Help me research RL police firearms accuracy rates, 80s run Options

[Kagetenshi]

"Suspect", please, unless they've been convicted.

~J

[Cthulhudreams]

To give an international perspective to the comments about 'gun culture' in the police force, let me offer up some commentary about australia.

In Australia the use of firearms by criminals is mostly confined to a few 'bad' suburbs, and other than that, it's not really an issue. Many cops would prefer not to carry their service pistol and instead move to a british model with no guns.

there has also been a demographics shift in the Australian population, which means for most cops (probably the majority especially at more junior levels), the only gun they have ever seen or shot with is their service pistol.

Completely different look at things for a police force that carries 9mm pistols like they do in new york!

unfortunately i don't have any information on accuracy, but I have every reason to believe its quite high from purely anecdotal evidence. Conversely because most cops are not shooting at people with guns, usually knives and other weapons, accuracy rates might be different in a real 'gunfight'

[Link]

or "person of interest", used hereabouts. "Suspect" may perhaps be seen as prejudicial.
POI = PC

[Kagetenshi]

Well, in the case of the man who at the time was suspected of having killed Deputy Vernon Matthew Williams in Florida, and who was shot at 110 times and hit 68 times (because "that's all the bullets we had", according to the Sheriff, always a man for respecting due process), we get something like the following:

Range: Short or Medium

Recoil: presumably fluctuating between 0 and 1

Other mods: Target Stationary for -1

We have a TN fluctuating between 3 and 4 or 4 and 5, with an overall hit rate of just under 62%. At Medium range it's not actually possible to get that close to 62% expected hit rate, but the closest I can get with the time I have is 54.17%, which means that the cops have Pistols 1 and spend one point of Combat Pool on their TN 4 shots.

Edit^2: further investigation suggests that they may actually have been using submachine guns, which changes the math drastically. I need to get back to work, though, so no modification here from me.

Edit: well, "suspect" does carry a negative connotation, but it's an implicit one that will only be transferred to any replacement term via the euphemism treadmill, so I'll stick with it. "Perp", however, is explicit: the perpetrator is the one who perpetrated, no question about it. I suppose there's a certain degree of vagueness as to whether criminality is implied, as in some cases it can be clear that someone performed an action despite it not being clear that they are criminally culpable, though I'd still prefer to leave that question to a judge in cases of police involvement.

~J

[Cthulhudreams]

Another interesting point about firearms accuracy. In WWII less than 1% of bullets fired actually hit anything. Lots less than 1% if I remember correctly i think it was less than 0.1% (It could very well have been 0.01% or 0.001%)

Which probably has more relevant to the shadowrun milleu, because lots of that would have been suppressive fire, which has been undermodelled in every RPG ever.

[kzt]

[Wounded Ronin]

[Cthulhudreams]

[Kagetenshi]

To put it in perspective, my longest-running character has acquired ~2,000 MMG rounds, 400 MMG tracer rounds, and 100 sporting rifle rounds over the course of the game, and has fired 363 of those rounds (and some grenades and ATGMs I'm not going to try to count). Granted, there's been some use of the bumper of the van as a weapon, and we've been in ammo-conservation mode for over a year out-of-character because of Bug City, but even with the occasional use of suppressive fire we're going through rounds far too slowly to hit 10k in any kind of reasonable timeframe.

I guess it makes up for ¥2-a-pop bullets.

Edit: for more perspective, consider that the ammo load of a Strato-9 is 500 rounds, or about 137 more than I've fired over the entire campaign.

~J

[Cthulhudreams]

And to cast THAT in perspective, a british operator of a Bren Gun in could expect to be carrying 700 rounds into battle between him and his fellow assistant, and another 300 rounds carried by everyone else in the squad, or in the APC.

But that is a different type of fighting than SR, I suppose the closest numbers would be vietnam. I dug around - small arms fire was a much bigger killer, and the US estimated it was spending several thousand rounds to actually hit someone - my source for that isn;t that great though.

Weapons are much more comparable to SR to boot.

[kzt]

IIRC, in Vietnam the amount of small arms ammo expended per kill weighted more than the average soldier. It's a huge number of rounds. Some of it was due to things like "Mad Minutes" and recon by fire, but a lot of it was due to the fact that people under great stress typically can't shoot worth a damn. Even at silly close range I've known people who got missed.

The main modifier that is missing from pretty much all RPG is some universal negative when your character would feel like he is in great danger of being killed or severely wounded right now. So it wouldn't apply when you ambush someone (because they are not shooting at you) or if you are a police sniper, but it sure would if you are shooting it out in an alley with some thug.

This would allow for the great shooting people do at the range, and the crappy shooting most people do on the two-way range.

Typically it seems the more times someone gets shot at the better they are at handling this, so there might possibly be some sort of mechanism to reduce it effects.

[Critias]

But that's because, in most games focused on combat, not many people feel like role playing the guy that pukes up his lunch at a near miss, or the guy with the sweaty palms and the shaking hands. Folks want to play the steely-eyed veteran, for whom a two-gun shootout is just another day at the office; Bobby De Niro from Heat, not Sean Bean.

Which is part of why it's so difficult to find "realism" in an RPG. So many of the things that make for wildly inaccurate fire IRL -- the physiological responses to danger, all the little quirks that go into good shooting, the weirdness of recoil, even the deeply ingrained idea that killing someone else is wrong (thought to be responsible for quite a few of those WWI and WWII misses) -- don't come up in most RPGs any more than they come up in most action flicks.

Even for folks that know that stuff exists and worry about it, it's not really fun stuff to deal with.

[Fortune]

[Cthulhudreams]

[Critias]

Just because some cops get their handguns mixed up, etc, doesn't really mean diddly squat about "Australian Police" taken as a body. Some people, even in law enforcement (or the military, for that matter!) just aren't gun guys! That doesn't mean most cops or soldiers are eager to turn theirs in, by a longshot.

And, please, let's move the conversation away from gun control laws and their supposed effect on violent crime. Else I'm liable to get myself banned again by replying.

[Cthulhudreams]

[nezumi]

[Cthulhudreams]

[Fortune]

[Fortune]

[Snow_Fox]

I don't think you can really worry about accuracy- it will vary from unit to unit. I think you have to be more aware of what the police are carrying. For example look at the first two terminator movies- in the first one, most police are carrying revolvers. By T-2 most had semi-auto's.

In the mid 80's the LAPD did not have long arms-the infamous case of bank robbers with body armorand AK's causing police to run into a gun shop to borrow weapons, by comparrison at the same time, when an NYPD officer standing guard at a witness' house was murdered, ther NYPD turned out in full body armor carrying Steyres.

You could also look for when leagally thingsl ike assault rifles dissapeared from the world where they could be legally bought.

The other big thing is communications- I mean I remember back then the fin antenna on the back of limos that had car phones (Remember the Crocadile Dundee bit?) now my cell phone can fit into a pocket so I don't even need a bag to carry it. when was the last time you saw a pay phone in the US? They were big then.

CD's and DVD's? Heck, is the VCR VHS or Beta?

[Kagetenshi]

Laserdisc.

~J

[Snow_Fox]

Atari and only real geeks, whom I would never even think of dating, knew what the hell to do with those big floppy discs. No PC's but you got time at the school lab.