[Terrorism] Police shot Brazilian eight times

The man mistaken for a suicide bomber by police was shot eight times, an inquest into his death has heard.
Brazilian Jean Charles de Menezes, 27, was shot seven times in the head and once in the shoulder, at Stockwell Tube station, south London, on Friday.

Det Insp Elizabeth Baker revealed the details at a hearing in London.

Security sources have said Mr Menezes had been in the UK on an out-of-date student visa, but his family deny this and are considering suing the police.

Marc Says: It is important to realize that all handguns are ballistically inadequate to immediately stop someone. Contrary to what you may have seen on TV and in the Movies, where actors hooked to harnesses are thrown backward through windows by a single handgun bullet, in real life the most common reaction of someone shot with a handgun bullet is ... absolutely nothing. They keep right on doing whatever they were doing. There are well-documented cases of people hit with 33 9mm pistol rounds who kept right on doing what they were doing at the time (in that case, attacking several police officers).

Under the pre-9/11 rule set, the good guys (the police) were supposed to "shoot to stop", meaning, keep shooting the bad guy until the bad guy stopped doing whatever bad thing he (or she) was doing, such as attacking a victim or raping somebody. There was no particular intent to kill the bad guy. In fact, modern jacket hollow point bullets have a fatality rate of about 1% for a single hit, and about 3% to 4% fatality rates for multiple hits. Modern bullets are designed to cause a lot of shock and trauma, and to stop the attacker, rather than to kill him or her. They do an excellent job of that.

The post-9/11 rule set, and in particular the post-7/7 rule set is now quite different. The new rule set is to prevent the suspected homocide-suicide bomber from triggering the switch to detonate his/her bomb. If the would-be bomber is carrying the switch in his hand (common practice), he or she has to move one finger about 1/16 inch to press the button, close the switch, and kill the surrounding citizens and police. Preventing the switch closure requires shutting down the suspected bomber's nervous system.

Shutting down the nervous system using handgun bullets is extremely difficult to do. Handgun bullets are ballistically inadequate to the task (I keep saying that, and I will continue to keep saying that). Cutting the spinal cord and so stopping electrical signals to the bomber's hand requires severing the spinal cord, which is about as thick as your little finger. Hitting it while the shooter and the suspected bomber are moving around (or rolling around on the ground is effectively impossible. If you do not believe me I will invite you out to the range so you can demonstrate for me (we will use moving targets as thick as your finger and you will be running at the time, I can furnish the targets and the safe backstop, you bring the handgun and the ammunition that you claim you can do this with -- I really want to see this done).

So, to shut down the suspected bomber's nervous system before he or she can trigger the bomb the police have to shoot at the biggest target they have, the brain. This is extremely difficult to do with a handgun. As many of you may know, the brain is surrounded by the skull, a highly resilient and curved structure that does an excellent job of deflecting impacts and blows. There are many recorded cases of the skull deflecting handgun bullets. Shooting at somebody's head, particularly while the shooter and the target are moving, is extremely hard to do. The brain itself is about the size of a grapefruit, and it is all inside the skull. Shooting a bomber in the jaw will not stop him or her from triggering his or her bomb.

To make things even more difficult, the brain is a highly resilient and redundant system. It has two halves, either of which can run the body. There are many recorded cases of people who have suffered what a reasonable person would think are traumatic brain injuries (shootings and construction accidents being the most common) who were not affected in the least, and who then walked into the emergency room under their own power, and who lived after treatment. So shooting a suspected bomber in the head (and actually hitting the brain) is not at all sufficient to prevent the dedicated bomber from triggering the bomb.

So, given that handgun bullets are ballistically inadequate, given that the skull is very difficult to penetrate, and given that the brain is quite resilient and redundant, the proper protocol to stop a suspected homocide-suicide bomber from triggering his or her device is to empty the handgun's entire ammunition supply into the suspected bomber's upper head just as rapidly as possible. How fast is that? A semi-automatic handgun cycles at about 30 rounds per second. Nobody can pull the trigger that fast. A trained shooter can reasonably pull the trigger about 4 or 5 times per second, a well-trained shooter can pull the trigger about 8 times per second. I have the electronic timer and the first-hand experience to prove it. Don't believe me? Come on out to the range with me -- I bet I can train you to shoot 4 rounds per second in the first day of training, faster if you don't aim in between shots.

So what do I think happened? I think the officer chasing the suspect, shouting for him to stop, seeing the suspect run away, dodge, and run onto a commuter train, made the decision that this guy met the criteria for being a possible bomber. The officer pushed the suspected bomber down to the ground to clear the line of fire from hitting innocent civilians and emptied his handgun into the suspected bomber's head just as fast as he (the officer) could manipulate the trigger.

The London police are in the painful process of updating their rule sets. So is much of the rest of the Western world.

Mr Menezes' cousin, Alex Pereira, who is based in London, said the police would "kill thousands of people" if they were not held accountable for what had happened at Stockwell on Friday.

He said: "They just kill the first person they see, that's what they did. They killed my cousin, they could kill anyone."

Marc Says: Note first that Mr. Pereira omits any mention of Mr. Menezes' having a responsibility to stop when ordered to do so by police. Note also that Mr. Pereira goes off into unsubstantiated flights of fancy, as London police have not been killing thousands of people since the 7/7 bombings and the more recent change in policy concerning stopping suspected homocide-suicide bombers.

Tony Blair said he was "desperately sorry" an innocent man had lost his life.

Marc Says: I concur. Very sad. Utterly preventable, all the suspect had to do was stop, raise his hands, show the police the palms of his hands with his fingers spread widely apart, and make absolutely no motion.

A simple word of advice here, people -- when the police yell "Stop!" you are actually supposed to stop. Otherwise, in today's world of homocide-suicide bombers, you can reasonably expect to immediately become very terminally dead. Both Mr. Menezes and Mr. Pereira appear to have failed to grasp that simple and vital point of the new post-7/ 7 rule set.

I think we will soon see a new category for the Darwin Awards (the award for people who delete themselves from the human gene pool by doing incredibly stupid things) for "innocent" people who commit "suicide by security forces" by acting like a homocide-suicide bomber. I nominate Mr. Menezes for the award, and I nominate his cousin, Mr. Pereira for honorable mention.