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I just re-read this again the other night and was just impressed with how many important lessons there are in this. And the police photos of the crime scene and follow-up Q&A starting on pages 29 and 30 give you a real feel for what happened. Here are a few more thoughts I had regarding this story:
1. It illustrates the importance of information security in our daily lives. The get-together was targeted because the woman living upstairs informed her new ex-con boyfriend about it (and helped him buy the gun).
2. Both the attacker and the good guy were shot in the hands. Both the attacker and the good guy are extremely lucky to be alive. In the good guy's case, that innocuous chest wound that he didn't even notice missed the subclavian artery by the width of a hair according to doctors. The bad guy had loaded his snubby .38 with Speer Gold Dots; but this normally reliable load failed to expand out of the short barrel. Had they expanded even a little bit and hit the subclavian artery, the good guy would have bled out in 10-15 minutes (according to him the ambulance didn't arrive until 15 minutes).
On the attacker's side, he was hit with both shots from the .45. Once in the hands. The second shot appeared to be a dead center mass shot. If you'd have showed me that shot on a paper silhouette at the range, we'd have probably both laughed and had the "He isn't going anywhere soon!" discussion about how well we shot - except with the angle involved, the shot passed through the bad guy's clothes and never touched him.
Both men's injuries provide a good reminder of the limitations of firearms and great examples of how what look like solid hits in our 2D target practice, turn out to be much less effective than we imagined in the real 3D world.
3. Ultimately, one of the big benefits about this story is it shows how a lot of preconceived ideas about how our particular gunfight is going to go down may be wrong. In this one, the bad guy didn't flee at the first sign of a gun. He didn't immediately succumb to good center mass hits. The bad guy was carrying a quality revolved with Speer Gold Dots loaded and shot it empty in the fight.
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