Ask Lemmy

Cats really are the ultimate hunters. Polar bears are terrifying but something about big cats is just so much worse

But that experience is what convinced me to always carry a gun.

I just posted a video in this thread of someone who was being stalked by a mountain lion and did scare it off -- and I'm sure would have done their best to kill it if it had kept going -- with a pistol.

But I don't know how much I'd want to rely on a pistol to kill something like a mountain lion if it actually intended to kill me. I mean, it might bleed to death if it gets shot, yeah, but unless a bullet from a pistol hits something like a brain or the spine or something, it just makes a relatively-small hole in the thing. That might ultimately kill it, have it bleed to death, but it's not necessarily going to make the thing promptly disabled or dead. If that mountain lion wants to, it can probably do things to you that are going to cause you to die before your pistol makes it dead.

I mean, okay, a mountain lion is a predator. It can't afford to go after things that are going to damage it -- it's gotta regularly kill things that don't do much damage to it for the math to work out for its survival; if it has to heal up after each meal, that's not workable. Maybe it'll avoid things if it decides that they're dangerous or capable of damaging it. But I don't know if I'd rely on a pistol as a hard guarantee that it'll be stopped.

There was a video I remember watching a while back by a doctor -- I think an anesthesiologist -- who was doing a presentation on gunshot wounds. I'll see if I can go dig it up, believe that it's on YouTube, but his point was that pistols really aren't all that effective in terms of immediate impact. A shotgun or a rifle is a different story -- they'll tear large holes in tissue, a lot more energy involved. Humans take pistols seriously as a threat in that they know that they can die from them, but that doesn't necessarily mean that it's because someone has aimed a pistol at them, pulls the trigger, and they promptly go down. At one point in the video, he -- slightly tongue-in-cheek -- is talking about a security camera recording of some guy robbing someone at a gas station. The robber gets shot a couple times, and he says "and so he just ignores it, then stands around for a while, then decides that he should run off".

pokes around on YouTube

Ah, here it is. Note that YouTube has it flagged "mature content", so these days, Google's going to force you to have an account and sign in to view it.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wXwPtP-KDNk

In the video in my other comment, the guy was apparently hunting elk, so I assume that he also had some kind of rifle with him, maybe just didn't have it accessible, did what he could with what he had. And, okay, sure, having a pistol sure beats having bare hands. But in general, I think that I'd be a lot happier with a rifle in that situation.

There's an infamous shootout some years back that the FBI had with a pair of men who had been robbing banks, murdering people and taking their vehicles. The FBI put a team of agents on it. They actually found the perpetrators pretty quickly, had a whole team with a number of FBI vehicles force the car to a stop. Thing is, both of the suspects were armed with long guns, and almost all of the FBI agents were only carrying pistols. One of the suspects was an ex-Army Ranger, special forces guy, carrying IIRC a Mini-14. Very early-on in the shootout, one of the FBI agents inflicted what would have been a fatal wound on the ex-Ranger, bullet lodged right next to his heart. They also shot him a number of other times over the course of the shootout. However, the suspect didn't stop fighting after being shot-- he just kept trying to kill the FBI agents, and managed to do in a bunch of them, and seriously wound all or virtually all of them, even though he was bleeding out. I remember watching a documentary where, years later, some TV interviewer talked to one of the FBI agents that survived, and he commented that until that point, what they'd expected was that criminals would just run away or something like that, not wait until an agent was reloading, rush them, and then try and kill them, and that the tactics they used at the time weren't really able to deal with that.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1986_FBI_Miami_shootout

The 1986 FBI Miami shootout occurred on April 11, 1986, in Miami-Dade County, Florida, U.S. (the specific area was incorporated as Pinecrest in 1996), when a small group of field agents for the FBI attempted to apprehend William Russell Matix and Michael Lee Platt, who were suspected of committing a series of violent crimes in and around the Miami metropolitan area.

Although they had partially surrounded the suspects after maneuvering them off a local road, the agents involved quickly found their firepower was outmatched by the weapons which Matix and Platt had in their vehicle. During the gun battle which ensued, Platt in particular was able to repeatedly return fire despite sustaining multiple hits. Two Special Agents died from their wounds, while five other agents were injured by gunfire. The shootout ended when both Matix and Platt were killed.

The incident is infamous as one of the most violent episodes in the history of the FBI and is often studied in law enforcement training. The scale of the shootout led to the introduction of more effective handguns, primarily switching from revolvers to semi-automatics, in the FBI and many police departments around the United States.

While it didn't make the FBI carry long guns everywhere -- that's still bulky and awkward -- IIRC it was the factor driving them to carry 10mm pistols instead of the much-more-common 9mm.

A movie with a fairly-accurate depiction of the shootout:

https://youtu.be/Vp1FoWi1nx0?t=4496

A Marine firearms instructor giving his analysis of what the FBI agents did wrong (which in significant part, consisted of not bringing long guns):

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iv8cByaVyNQ

What I'm getting at is this: pistols can certainly disable things or make them dead. But they tend not to do so immediately, and if you're concerned about what something with large teeth is going to do to you over the next, say, minute or few minutes, that may be less of a surefire form of protection than one might think.