Running away from a knife-wielding attacker is considered good common sense in the self-defense community. Guns are a little more complicated. After all, they have range. Turning your back on an attacker with a handgun doesn't do anything to prevent him from shooting. However, a while back I encountered a number of statistics that caused me to believe that trying to outrun bullets is a much more sound tactic than you might think.
My argument is entirely statistical. It's based on the fact that there is actually a lot that can go right if you turn around and run, and the odds are strongly in your favor. This is my argument. If you run, they might not try and shoot you. If they do, they might fail to fire. If they succeed, they might still miss. If they miss, you might not die. While the odds for any one of those are not especially comforting, in aggregate, they end up making running a safe option, because the attacker has to succeed at every one of those steps. A failure at any point means you live.
And before I get started, know that many of these stats are weak. They aren't completely made up, but it's hard to find good data on this stuff. But I think you'll find that, even if you make fairly significant changes to some of the numbers, the argument still stands.
The area where I have no numbers at all is for if an attacker will try and shoot you if you try and run. If anyone has data on this, I'd love to see it. I'll use 50% for this exercise, but I suspect in most situations, it's not even that that high. I believe most attackers wield a gun as a magic wand which automatically forces compliance, and don't plan to actually use it. (There is some evidence for this in the next section, such as the fact the many criminals don't even load their gun.)
Next is will they succeed in shooting their gun if they try. I would have thought that, yes 100% of criminals could figure out how to fire a gun. But there is strong evidence against that. This is actually what got me going in this line of thinking. A while back, I found some information on criminals and the guns they carry. Now this isn't a scientific study or data on a national scale. It's just data from one department over a few years. But in that case, 41% of criminals' guns were completely non-functional. They either weren't loaded, were loaded with the wrong ammo, or were completely broken. These 41% of criminals couldn't shoot you if they tried.
So what about the 59% who can shoot you. Well, I don't have data on how many shots a criminal might fire on average, but given that many of the guns recovered weren't fully loaded, didn't have magazines, or failed in some way within 3 shots, I'm going to say they'll shoot at you 3 times. Next we need to know their odds of hitting you on any given shot. For this I'm using an old random study I found that suggests that "Metro-Dade Police fired about 1,300 bullets at suspects, and missed more than 1,100 times". That's an 84.6% miss rate! If you give the attacker 3 shots, that comes out to a 39.5% chance of hitting you.
So what if they shoot you? What are your chances of dying? This BoJ Report says there are 3.3 survivals for every 1 fatality, and this is specifically for gunshots resulting from assaults (not suicides or accidents). That's a 76.7% survival rate.
So add all this up. 50% chance they even try and shoot you. 59% chance their gun actually works. 39.5% chance they hit you. 23.3% chance you die. If I've done my math correctly, that's only a 2.7% chance of success for the attacker, which means a 97.3% survival rate for you. Those are great odds. So don't feel like turning your back on a gun is a death sentence. It's a perfectly viable option.
Submitted September 27, 2019 at 09:50AM by xAptive https://ift.tt/2lCFL07
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