Gun misfires at Ft. Worth McDonald's

[JALLEN]

On the news tonight, the "shooter" says that his gun didn't malfunction, "it just wasn't cocked." and the one of the victims says that the "shooter" pulled the trigger five times because he heard the clicks.

If it wasn't cocked, one has to wonder how it fired outside, and if it was a semi-auto, which the videos show, one has to wonder what all the clicking was, do Glocks do that? Or maybe it was a DA semi-auto.

I find the victims statement a little hard to buy into. Remember, one of the victims interviewed at the Navy Yard shooting claimed to have seen the shooter carrying an AR15. Of course we know from the videos that it was a shotgun.
Given how often "eyewitness" accounts are proven to be grossly inaccurate, it's amazing that such testimony is weighted so heavily in trials.
I've heard of studies where a group of people were shown a video clip and then asked to write down their version of what happened. Another group was then asked to sort the papers putting like stories together. The end result was papers that the second group felt were completely unrelated to the others.

A Government Professor at an unnamed university was teaching "American Constitutional Development" in a lecture hall with upwards of 100 students, right after lunch TTh.

About midway through one lecture, the door opened, a man ran in, stuck a gun in the Professor's ribs, and demanded his wallet. The professor, cowering in fear, shakily got out his wallet and handed it over. The man ran out the door.

The professor told everyone to write down what (s)he had seen. When that was accomplished, he collected the descriptions and accounts, and went to the door and invited the gunman to come back in.

The "gun" the man had menaced the professor with was actually a banana. Nobody could imagine handing over a wallet to a man brandishing a banana, so it had to be a gun, right?

Descriptions of the gunman ran all over the place, tall medium height, blonde, brown, dark hair, long, short, blue jeans, slacks, collared shirt, t-shirt, a revolver, a SA, blue steel, chromed, large, small, etc. Completely worthless.

Trial lawyers love or hate eye witness testimony. They are the least reliable of all forms of evidence, generally. OTOH, "an eye-witness always ruins a good story" so if it's your eye-witness who ruins the other guy's story, well, OK!

[ELB]

WRT to eye witnesses: I remember making a statement to German police about an accident I had witnessed the day before. The officer on scene has asked me to go to the station the next day where another police officer and an official interpreter would take my statement. I had a mild emotional reaction to the accident (OH ?!$#!), namely that it very well could have been me that this lady ran into (instead she hit a delivery truck) and the car I was driving I had already sold (this was the very end of my military assignment).

They asked me pretty much everything you would expect, and I answered without a problem, until the investigator asked me what color her car was. I was absolutely stumped. I could see everything about the accident -- except the color of the car. It was bizarre image in my mind, a little BMW with no "color" to it. All I could tell him was it seemed to be dirty. He asked me several times, finally grinned and told me it was gray.

That and some other military experiences (not violent ones either, fairly benign situations) convinced me that eye witness accounts need a large shake of salt.

I believe there is a current theory or explanation that says we (our brains) pretty much function with models of the world, with only a few "actual" details that the brain deems significant being processed -- otherwise our brain would be overwhelmed with all the sights, sounds, touches, smells, etc coming in every moment. So we alot of what we "see" and remember is based on what we thought we should see.

Some years back, there was an off-duty police officer in Detroit (maybe Chicago) who was working security at a...(wait for it) McDonalds! that had a problem with robbers. A robber did come in one night, he and the cop exchanged gunfire. The officer had always told himself to keep fighting even if he was hit, so when the robber fired and the cop felt the hit in his abdomen and went down, he kept firing and put the robber down in return. When the cop went to check on how badly he was wounded...he could not find ANY wounds on his body. He had subconsciously wired himself to not only expect to keep fighting if wounded, but to expect to be hit, so strongly that he actually felt the strike and responded to it by falling down backwards, even though it was all in his mind.

So yeah, I could see how some having a gun pointed at them with the robber pulling the trigger could hear "clicks". Maybe we should be surprised he didn't hear "bangs."

[CHLLady]

ELB, that is a very fascinating story about the cops reaction and yours as well.

Thank you for sharing that.

[CHLLady]

Video update with an actual jail house interview.

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[TREKFAN]

Makes me wonder if he had a "nine" with the wrong ammo in it. A 9mm with .380s in it might fire pointed up, while the cartridge might sit far enough forward in the chamber with the gun horizontal, particularly if it had been carried pointed down, for the firing pin to fail to make contact.

I once in my naivety fired a 9mm round out of a .40s&w

It's okay, I once loaded my old ak-47 mag. with .223........... This of course was when I was new to guns and just bought the wrong box, as I bought a couple boxes of 7.62x39 that day. It happens to the best of us.