The second area of tactical proficiency that needs to be worked on is magazine retention. Remember the Newhall, California, shootout in 1971, where four California state highway patrolmen were murdered by two armed robbers? The officers were armed with Smith & Wesson Model 19 .357 Magnum revolvers. The two bad guys had a shotgun and a Colt .45 Auto. The bad guys survived the grisly ordeal, but through their involvement in the incident and knowledge of how the officer’s responded to and handled the situation, a great number of important training lessons were learned the hard way for law enforcement.
First, according to witnesses, a couple officers looked shocked and confused when they fired their handguns, looking at them as if they were broken. Why was this? The officers were firing full-power 158-grain semi-wadcutter .357 Magnum ammo for the first time. At the range, to save money and wear and tear on the officers, they had been training only with the very mild .38 Special 148-grain wadcutter bullets. That’s about 1,200 fps in velocity versus 700. No one knows for sure, but it was surmised at the time that the officers may have thought their guns were going to blow up when they experienced the unaccustomed heavy recoil and muzzle flash of the .357 Magnum round. That fact altered police training to the point where Ohio law, for example, requires that law enforcement agencies must qualify with practice ammunition that approximates the power of their duty ammunition.
By the way, another possible explanation for the officers’ issues with their guns is based on Col. Grossman’s research into visual and audio distortion during gunfights—information unknown back then. Grossman’s studies found that the officers may have thought that their guns weren’t working at all. It still happens today, due to phenomena known as auditory exclusion, and it can happen no matter the caliber or load. This is also known as “tunnel hearing,” akin to “tunnel vision” and can set in at times of extreme stress—in other words, the noise of the officers’ own gunfire may have perceptually receded so far in to the background that the “distorted” noise could have led them to believe they had malfunctioning guns. How can you avoid this? Train, train, and train again,\ with all the right ammo, but just being aware that this can happen is at least as important. You have to know what can happen to you physically and mentally in the middle of a gun fight before you get in one.
The second thing learned from that shootout is that the four officers who died, who would have loaded their spare ammo out of dump pouches or belt loops back then, were found to have empty brass casings either in their pockets or in a neat little pile on the ground at their feet. This meant that they were following the ingrained range procedure of catching the empty rounds into their hands as part of the reloading procedure, and them putting the empties into the brass can at their feet in order to keep the range neat and avoid being yelled at by the rangemaster. Immediately after this was analyzed, training for law enforcement was changed, and it became universal standard procedure to let the revolver empties fall freely to the ground, collecting them only after all shooting was done.
This procedure carried over to the autoloading pistol era, except it wasn’t really the same thing. Empty brass from a semi-auto is, of course, automatically ejected away from the shooter each time a shot is fired. Problem solved there, but a new one was created. Officers and civilians were being trained to let empty or partially full magazines, an operational part of the weapon, fall to the ground and become unavailable.
Did you know the first generation Glock pistols had magazines purposely designed not to drop clear of the weapon when the magazine release button was pushed? That was a specification of the Austrian Army, when they adopted the pistol as their standard duty weapon. They didn’t want soldiers losing magazines after firing. It was the American law enforcement community that demanded drop-free magazines from Glock, so the design was changed.
Train yourselves out of the drop-free pattern whenever you shoot, be it personal practice, competition, or qualification. During current times, dropping magazines isn’t a huge concern, but in the civil disorder era, when you’re on the move, you can’t afford to leave behind empty or partially empty magazines. So now when you train, capture every magazine—full or empty, rifle or pistol—with your weak hand, stuff it into one of the pockets on the cargo pants you’re wearing, and load in a fresh one. This is why I said much earlier that, as much as I love my M1 Garand, I would likely leave it behind because it throws its empty magazines all over creation every time it’s emptied. While I might be able to recover those empties, it isn’t likely to happen when rounds are incoming or when it’s pitch black outside. If you want that level of power, get an M1A in .308 and catch and secure the magazines each and every time that you shoot. With all your weapons, practice shooting and reloading them with one hand only. And everyone who’s going to carry a gun and provide for the common defense must train with their guns—everyone, men, women and children. With the kids, start them out easy, okay? Teach them first the safety and joy of shooting and shooting at fun targets. Don’t start out telling them they’re learning to shoot so they can shoot at people. That kind of stuff will end you up in the offices of the local Children’s Services agency with a follow-up appearance on the local and maybe national news. If you’re carrying other weapons for defense—pepper spray, launchers, tomahawks, knives, or even bows and arrows—train with them, as well, because your CQB could turn out to be really close and uncomfortable.
Vehicle Defense
There are times when you may have to fire at attackers from inside your car. This happens on a fairly regular basis, such as when carjackers don’t realize they’re attempting to ply their trade in a state that now permits concealed carry. It also happens with law enforcement officers. In these situations, it usually involves officers firing handguns from within their cars, often through their own windshield at assailants approaching their position. Recently, we had an incident here in Columbus, where an officer returned fire with his Smith & Wesson Model 4506 .45 ACP pistol, firing through his windshield against a suspect armed with a semi-auto AK-47 successfully taking down his assailant (permanently).
In the immediate aftermath of civil disorder, you may find your vehicle surrounded as you attempt to escape and evade the urban ground zero you’re in. Think of the case of Reginald Denny during the Rodney King riots in L.A. If you are alone, that means you will have to use a pistol, a large-capacity pistol, to drive off the crowd. That’s why I travel not only with my Smith & Wesson Model 642 .38 Special with 15 rounds on my person, but also with my Beretta M9A1 with a total of 45 rounds in my Maxpedition Sitka sling pack. You cannot allow yourself to be surrounded and dragged from your vehicle, or you will be done. If you have someone riding with you, they can use a long gun, one of the short, folding-stock models, to bring more firepower to bear, hopefully keeping the muzzle outside the window to lessen the noise impact. You can use as many people as you have weapons for to provide that 360-degree defense, and that way you can concentrate on driving.