his men to the local hissy-fitters ~ the uber-sensitive sheep who can't conceive of why cops shot at a car with a kid in it ~ shows himself to be a freaking tactical ignoramus who's also stupid enough to fall on his "advanced-degree" sword and say in public and for the record: I just don't want to try to speculate on why they felt the need to shoot at the suspect while he was in the vehicle.

 
Hey, Rutherford; you'd better wake up to the reality of the real world. Here it is: in the Jacksonville abduction ~ not a simple car-jacking, an abduction of three innocent people ~ the first crime scene was where the bad-guy gang-busted his way into an occupied car shouting I'm going to kill you to the driver and forcing her into the passenger seat. He then began to drive from crime scene one toward crime scene two ~ wherever that would have turned out to be ~ with those three innocent people still in the car.  In order to not have a second crime scene, where savvy experience and statistical probabilities ~ as well as the death threat shouted by the bad-guy as he jacked the car ~ told those cops they would find the bloody bodies of the three innocents in the car, those street-wise cops about whom Rutherford scratches his head did absolutely the right thing: they tried to save the people in the car by striking the driver ~ while hoping they didn't hit the innocent passengers.  For those still wondering, that is what those audacious warriors were doing.

More coverage of the shooting here.  The bad-guy was killed, by the way. The father of the wounded but alive and recovering and free almost-victims said he's now afraid of the cops. WTF? He should be on his knees in front of those warriors for doing exactly the right thing.  

Okay, let's exercise your deciding muscles for a while. Try your hand at this shooting game. It's incredible; not just in police training are you not allowed to shoot if a bad-guy's near a hostage, even the game narrator lets you know you've hit or wounded a hostage and his tone of voice makes it sound like you really screwed up, like he's your decider. What are you going to do if you accidentally shoot a hostage? Go into vapor lock? Drop your gun in horror and begin to cry? Wail; Oh, my God; I'm so sorry... ? What you need to do if you wing a hostage, and you will in this game, is keep on shooting. If UBL is right in back of your falling hostage, shoot that dirtbag as the hostage falls. Don't freeze up in this goofy game. Practice here to the extent you can so you won't if it comes down to it.

Keep up with me now: the three elements of a successful attack are surprise, speed and audacity ~ any trained warrior can tell you that. And any hockey player. Jack's audacious answer in Speed showed a will to win that we must all have in order to survive the savagery of our current enemy.

You can read here an article about why bad-guys do so well in gunfights. Basically, it's because they don't care about the consequences. Their primary objective is to stay free, to not be locked up or be killed by cops. That's what you have to do, in a way: re-prioritize your concerns. What's your highest priority?

• Stopping an armed bad-guy by shooting him even though he's holding a hostage in his arms, and maaaaaaybe you wound or kill the hostage by accident in the process?
• Or permitting that bad-guy to walk away from you and kill that hostage and possibly some others simply because you refused to stop him when you could because you didn't want the hostage to be scared or for someone to drag you into court when the dust settles?

 
Take that famous inner look we all need once in a while. 

Is your moral imperative to save lives or to protect yourself from the negative consequences that may befall you by way of angry chiefs a/o litigation from an aggrieved family a/o taking a beating in the media?

I'm a trained hostage negotiator and I couldn't possibly care less why that POS is threatening little Miss Muffet. He fucked up. He's shown clearly that he is willing to take a human life for his own selfish reasons. His ticket is getting punched after the third word comes out of his mouth, unless it's I surrender now and he drops his weapon at the same time.  Otherwise, I don't care what he wants.  If I don't stop him, he just might kill that woman. Then what? I live with guilt and shame all my life because I was such a pussy that I couldn't pull the trigger on someone who by his actions shows me it's okay for me to kill him?

I've made my decision. You make yours, and prepare for the consequences of your action or inaction.

So, why's all this important? Because it will be the 6th anniversary of Beslan in just a few weeks. And while many blog commenters will be filling dialogue boxes with how bad they feel and how we should all "remember" what happened, I operate a little differently.

I don't want anyone to remember what "happened", as though some rogue meteor hit Beslan school on 1 Sept 04. I want everyone to know and remember who deliberately planned and carried out that vicious, evil attack against those innocent people. And I want everyone to know and remember exactly what those savages purposefully did to those innocent people.

And I want everyone to decide what the hell they're going to do to prevent such an act from being attempted by Muslims of any stripe here in the US, or wherever they happen to call home.  And I want everyone to decide what they will do ~ whether they are a police officer or someone who just happens to be swept up into the event ~ to end such a horrific slaughter.

My guess is that sooner or later an attack like this will be made on schools in this country. And I have no doubt that honorable, brave police officers will respond as quickly as they possibly can. But I also know their SOP in a hostage situation is to stabilize and wait for the negotiator. In a Beslan-type attack, stabilizing means you shoot as many terrorists as you can as quickly as you can so they don't have time to stabilize... and God will forgive you if you hit a few hostages while saving the rest of them.

In closing let me again highly recommend John Giduck's great book; Terror at Beslan. If you don't have it already, you should buy it here and now. If you don't read the book you can just keep on rustlin' up all the stuff you think you know about that situation and mumble about the carnage; Oh, that was just those crazy Russians. They just went in shooting and killed everything that moved.

In case you don't know, the Russians have been slugging it out with Muslim savages for decades longer than any CV-worried chief here in the US. And the one man who did the best review of that action is former Special Forces operator John Giduck. Below are some choice excerpts with which I will leave you.

 

Once the decision to assault is made - whether as a reaction to a triggering event or as a surprise attack - you must go in like Delta and SEAL Six. This means maximum force of violence. There can be no holding back, no hesitation, no stopping, and never a withdrawal.

A lesson that was learned from Columbine, as children and one teacher lay bleeding to death while SWAT teams painstakingly cleared and secured every part of a large school, is that where children are involved, concern for personal safety of the assault force must assume a far lower priority than normal.

There are worse things than dying; such as watching close to two hundred children being shot, blown up and burned to death, or walking among their small lifeless bodies in the aftermath, wondering why you are alive but they will never have their chance in life. When you assault, hit the building hard, move as quickly through it as possible, and toward the sound of battle, or the known positions of terrorists... Most importantly, American law enforcement must realize they are no longer police officers but soldiers in a war.

 
American law enforcement, and perhaps more importantly the American public, the legal system and the news media, have got to get it through their heads that such situations are not pedestrian level criminal episodes committed by the socially misunderstood, where less than-than-lethal force should be used and a suspect afforded all his rights. These are attacks on American soil and American citizens by enemy combatants.

 
Rather than the least possible amount of force, the greatest force available must be brought to bear against them if the lives of the innocent are to be saved, and the deaths of the rescuers are to be prevented. National legislation must be passed granting all responders to a terrorist siege - once that status has been declared by the appropriate authority - to use deadly force with full immunity from civil and criminal prosecution.

 
If, in the midst of an all-out pitched battle you kill a hostage, accept it and move on. Do not linger over the dead, and not even over the wounded or dying. Others coming in behind you will have that responsibility and can attend to the injured. You are the tip of the spear, and if that spear is pointed in some other direction, even for an instant, the result will be disastrous. If you do not constantly move forward, always engaging and staying in battle, more will die.

My other writing on Beslan is here. And you need to read it carefully. 

Lest there be any misunderstanding: I am fully and eternally on the side of the cops. But this is war and they need to know their enemy and be prepared in every way to defeat him or her.

Keep your sticks on the ice, unerschrocken.

Comments

[Monte]

A quote, "He who hesitates, is lost ".

[Talbot]

I lost all confidence in police after columbine. They work ultimately for the political masters. If 300 cops couldn't produce among their number even ONE man I knew that after that after that I was on my own. I'm quite as well trained (much combat experience and police training) and if my kid or grandkids are in danger it's about me - not those pussies in the SWAT costumes. I hope to hell the cops in GA have more guts than those pukes. That said I probably would help a cop - I'm dumb that way.

[greg_o]

Good writing. I had to do a complete clean install of windows and had lost the link or the name of your site. Lost ALL of my favorites and book-marks. Thank heavens, I found it a jihad watch. keep up the teaching pal. Oh, I scored 30 on that shooting game and only hit the hostage once.

[Randy Labusky]

I had the pleasure of attending a 3 day SWAT seminar taught by LtCol. Grossman and John Giduck a few years back. It was by far the best training I've had in my 25 years on the job and it permanantly changed the way I look at things.

We're facing a really sick enemy. This article needs to be seen by as many people as posible. Thanks for the site

[Angel]

wow. well done. Impressive work too~!

[Mobamad]

Wow dude, that is hard core.