About | HeinOnline Law Journal Library | HeinOnline Law Journal Library | HeinOnline
LOG IN
LOG IN

13 Am. J. Police 1 (1994)
Biological Limits to Police Combat Handgun Shooting Accuracy

handle is hein.journals/ajpol13 and id is 5 raw text is: American Journal of Police Vol. 13, No. 1 1994 BIOLOGICAL LIMITS TO POLICE COMBAT HANDGUN SHOOTING ACCURACY Bryan J. Vila Gregory B. Morrison University of California, Irvine History suggests that police shoot with far less accuracy than many citizens, public officials, and policymakers believe. For example, Justice John Paul Stevens interrupted the oral arguments in Tennessee v. Garner to ask why the officer involved could not have aimed at a leg or arm or otherwise shot to wound the fleeing Garner (471 U.S. 1). As many researchers have noted, however, police officers seldom shoot accurately in combat situations (Geller & Scott 1992; Binder & Fridell 1984; Scharf & Binder 1983; Geller & Karales 1981:90; Fyfe 1978). And the ability of police to hit opponents in gunfights appears to have improved little over the past 100 years despite improvements in weapons and substantial increases in firearms training. This highlights the lack of handgun training validation and raises the possibility that the limits to how accurately police can shoot under combat situations may have been reached. Although variables such as cognition and perception also are important, the body's nervous and mechanical systems place finite lim- its on combat handgun shooting accuracy. Research in neurophysiol- ogy and biomechanics (e.g., Calvin 1983; Leavitt, Marteniuk & Carna- han 1987; Poppel 1988) indicates that these limits may be unexpectedly low--especially when officers suddenly confront armed opponents at close quarters. Accurate handgun shooting places substantial demands on human nervous, muscular, and skeletal systems because it requires so much steadiness and hand-eye coordination. These demands dra- matically increase in complex, rapidly changing combat situations. We use contemporary and historical data on police combat handgun shoot- ing accuracy and a simple mathematical model to test the hypothesis that the biophysiological limits of combat handgun shooting

What Is HeinOnline?

HeinOnline is a subscription-based resource containing thousands of academic and legal journals from inception; complete coverage of government documents such as U.S. Statutes at Large, U.S. Code, Federal Register, Code of Federal Regulations, U.S. Reports, and much more. Documents are image-based, fully searchable PDFs with the authority of print combined with the accessibility of a user-friendly and powerful database. For more information, request a quote or trial for your organization below.



Short-term subscription options include 24 hours, 48 hours, or 1 week to HeinOnline.

Purchase Access

Contact us for annual subscription options:

Contact Us

Already a HeinOnline Subscriber?

Log In

profiles profiles most