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Old June 6, 2005, 09:54 PM   #21
Double Naught Spy
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Join Date: January 8, 2001
Location: Forestburg, Montague Cnty, TX
Posts: 12,712
Right. OSS data are ONLY important when on paper. Actually, they provide a really interesting and frightening set of considerations for real life. The OSS is based on percentages. There is the assumption that the percentages are predictive in some manner. But as statisticians note, you can have a bad run where you get several instances where the expected result is not attained and such a problem can actually happen randomly (as far as the numbers and order of occurence are concerned). A lightbulb maker may have a 99.9% successful working bulb rate, but that won't mean that the maker will have 1 bulb in 1000 that doesn't work. He could have a run of 50000 that work fine and then have a complete bad batch of 50 in a row that fail.

If we are talking OSS percentages, you have no way of knowing if you will be in the 50,000 that work fine, or in the batch of 50.

Of course, the other problem of OSS data is that there are no real controls over other parameters other than the bullet make and model and whether or not the person was "stopped" with just one shot. Without other controls, you have no real way of predicting bullet performance for your particular situation since you don't know if the parameters of your situation correspond to those where OSS were successful or not. A couple of the repeated parameters for which there is no control in the statistics are shot placement and condition of the shootee.

No doubt a huge bias in the supposed statistics is that better shooting will produce better results more often. When the shooter is a poor shot, then several shots may be required to effect the stop and so those stats are not considered. In other words, OSS is most likely to happen when you manage to perform well as the shooter. From this, what is important to not that shooter performance is going to be just as relevant or more relevant than bullet performance.

At the other end of the scale, OSS have been reported in many cases where the shooter doesn't even manage to hit the opposition. In one case, an old lady heard a man breaking in at her front door and so she got her .25 auto and when the guy came in to her home, she shot at him and got the desired stop with one shot. The only problem is, she didn't hit him. She hit the door frame. She intended to hit him, but missed. And along those lines, OSSs have been attained with warning shots. In both these examples, it isn't the bullet or shooter performance that produced the stop. It was the report that generated fear of potentially being shot that produced the stop.
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