Crazy Video – Cop Shoots Fleeing Felons While in Pursuit

Cop Shoots Fleeing Felons

Here we see some intense body camera footage of a vehicle pursuit gun battle between two fleeing felons and Las Vegas Police. Watch as the police offer shoots from his car.

As always, be careful drawing conclusions on shortened and edited 15 second video clips that are being shared on social media.  Most of them fail to show that the officer was under fire for over 3 minutes before returning fire.  Here is the longest clip I could find:

Of course the marksman in me wants to critique the pistol handling that we see in this event.  Every time the officer placed both hands on the grip it was sloppy.  Notice the thumb of the support hand behind the grip asking for slide bite.

The shots themselves were more on par with a mag dump then well aimed shots in a public place, but I imagine those were a bit more responsible than the dozens of rounds fired from the criminal’s vehicle.

The reload was far less than ideal, but he eventually seated the magazine and stopped the threat.

Now don’t get me wrong – I’m not trying to Monday Morning Quarterback police tactics of shooting from a moving vehicle at a fleeing felon.  For all we know the officer’s actions could have saved dozens of lives.

But here is my point: under stress we fall to our lowest level of training.  Most competition shooters have all fumbled reloads and even dropped firearms at some point trying to beat the buzzer.  Under stress of being killed we will likely fall to our worst firearms performance ever.  To counter this we must continue training to hone our skills.

We train so that our hands automatically know what to do when they feel the half cycle of a slide indicating an empty magazine.  Only by repetition will we know where our support hand needs to meet our handgun to be able to control recoil.  We must dry fire practice frequently so that we can send well placed shots at the target.  I’m glad the outcome was favorable for this officer and the surrounding citizens and I appreciate the available body cam footage so that we can take lessons from it.

Feel free to leave a comment below on your thoughts of the crazy event.

Sidenote: if it are familiar with Bloomberg’s Anti-Gun “Mom’s Demand” action group you can be sure that they will include this in their statistics as a “school shooting” since it ended by an elementary school.

And in the meantime, train often, pray hard, shoot straight.

Full details of the chase

Dustin Ellermann