Easter Sunday, a group of us went shooting at the KR Training range. Because what better way is there to celebrate the resurrection of Christ than to shoot off guns? Hey, didn’t the man say “If you don’t have a sword, sell your cloak and buy one?”<\/p>\n
(Also: KR Training<\/a>, official firearms trainer of Whipped Cream Difficulties.)<\/p>\n While we were out there, My mind immediately went in a particular direction, but I’m going to come at it from the long way around. Because that’s just the kind of hairball I am. Let’s start with the question: what calibers do Glocks come in?<\/p>\n I can almost visualize a .380 ACP Glock AR carbine (or an AR pistol). The vision I have of it in my head is that it would be a kind of cute plinking gun…that shoots relatively expensive ammo and doesn’t have a fun switch<\/a>. It reminds me of the old MAC-11<\/a>, but even less useful. (Though the AR platform carbine would perhaps be more reliable.)<\/p>\n 9mm seems to be where the AR\/Glock action is, and for good reason: 9mm ARs are fairly popular in various places, 9mm ammo is relatively cheap, and this seems like a very practical pistol caliber carbine. Perhaps even more so if you pay for the tax stamp and make it a short-barreled rife. I think a lot of folks are looking at these, even without the SBR tax stamp, as good home defense weapons: easier to handle, point, and shoot than a pistol, without the possible over penetration issues of 5.56.<\/p>\n You could make the same argument for .40 S&W, except that the ammo isn’t as cheap as 9mm. and I don’t think it has the same following that the 9mm carbine has in the tactical community.<\/p>\n .45 ACP could be an interesting build. I don’t see a lot of tactical operators talking about operating tactically with .45 ACP carbines. But I don’t hang out with a lot of tactical operators, either. Feel free to correct me if I’m wrong.<\/p>\n .45 GAP? Well, that’d be weird. The Winchester ballistics calculator on my phone says that .45 GAP will drop a little less and have slightly more velocity at 50 yards. But my impression is that .45 GAP is a dying caliber (even though Glock still chambers guns in it) and is maybe a little more expensive than .45 ACP by a few dollars a box for comparable ammo. However, I haven’t shot or bought .45 GAP, so don’t take that as gospel truth. Check prices at your local dealer or online ammo vendor.<\/p>\n .357 SIG? Ah. That’s the first place my mind went. I remember .357 SIG being touted as having a flatter trajectory than the .357 Magnum, but the same punch at range, higher capacity, and the ability to actually feed it in auto pistols. That same Winchester calculator (which only goes out to 50 yards on the iPhone) does show slightly less drop and a slightly lower velocity for the .357 SIG at 50 yards. If I can find a better calculator, I’d love to run numbers out to 100 yards.<\/p>\n Apparently, I’m not the only person who has this thought. there’s an interesting discussion over at Better and Better<\/a> where Matt G mentions much the same idea (and also responds to a question from your humble blogger about the current role of the police shotgun).<\/p>\n And finally: 10mm? Why not? I like this idea, too. It reminds me of Jeff Cooper’s “Thumper”<\/a>. I could see a SBR version of this working perhaps as a compact police carbine, but more so in Cooper’s original conception: a personal defense weapon for tank crews and other people who need something they can carry and deploy in tight quarters. I think I’d pick a 9mm or .357 SIG version for my daily use. But if I was in an appropriate military position, I’d build up a few 10mm ARs for experimental purposes in the sandbox.<\/p>\n More crankery after the jump.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Over the past week, I’ve had a chance to mess around with shooting simulators that belong to various police agencies. You know how these work, right? You’ve got a realistic gun fitted with a laser instead of bullets, they project scenarios on the screen in front of you, you interact with the scenario (controlled by an operator) and at some point you have to make a decision to shoot, get shot, or possibly handle things another way (Taser, pepper spray, verbal judo, a hug, cookies and milk…)<\/p>\n I’ve also spent time listening to many of these same officers talk about the “reasonable man” standard<\/a> in shootings. And yet another thought came to me.<\/p>\n I’ve done some reading about aviation, too, particularly plane crashes. One investigative technique I’ve seen mentioned in air crash investigations is the “let’s put them in the simulator” technique. The NTSB (or whoever is in charge) loads up a flight simulator with the best data they have available from the flight data recorder, cockpit voice recorder, and whatever other evidence they have. Then they bring pilots in, put them in the simulator without telling them what’s going on…and watch to see how many “crash” and “die” and how many manage to make it out “okay”.<\/p>\n (I have a memory of this being done in the Kara Hultgreen<\/a> investigation, but can’t find a source for that. I believe the NTSB also did this for Flight 191<\/a>. The most famous example I know of was cited by Don Norman in one of his books: the pilot of a small commuter plane silently died on the landing approach, the co-pilot was afraid to say anything and didn’t realize the pilot was actually dead<\/strong>, so he let the aircraft get too low before pulling up. The aircraft crashed short of the runway. The NTSB put a bunch of pilots and co-pilots into simulators, secretly told the pilots to “die” on approach, and watched to see what the co-pilots did. The vast majority of co-pilots let the plane fly into the ground. Norman cites this as the incident that began research into crew resource management, though other sources differ.)<\/p>\n What if, in the case of a particularly controversial shooting, especially one that’s gone to court, the police (or even better, a neutral third party) took all of the collected evidence – witness statements, radio transmissions, dash and body cam video, etc. – and used it to program as accurate a simulation as they could get? And then what if they ran, say, 100 police officers from various outside agencies with various levels of experience (but let’s set a floor: don’t use anybody with less experience than the person in court) and ran them through the same simulation, without any prior preparation?<\/p>\n Wouldn’t that be an interesting and possibly useful exercise? “Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, in the simulation you just saw, 98 out of 100 officers who went through the simulation drew their weapon and engaged the suspect.” Or even conversely, “Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, in the simulation you just saw, none<\/strong> of the 100 officers who went through the simulation drew their weapon and engaged the suspect<\/a>. All<\/strong> of the tested officers stated they would pursue the suspect on foot and radio for backup.”<\/p>\n (The police officers I have been around have pretty much unanimously condemned the Walter Scott shooting, with comments like “That guy should never have been a police officer.” Just saying.)<\/p>\n Where this might get even more interesting is in “questionable” situations. I’m thinking here of the famous naked 17-year-old, or the Terence Crutcher shooting in Tulsa<\/a>. Wouldn’t it be interesting, and possibly even statistically relevant, to find out how 100 officers with a similar level of expertise from Houston and Dallas would have handled the naked 17-year-old? I know I’d be curious to see those results.<\/p>\nthe actor we’ve hired to play<\/del> Karl mentioned that you can get AR pattern lowers (and uppers) in pistol calibers…that take Glock magazines. Here’s an example.<\/a> (Not endorsed by WCD: I have no experience with the company or product.) Since most folks who are serious Glock users have a bunch of magazines around, this is an attractive idea. Even more so when you know that you can get magazine extensions for those standard Glock magazines and load up even more rounds.<\/p>\n