When you pull out a gun to stop someone else with a gun, the goal is to achieve a result as quickly as possible. Everyone agrees on that. But where the confusion comes from is what results look like. Shooting someone in the arm or leg is really, really hard. Hell – shooting someone in the chest is hard, especially when both parties are moving and shooting at each other. But besides hard, the leg doesnt give us what we want.
Despite what we see in TV shows, legs shots and rounds to the extremities don’t typically incapacitate or even slow people down. Especially rounds fired from a handgun… we’re talking small holes punched into the body at relatively slow speeds. Pistol rounds don’t typically break bones, etc. They punch holes. And people with holes in their legs, historically, can still kill you (and anyone else near by). Many people who are shot dont even know about it until after the fact. Leg shots aren’t even less-lethal. They are one of the worst places to get shot… the problem is it takes several minutes to bleed out from that leg shot, and during that time you are still more than capable of inflicting damage. Tldr: leg shots are super difficult (and if you miss, you increase the odds of killing an innocent), don’t stop your threat, and if you pull them off, your threat still dies (just 10 minutes later).
Warning shots fall into a similar category… but are even worse. People dont tend to understand bullets very well. Every round fired from that gun goes somewhere. And as an armed professional, you are responsible for every round you fire. That warning shot can easily ricochet and kill a bystander. It can travel through several walls or vehicles and strike someone you can’t even see. Rounds fired into the air… must come down somewhere. And most importantly, what is the point? If a loud noise was enough to get your criminal to “give up”, something tells me pointing a gun at them and saying “show me your fucking hands!” will achieve a similar result. Warning shots put EVERYONE within a mile of the shooter at risk, and only serve to make noise.
The gun comes out when you need to (or anticipate needing to) incapacitate a threat within a fraction of a second in order to potentially save other lives. The fastest way to incapacitate a threat is to shoot them in the chest or head. Even rounds fired to the chest can be ineffective – as such many departments today teach aiming for the head as either a failure drill (rounds to the chest aren’t working, transition point of aim to the head), or as an initial target (if a round to the head is missed, transition to the larger target of the chest and keep firing until the target falls).
It’s a hard answer no one wants to hear, but it’s why all armed professionals are trained to shoot center-mass (at a minimum).
