“What do people do after you shoot them with a handgun?” John Farnam once asked a group of his students. It was a rhetorical question and John didn’t wait for us to answer. “The same thing they were doing before you shot them.”
I was a member of that class and it was the summer of 1986. Farnam reminded us that the term “stopping power” had been incorrectly applied to handguns and that we carried handguns for convenience, not because they’re the most powerful tools available. “A handgun will never have the power of a centerfire rifle or properly loaded shotgun,” we were admonished.
‘Stopping Power’
Back before the internet and socialist media, gun folks used to entertain themselves in various ways. One way we occupied our time was to have debates with each other regarding the “stopping power” of various handgun rounds, calibers and loads. Books and articles were written and sold with formulas to better help you to calculate the likelihood of a “one-shot stop” from your favored caliber and bullet design.
Like I said, we didn’t have the internet back then, so we debated caliber, velocity, bullet weight, bullet design, etc. The ammunition makers were hellbent on coming up with a law enforcement load that could pass the FBI Handgun Ammunition Protocol and offer the best “stopping power.”
Of course, in hindsight, as King Solomon once said, “all is vanity and a striving after wind.” The older, more seasoned veterans of both wars and street fights knew that the whole handgun stopping power debate was just vanity and chasing wind. As a gun community, we really didn’t do ourselves any favors chasing after the phantom “one-shot stop.”
Let’s face it. Rather than focus on dedicated training and the ability to put rounds into human attackers where they’ll do the most good, we instead chased after the “magic bullets.” People became convinced that with the right ammo, deadly human monsters could be instantaneously put down with a single shot. You know, just like on TV.
Meriden, Connecticut Officer-Involved Shooting
A police officer’s bodycam video is making its way around the internet showing a grim scene. The officer in question was dispatched to a domestic violence call only to find a large man actively beating another man on the ground with a baseball bat (ability, opportunity, intent = deadly force).
The officer is shown rapidly approaching the attacker and yelling for him to drop the bat. The attacker ignores the officer and keeps hitting the victim. Within seconds, the officer fires at the attacker, to no effect. He keeps firing as he’s closing until the suspect with the bat finally falls to the ground.
As the video ends, we see the officer is at slidelock.
🚨 Meriden, CT tragedy (July 19, 2026):
Two men are dead after a son allegedly beat his father to death with a baseball bat on Sagamore Road. Responding Officer Anthony Offiaeli arrived, ordered the suspect (Robert Lee Jenkins III, 38) to drop the bat multiple times, then fired…— The Globe & News (@TheGlobeNewt) July 23, 2026
We’re not going to break the body camera down by fractions of seconds, but from what we have available, it was nine to ten seconds from the first shot being fired to the suspect stopping his attack. Take a moment and count to ten. Not very long, is it?
Let’s consider human physiology for a moment. When using a firearm as a defensive tool, there are two ways to force a physiological stop on an attacking human animal; exsanguination (critical blood loss) and neurological; critical damage to the central nervous system.
Michael Platt, the murderer in the FBI Miami Shootout, was bleeding to death when he killed two FBI agents and critically wounded at third. Despite taking what doctors called a “non-survivable gunshot wound” Platt had enough gas left in the tank to keep fighting for another three minutes or so. Platt had twelve gunshot wounds when he stopped. Emil Matasareanu, one of the North Hollywood bank robbers, was shot 29 times, mostly in the legs, before he eventually bled to death.
While far less famous, an Illinois officer, Timothy Gramins, was attacked by a bank robber and had to shoot the perp 14 times with a GLOCK 21 he had to reload twice, before the robber stopped trying to kill him. The felon in that case received what the coroner referred to as six fatal gunshot wounds in vital organs prior to ceasing his rampage. The would-be killed emptied two pistols at the officer and the officer reloaded twice in all of one minute.
Expiring from blood loss takes time and the central nervous system is buried deep inside the human body and is a relatively small target, particularly if you consider the person will likely be moving. That felonious attacker in Meriden was an extra large, Baby Huey-looking thing.
The Typical Internet Pile-On
What was all too predictable was the typical internet pile on claiming that the Connecticut cop “missed all his shots” until the very end. First of all, there’s no way to watch the body camera footage and know that. Secondly, the official Medical Examiner’s report stated that the bat-wielding monster died of “multiple gunshot wounds to the torso.” Yeah, thanks for being so specific.
Depending on the agency and the amount of facts gathered, police officers nationwide tend to have an average hit to miss ratio in the 20 to 30 percent range. That means 70 to 80 percent of their shots miss their target. The NYPD has an abysmal 18 percent hit ratio when shooting suspects during gunfights. While some agencies are better than others, few of them exceed better than a 50 percent hit rate.
The unconfirmed number of hits from the Meriden officer that’s floating around is 11. Even if his GLOCK pistol was topped off with 18 rounds (I counted 18 while watching the video), that’s better than 50 percent. If our hero in Connecticut had only connected four or five times, he still would have done better than the NYPD average. Eleven hits out of eighteen rounds is a 61% success rate, well above average, so back off.
The Moral of the Story
Many years ago, we at Student of the Gun, began explaining the three types of threats posed by violent felons or armed criminals.
Type 1 Attacker: When met with resistance in the form of a firearm, will surrender or flee out of a sense of self-preservation even though they have received no injury.
Type 2 Attacker: Will flee or surrender only after they have received an injury. Career criminals use guns and see guns all the time, a good percentage of them do not fear the sight of a gun. However, the reality of physical injury may cause them to withdraw or surrender and beg for medical attention.
Type 3 Attacker: Will not cease their assault, regardless of the defender being armed or sustaining some type of injury from said gun. The attackers in the 1986 Miami Shootout and the 1997 North Hollywood Bank Robbery are likely the most famous examples of Type 3 attackers. Add the late Baby Huey in Connecticut to that list.
Both Types 1 and 2 surrender or flee based upon a psychological decision. They make the mental choice to cease their attack. The Type 3 threat can’t be stopped psychologically, only physiologically. It is only after sustaining sufficient physiological damage that the Type 3 attacker will stop their deadly assault. Physiological stops with handguns are difficult at best.
The good news is that there are far more Type 1 and Type 2 attackers in the world than Type 3s. The bad news is that when faced with a deadly force attack, the defender won’t know what type of threat they are facing until after the fight has concluded.
When thrown into an unexpected deadly force scenario, you will have no way of knowing how many bullets it’s going to take to stop an attacker from killing you or an innocent person. What we do know is that John Farnam was right all those years ago. Chasing after stopping power or some type of magic bullet is a fool’s errand. Take serious training and be mentally prepared for an attacker to just keep doing what they were doing before you shot them. Your responsibility to be ready for the fight never ends.
Paul G. Markel is a combat decorated United States Marine veteran. He is also the founder of Student of the Gun University and has been teaching Small Arms & Tactics to military personnel, police officers, and citizens for over three decades.
” ‘What do people do after you shoot them with a handgun?’ John Farnam once asked a group of his students. It was a rhetorical question and John didn’t wait for us to answer. ‘The same thing they were doing before you shot them.’ ”
Yep, “The same thing they were doing before you shot them. ” is true. Always assume they will continue until they can not continue, so be prepared to keep firing if necessary.
I’ve had several DGU’s in my life. In one incident, I had hit both the bad guys several times each and they were still able to continue and I had to expend three 15 round magazines (all except three rounds) to completely stop the threat from getting to my wife. It was the rounds I managed to put in one bad guys back that made him stop and drop because they hit his spinal cord and it paralyzed him but he had already been hit numerous times before that, and the second guy was still firing at me despite being hit numerous times. It was only being able to get close enough to place the final rounds that stopped the second guy. I had three rounds left in my third and last magazine when it was over, he still had several fully loaded magazines and several were laying empty on the ground where he had reloaded and fired at me during my fire-n-manuever-n-advance the 30’ish yards to get to my wife.
I EDC a lot more ammo these days because of that incident, six 17 round magazines.