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2. CHL initially thought the "robbery" was a joke. It seems that disbelief or "this can't be happening to me" is a pretty common feature in violent assaults.
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Yes. You can be the fastest gun in the west, but your .8 second draw and fire that hits a bullseye is quickly negated by the 1, 2, 3, 5, 10 second delay or longer.
They talk about the Tueller drill's 21 foot rule, but that only applies to when the intended victim already knows he is going to be a victim and has already pre-decided how to respond to the staged threat of the drill.
Take this incident of a sort of Tueller drill in real life. Felony chase, officers out of their cars (and apparently with guns drawn as they issue commands, and the suspect leaps from his car, stumbles, and manages to travel 22 feet while making slashing and stabbing gestures, and manages to stab one officer in the face before officers started shooting...about 3 seconds of reaction time on the part of officers.
http://www.jconline.com/article/2011...ction-shooting
The Tueller Drill says 21 feet about about 1.5 seconds and that is for an officer to draw and fire into the charging suspect (simulated). Inside of 21 feet, and the suspect almost always wins, even when the suspect is a slow guy like me who doesn't cover 21 feet that quickly, I can still cause harm to the intended victim (I nearly always manage to get "shot" but usually at about the time I am in the process of 'stabbing' the intended victim).
This officers didn't have to draw their guns as they were already drawn as would be procedure for a felony stop. Ideally, the guy should never have gotten close to the officers, but unlike the Tueller drill parameters, the officers did not know when the guy exited his car that he would charge officers (probably thinking he would surrender, prone out, or try to run away). Even once they saw him moving fast, stumble, and turn towards them and producing the knife, they all still failed to fire on the suspect (this isn't what was expected and they were probably going through the whole "this can't really be happening" mental cycle before determining that it was and deciding to fire). Critical time was lost not in the ability of the officers to have their guns ready and to fire on the suspect, but in the mental processing of trying to come to grips with what was occurring and determining the appropriate response. I find this really interesting because in the Tueller Drill, the majority of the time taken up involves the draw sequence. Pulling the trigger takes a small fraction of a second. The whole mental aspects of realization of what is going on and determining the response that is present in real life situations isn't present in the Tueller Drill.
Given what happened here, maybe the Tueller Drill parameters aren't really appropriate to apply to real life situations. Depending on when you want to say the attack started, then the officers took 3-6 seconds to pull the trigger. Imagine how much longer it would have taken to fire if their guns were holstered.
As with the OP story, once it is determined that the situation really has gone south, critical and precious seconds are often (usually?) already gone.