Denver police officers faced an armed bad guy who drew down on them amid a busy bar crowd at 1:35 a.m. The cops engaged, firing their sidearms, scoring seven hits out of six rounds. That represents a remarkable 117% hit rate. The only problem is that six of the seven people who were wounded soaked up rounds meant for the bad guy.
They surely don’t appreciate DPD’s marksmanship skills or lack thereof.
Yes, there’s that pesky fourth rule of gun safety: Know your target and what’s beyond it. For the record, that even applies to the staple guns you use to put your targets at the range. But for good guys everywhere, firing anything except carefully controlled shots at a bad actor surrounded by innocents could probably be described more as negligence than exigence.
Maybe Denver Police should hire a guy like Elisjsha Dicken to coach them up on their marksmanship skills. He’s the guy without formal training who took down a rifle-toting lunatic shooting people in a crowded mall in Indiana. Dicken scored eight hits out of ten shots fired, wounding no innocents by mistake, at up to 40 yards away.
Here’s the dirty laundry on the horrific incident from the Denver Post.
Denver police on Tuesday released surveillance video and body camera footage of three officers shooting an armed man and injuring six innocent bystanders outside busy downtown bars on July 17.
For the first time, the videos show from start to finish the shooting, which a grand jury will investigate. Denver police officials previously made public still images they selected from the videos but denied public records requests by The Denver Post and other news outlets to release the videos in their entirety…
Denver police previously said Waddy was holding the gun by the slide on the top when the officers fired. It’s unclear if Waddy could have fired the gun while holding it that way, Cmdr. Matt Clark said at a July 20 news conference. He said the officers believed the muzzle of the gun pointed at them as Waddy pulled it out.
Two officers shot a combined five rounds while facing Waddy with the front wall of Larimer Beer Hall behind him. A third officer fired one round from Waddy’s right side, and a crowd of people was visible behind Waddy in the officer’s body camera footage.
“The Department of Safety and Denver Police Department remains concerned about the health and well-being of those who were injured in this incident and will continue to offer support to aid in their healing,” the departments said in a joint statement Tuesday.
Maybe Denver’s police need to spend more time on the fundamentals of handgun safety and marksmanship and less on “woke” racial/implicit bias training.