Harlem Shootout Shoots Down “Stopping Power”

In his column Illegal Gun Ignites Senseless Bloody Shootout in Harlem, Michael Daly describes a scuffle between Luis Soto and Angel Alvarez wherein Alvarez wrested a revolver from Soto. And then . . . “Alvarez is said to have then fired at a uniformed cop who was hurrying toward the commotion. The cop fired at Alvarez, as did three plainclothes anti-crime cops who were coming from the other direction.” As opposed to a pro-crime cop? But seriously folks, according to Daly, Alvarez sustained 21 bullet wounds. A fact that’s strangely absent from the above Daily News graphic. Anyway, that’s a lot of holes in one person, sustained during a violent and confusing confrontation.

Clearly, the New York Daily’s Daley knows that there’s more here than meets the official police report. But he’s not prepared to consider any other possible explanation for the shootout other than . . . wait for it . . . illegal guns.

I can also tell you that the twists to this incident make it no less another example of the havoc wrought by illegal guns.

However many shots the cops fired, they would not have been carrying such firepower in the first place had so many bad guys not started carrying automatics.

A revolver can kill you just as dead, and the cops would not have fired at all had they not seen one.

The revolver, not at all coincidentally yet another illegal gun from the South, changed everything.

Were it not for that gun, there would not have been any blood on Lenox Ave. and everybody would have been lucky.

And if my grandmother had wheels I’d be a trolley car. But I’m a little confused about that “bad guys carrying automatics” bit. So automatics should be banned? Is Daley saying the cops wouldn’t have fired 46 bullets if the bad guys had revolvers?

One things for sure: that’s a hell of a lot of lead to send downrange—even at 3am. If we take Mr. Daly’s report as writ, Harlem residents should consider themselves lucky that Mr. Soto was the only innocent victim of New York’s finest’s 47-bullet fusillade.

Again, according to the report, 21 of those 46 bullets found their target. Discounting Mr. Soto’s bullet, that’s 25 misses. A “hit rate” of roughly 45 percent.

One wonders if the cops were all shooting standard-issue Glocks 19s. If so, did the long, hard “New York trigger” pull had a deleterious effect on their marksmanship? In any case, whether or not that’s bad or good shooting depends on the situation: distance, geography, Mr. Alvarez’s movements, etc. And it still doesn’t tell us if this incident was a bad or good shoot.

Meanwhile, is it really possible that a human being can sustain 21 bullet wounds (of any caliber) and not die? Apparently so. In theory, you could empty the Glock 19’s 19 9mm-bullet magazine into someone and they could live to tell the tale. Which also means one or two or five or eight rounds in situ could still leave them capable of continuing an attack.

In contrast, according to Daly, Mr. Soto was felled by a single “stray” bullet.

My takeaway, while shot placement is THE critical factor for stopping an attack, I’d rather be lucky than a crack shot (preferably both). Common sense suggests that the more bullets that hit the target, the better the chances that one of them will do the job. More bullets is better than bigger bullets.

As for this incident, I doubt that we’ll ever know the full truth. But that shouldn’t stop a jobbing journo from asking the right questions about police procedure, instead of pursuing some pig-headed anti-gun agenda.

Oh, the AP reports that Soto was hit by five bullets, not one. He may have been shot by a second gun (not his own) fired by Mr, Alvarez. Two cops were also hit by bullets (at least one by another officer). As well as three bystanders. And the gun used by Mr. Alvarez may not have been illegal. FWIW.