Reply #33: Finally heard about, and got to watch this

[Euromutt]

Specifically, the classroom shooter "experiment." It can be found on YouTube, part 1 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0MX3QtumSuE and part 2 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xxNRLMWkjc8

What an utter load of bilge from start to finish!

A number of the obvious points have already been addressed (please note I'm using masculine pronouns for general purpose throughout):
First, the armed student was always seated in the same place, and the shooter always went for the armed student immediately after shooting the instructor.
The student was also seated in just about the worst possible spot, right in the middle of the front row, with minimal room to maneuver. And how plausible do we think it is that an active shooter is going to know in advance who is going to be armed in a classroom? So that stacks the deck right there.
Second, the students were assigned sub-optimal clothing and equipment and inadequately instructed how to use it.
In spite of otohara's whinge above, this is far from trivial. Anyone who's actually tried to carry a large-caliber firearm on an unstiffened belt (and I have) soon discovers that the holstered gun flops all over the place, gets tangled up in clothing, and risks being exposed; at that point, said person decides to invest in a dedicated gun belt. And that's before he even tries to draw the weapon. Like spin, I wear a reinforced belt from The Wilderness, only I wear the metal-free "Frequent Flyer" model (http://store.thewilderness.com/product_info.php?cPath=43&products_id=196); and yes, I wear it almost all the time.
Positioning the holster for a comfortable draw is also something that the carrier has to decide for himself; you cannot have someone else put a holster on you and expect it work correctly for you. In this instance, the firearms instructors even appear to be deliberately placing the holsters badly, so far forward (at the two o'clock position) that it's guaranteed to make the draw more difficult than it needs to be.
The oversize white t-shirts given to the students are a pretty lousy choice for concealed carry as well; difficult to get out of the way, while being the perfect color and material for the gun to "print." No CCWer worth his salt would be likely to even wear such a shirt as a cover garment, but if he did, he'd at least practice sweeping it clear of the holster, which I don't see anyone doing in the video.
Next, gloves. As spin has pointed out, requiring gloves during the exercise made sense from a safety perspective, but if so, the test subjects should have been required to practice using the gun while wearing them. See anyone in the video wearing gloves during preliminary training? Me neither.
In combination, this stacks the deck even further.

Then I have some more criticisms:
Multiple shooters enter the room.
Very, very few school, mall or workplace mass shootings have involved more than one shooter; Columbine and Westside Middle School (in Jonesboro, AR) are the only two I can think of. It's not inconceivable, but it's highly unlikely; something Sawyer blithely glossed over.
Shooter has a accomplice pre-positioned in the room.
This has never happened in a school, mall or workplace shooting. It is a very real risk in armed robberies of stores or banks, but highly implausible in classrooms. And in robberies, they perpetrators typically don't start shooting people the moment they walk in the door (killing someone in the course of an armed robbery is an automatic first-degree murder charge for everyone involved). Whatever useful lesson about tunnel vision might be contained in this segment is drowned out by the overwhelming impression that the real reason this variable was introduced was to cause the one student who was most likely to perform effectively--in spite of the stacked deck--to also fail.

Like our other students, Jason makes mistakes, failing to take cover. Though he hits the intruder, it's not before he takes a hit in the chest.

Emphasis mine.
Slanted debriefings
Note the students are debriefed immediately after they've been pwned, and in a condition of shock and embarrassment; and, crucially, before they've had a chance to realize that the game was fixed.

INTERVIEWER: Was it realistic?
DANIELLE: It was very realistic, yeah. My heart's still pounding.

How would she know? Given the frequency of incidents in which a professional police firearms instructor goes on a shooting spree and unerringly homes in on the one person in the room with a firearm (i.e. never), ignoring all the other potential victims, I wouldn't call this "realistic." A game of paintball gets my heart pounding, but that doesn't make it a realistic simulation of small unit combat.
Emphasizing the test subjects' "failure to take cover"
Cover is anything that will stop incoming fire, and the students don't have any available; that paneling at the front may stop a Simunition FX round, but it won't stop a 9mm. At best the students have concealment, but if you can't hide yourself completely, it's useless, and it would be a mistake to rely on it. It would be an even greater mistake to compromise your effectiveness trying to stay behind a piece of paneling that isn't going to protect you from real bullets.
(Somehow, I have a sneaking suspicion that if any of the test subjects had made effective use of concealment, the shooter would have emptied his mag at the paneling and the test subject would have been declared "dead" because real bullets would have penetrated it. Heads, I win; tails, you lose.)
Looking at the video, moreover, it looks to me like the tendency of the test subjects to stand is the effect of their ill-fitted holsters; they need to stand to even be able to "clear leather."
Biased statements about training.

SAWYER: And you should know that our basic course is already more hands-on training than almost half the states in the country require to carry a concealed weapon.

Implication: a large number--possibly a majority--of CCWers have next to no training in the use of the weapons they carry. However, in actual fact, the amount of training required to get a CCW permit is not a reflection of much training a permit holder chooses to get. There are firearms training instructors all over the U.S. from the big names like Massad Ayoob's Lethal Force Institute, Gunsite, Thunder Ranch, and the Firearms Academy of Seattle, to current and former LEOs running training courses at every gun shop with an indoor range. There are two within half an hour's drive from my house. The fact that they stay in business is a good indication that somebody is getting more training than the law requires.
Oh, the kicker? The big schools typically require you to have a CCW permit before they let you take a class (certainly their more advanced classes). Why? Because it shows you've undergone a federal background check, don't have any felony convictions, and the FBI has your fingerprints. In other words, it's as good a guarantee as they can get that they're not providing training to career criminals.

POLICE INSTRUCTOR: Even police officers, through extensive training--if you don't continue with your training, ongoing training, it's a perishable skill. You'll lose it.
SAWYER: How long before you're going to lose it, even at your level of training?
INSTRUCTOR: If you go for a month to two months without training, you'll lose it.

Given that the national norm for a patrol officer consists of the training necessary to pass semiannual requalification, this would imply that a large number of American patrol officers and detectives are going about their duties with, in effect, no firearm skills for at least eight months of every year.
And how much training do we think the shooter will have, huh? Almost vvery mass shooting in recent years took place in an environment where nobody was able to return fire. Why should the typical spree shooter (as opposed to a police firearms instructor) keep his shit together when someone starts shooting back?
Overplaying the shooter's performance; underplaying the students'.
A persistent feature is the evaluation of the test subjects' performance only in terms of averting harm to themselves by use of the firearm without looking at the benefit to others present. Time after time, when the shooter homes in on the test subject, he ignores the rest of the class, allowing the majority of them manage to escape unharmed. Even if (and that's a big "if") the only effect a CCWing student has is to make himself a target and draw the shooter's fire, if in doing so he facilitates his classmates' escape, that's a net benefit.
Also, the effect of students' hits is downplayed; for example, the leg wound inflicted by Danielle would at the very least slow the shooter down, hampering his ability to rack up a body count before police arrived. At best, the shot might sever his femoral artery, which would really slow him down.
Unlike with Danielle and Ashley, no attention is given the location of Jason's hits on the shooter. Given the tendentiousness of the segment, I'm guessing that means they were in a location likely to stop the shooter. Okay, armed student takes two shots in the torso with likely incapacitating results, but if he's stopped the shooter, he's just saved a lot of people's lives, even if it is at the cost of his own.
It's emphasized that four of five of Ashley's shots don't hit the shooter. Not pointed out is that of the ten rounds the professional police instructor fired, four also went wide.

And while Ashley was firing at the intruder, she took six shots to the center of her body, including one to her abdomen.

Actually, I make it two shots to the center of mass; two more hit her abdomen (not guaranteed to incapacitate immediately), and the other two, well... they were grazes at worst, and one of them looked suspiciously like the Simunition bullet had snagged her oversize t-shirt and not impacted on her body.

I've belabored the point long enough, so I'll summarize: this piece was biased and tendentious, and was clearly made with the object to "show" that handguns are not an effective means of self-defense in spree shootings, even if the producers had to thoroughly stack the deck in the shooter's favor to achieve footage to illustrate that point. There were some useful bits of information hidden in the dross, but nothing you wouldn't get from a decent firearms training DVD, like the ones I have by Rob Pincus.

Parting shot: in part 1, check out Diane Sawyer at 6:13. She's waving the training weapon about with her finger on the trigger; I'd say she's violating at least three of Jeff Cooper's safety rules there, possibly four. Call me strange, but when somebody that incompetent with firearms tells me they're of no real use, I'm inclined to be skeptical, to put it mildly.