You know the “reasonable, common sense” crowd’s litany, the one about guns only being good for one thing? Namely, killing, death and wanton destruction? Yeah, well, next time one of them throws that one at you at a cocktail party, here’s a handy comeback example to keep in your quiver. If Chris Willden hadn’t had his gun on his hip yesterday, there would probably be two or three dead kids in Logan, Utah…
Roger Anderson was headed for a day of skiing with three kiddies in tow. But he lost control of his car on a slippery, narrow bridge and his Honda went wheels-up into an icy river. According to msnbc.com, that’s when Willden, who had been driving by, jumped in to try to get them out.
Willden said he tried unsuccessfully to open windows and doors. He then used his firearm just as he had done in training for his current job as a bodyguard and Department of Defense contractor.
“(The driver) was panicked, doing everything he could to get in through the doors, but they wouldn’t budge,” said Willden, who had jumped into the water with his own father.
Willden, a former cop, pressed his gun against the submerged glass and blew out the windows. He used a pocket knife to cut away seat belts. And that allowed him, with the help of others who had stopped, to turn the car right side up and yank the three kids to safety. But only one of them was breathing.
He said the other two children were lifeless, the boy upside down in his car seat and the second girl floating in the front passenger compartment. Both were pulled from the vehicle.
Buzzy Mullahkel, of North Logan, told the Deseret News of Salt Lake City that the boy wasn’t breathing and didn’t have a pulse, but was revived when another passer-by performed CPR.
“Emotions started taking over when he started to breathe. Everybody started to cheer. Lots of tears and clapping,” said Mullahkel, a father of a 4-year-old.
Fortunately, it looks like all three children will recover.
Something you’ll never hear from MAIG, the VPC or the Bradys is that guns are tools. Tools for having fun at the range, putting some meat on the table, defending your home or protecting yourself and your family. Just like a hammer or a knife, the decision of when and how to use them is up to you. Unless you live in certain cities and states, of course.
Chris Willden happened to have his tools with him when that car went into the drink. We’re sure Roger Anderson’s mighty glad he did. And three kids in Utah are alive because of it. It doesn’t get much better than that.
Willden. (Two “L”s)
From his Company’s Facebook page:
I don’t leave home without 3 things.
1: Handgun
2: folding CRKT knife and
3: Surefire E2D flashlight.
2 of the three were used to save three lives that day!
Exactly. You never know when, you never know where.
Oh but do remember what works in Utah doesn’t work in New Jersey.
Great story! Wow.
Can someone tell me the correct method for breaking car windows with a handgun and still ensuring that bullets don’t hit passengers or passers by?
Don’t aim at the passenger.
wisdom!
excellent advice.
If you have to ask that question, then one of three things apply or possibly all:
1. you are trying to bait someone
2. you should not be allowed to carry a weapon
3. you need adult supervision to chew gum.
Darrel, LOL. Good one (or three)! Skyler, perhaps if you drove your car into a frozen creek and locked the doors and windows, we can conduct an experiment to find out?
Are you capable of doing anything without supervision?
Sorry, but I’m pretty sure the knife he used to cut the seatbelt would have broken that window just as well.
Not necessarily… pretty hard to break a window with a knife if it’s underwater…
The car came to rest upside-down in the water with the windows submerged. All movement through water has added resistance and Mr. Willden was correct in his split-second determination to use the BEST tool at his disposal to breech the window ASAP to rescue the drowning occupants.
It would be a different type of impact and breakage, wouldn’t it? What about his safety from the sharp glass if he had used his pocket knife instead on the window?
not likely auto glass is very hard to break by design and to drive a knife handle into a window hard enough to break the window is likely to hurt your hand if not outright fail.That is the reason the carbide glass breakers are shaped like a hammer.The best “other” way requires a carbide automatic center punch but no one carries a fully loaded tool box with them at all times
Didn’t mythbusters prove that it was extremely difficult to break auto glass? i think they used a key not a knife but still, mad props to Chris.
“Willden, a former cop, pressed his gun against the submerged glass and blew out the windows.”
To answer your question as to whether or not the the pocket knife would have worked, negative. Seeing that the glass was “submerged” indicates that the window was under water. Even if he could have smashed the window with the hilt of the knife on dry land, the water would have created too much resistance for him to strike the glass with sufficient force to break it. Don’t let the movies fool you.
As a volunteer firefighter I’ve broken many a car window and can tell you that they are much stronger than they look. We’ve had our automatic punch fail sometimes because we didn’t hit the window in the sweet spot. I honestly don’t think there is any way his knife could have done the job, especially with the windows submerged.
Unbelievable. The man saves the lives of little kids, and all you can do is criticize him for using a gun!? You need a good ……
As others have said, car windows are hard, and trying to break a window underwater even harder. That’d be my biggest fear if my car ever got submerged, not being able to kick hard enough to break a window and escape.
[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j8wjRx5vvHs&w=560&h=315
Have you ever tried doing autoglass with a pocket knife? It’s harder than it looks, especially in the water. Go to the junk yard and try it.
This man’s a hero, but if he had done the same thing in some of our COMMIE states he’d be sitting in jail for a few years.
+1 Jersey or NY and he would be looking at jail time.
As has been said, it is extremely difficult to impossible to pop auto glass under water with a knife. The only way to do it is to hit some relatively sharp metal object with another one. So, I suppose he could have pressed his closed knife frame to the window and started beating on it with his gun. However, that is a) A crap shoot, and b) Really stupid.
A pretty important metric is being overlooked, and that is TIME. A pistol pops out windows really fast. Other tools, save for in perfect environments, generally do not. Were I in a similar situation, I’d most certainly want someone being “aggressive enough fast enough” and shooting some glass.
Whether or not Our Hero thought of it at the time, it’s actually a fairly safe thing to do in such a situation as the bullet fragments aren’t going to move more than a few inches with anything like enough energy to hurt someone.
Even in an absolute worst case, one in a million solution, I’d rather risk taking a bullet than spending the remaining minute or two of my life with my lungs full of water.
Great article, thanks Dan!
I remember the 1st time I tried to break window glass to rescue a driver in a burning car. Two young, strong grown men kicking the window glass simultaneously were unable to even crack it.
As for the use of the pistol to break the glass: I suspect he aimed the bullet under water toward the roof of the car (which – as I understand the article – was “down” at that point). The water would slow the bullet rapidly.
I just finished reading “Unbroken: A World War II Story of Survival, Resilience, and Redemption” by Laura Hillenbrand. (ISBN: 1400064163) In the book it relates how Louis Zamperini was saved from being machine-gunned to death by a Japanese Zero by the fact that the rounds lost all lethal momentum in the first foot or two of sea water. I believe it’s safe to say that the rounds fired by a Japanese Zero were a little more powerful than whatever handgun Mr. Willden was using. He was actually taking very little risk in using it to break the window.
A knife would have been useless to break the window. Even a hammer may have been ineffective. Those things are really pretty hard to break.
Mythbusters did some testing (I think up to .50 cal, even) and if I remember correctly, no round retained any energy past three feet. Given that fact, and the fact that his backstop was likely the rooftop and the riverbed behind that, I agree that the risk to the passengers was minimal.
Since I live in SoCal and our freeways are a nightmare ,my daily carry knife has both a carbide glass breaker and a seat belt cutter , but I agree with everyone here that there’s no way it would work effectively underwater.
Auto glass is tough to break. I have had criminals hit the glass with a hammer and it indented but really did not break. This type of thing happened to a guy with a pickup truck along the Chief White Eye Trail in my area. Luckily, he got the window down and the water in the fast moving creek was not deep.
Pointy is key. You need to focus the impact on a tiny area to overcome the compressive strenth of the glass. However, just a slight tap along an edge will shatter tempered every time.
Drew – you tried that underwater in a river in the winter yet?
You might find it more difficult even when you just hit the edge of the glass.
Oh, I agree totally that underwater would be damn near impossible. I was referencing the hammer blow in his comment above.
Gotcha! I’d missed the reference.
Now we need TTAG to do some research — what handguns can be fired safely under water? Any, most, or just some? I know Glock sells spring cups (to military and law enforcement only, I think) that make them safe for underwater fire. Do all semi-autos need that? How do revolvers fare?
I know that the Beretta 92fs…I’m guessing most if not all quality modern semi-automatic handguns can function underwater. Revolvers would be interesting to see, however.
Any modern gun will fire under water. The only thing that would prevent it would be wet powder and sealed cartridges solve that problem.
What I want to know is, what handguns can be dry fired under water?
Center-fire caliber handguns, of course!
In other news, the Bradys and mikeb will be holding a candlelight vigil for the broken window, yet another victim of senseless gun violence.
[choking on my coffee while trying to laugh]
Actually, I think it’s a wonderful story. There was one last year too. A guy drove into a river and shot his way out.
But, you know how you guys are always telling me how few the child deaths are and how few the “accidental deaths” are, well what about these heroically-shooting-out-the-car-windows stories. Even fewer, I’d imagine.
So is it your contention that New Jersey style restrictions should be in place and that this man shouldn’t have had the gun? I’d love to see you try and explain your reasoning to the father of these children.
Lighten up, Ruffy. You can’t work backwards from the incident to the laws. Of course it was good this guy had a gun.
But, do I want to make it easy for EVERYBODY to have a gun just in case they drive the kids into a frozen river someday? No.
“Of course it was good this guy had a gun.”
Don’t you typically refer to people like him on your website as being ‘paranoid’? Which is it, paranoid or prepared?
It’s also been increasing common for us to be referred to as potential criminals.
it is better if we could post pictures of the kids he saved. kids and puppies melt hearts (or better yet, a picture of the kids holding a puppy). and those antis who will scream about gun usage will have a heard time arguing against this
I’m SO glad the local station (ksl.com) didn’t even bother to mention the DGU or the details of the heroics. Why have a positive story about guns when it can be avoided?
Nice job Mr. Willden. My family is very proud of you (and your Dad)…
RR
many years ago when I was in a rescue unit (1989) we had an expert show us with his issue 1911 and GI ball ammo a method for breaking auto tempered glass underwater by placing the top of the pistol slide flat along the glass that is the bullet not aimed at the glass but along it into the frame of the window the blast of the discharge and the incompressibility of the water creating the glass confetti but thinking on it right now I wonder if the slug hitting the frame is not causing an edge impact which has been stated will shatter any tempered glass
That is a worthwhile experiment to see which calibers and firearms have the ability to break glass that way. I also noticed that the firearms in question use a locked breech. I’m just curious if an straight blowback design such as a PPK or Makarov could safely fire underwater. Either way, I will also attest that autoglass is damned near indestructible as my I’ve destroyed my 3D Maglite just getting into one passenger side window before. Suggesting that a pocket knife could do this underwater is plain absurd.
People greatly underestimate the strength of the side and back auto glass windows. I was doing crane work at a location next to a auto salvage yard. I saw a worker cleaning up an area by throwing scrap metal items into a junk car. The back door window was fully up in its channel when the guy threw a brake rotor and hub “Frisbee” style at the window from a distance of about 10 feet. The rotor bounced off the window. The rotor was from a full sized vehicle and had to be over 15 pounds.
An earlier comment by Pyrotek85 said “being able to kick the glass out”. As already mentioned here, it does not work that way. When you are in a car that is submerged, the pressure of the water adds to the already strong glass. The TV news reporter Jessica Savitch found herself in this bad situation in 1983. When they pulled her body from the car the heals of her shoes were broken.
Hi everyone. I googled myself and found this little conversation. Thanks for all the cudos but I wasn’t the only one there. Ya, I was first in the water with dad. Ya, I used a tool I had on my belt to open a window that was completely underwater. Ya, I tried the doors and they wouldn’t open. I watch as Rodger tried to kick and hit one of the windows to break them. Did it work? Nope. My knife was a CRKT M16-12M (complete with our company logo on it) and I have carried it since Strategic was founded. The firearm, a Glock 23C. I tried to locate the bullet two days after by looking in the vehicle and no hole in the roof, door frame, seat cushions etc. No fragments ANYWHERE. I think someone upstairs kept it as a momento and hopefully he puts it in my folder to enter through the gate. Be safe and if anyone has any questions, feel free to contact me on our company Facebook page. Be safe everyone.