Avoid stupid... you know the rest

So there I was chatting it up with the gentleman who was selling me our new livestock. He threw in a sack o feed and bowls and assorted other goodies he no longer needed.

Seeing how he only lived ten miles from me, we played the "Do you know..." game.

In fact, there are several people we both knew.

It turned out that the seller was a firefighter, EMT and is "into" martial arts and weight-lifting.

So Barry (not his real name) insisted on telling me a story about one of his most recent martial arts experiences.

A traveling "Master" of their discipline had come to the dojo and given them a talk on "practical self-defense".

I am paraphrasing here, so cut me some slack

The Master said "Everybody gets it wrong because your beloved papa and grandpappy gave you bad information."

(Collective gasp from the audience)

"It is STUPID to wait for the person who is assaulting you to land the first punch."

At this point, the firefighter/EMT commented, "I made a lot of runs where the fight was over with one punch...the first and only one. Dude gets hit, falls back and knocks the back of his head on the curb, GAME OVER. Potentially fatal damage."

Back to the Master. "There is a fraction of a second when the person assaulting you has fully committed himself. His hands are balled into fists. He has thrown his striking hand back to wind up and throw a really hard punch. At that instant, if you step forward and hit him with a short, hard punch with your same-side hand (i.e. hit him with your left if he is drawing back to hit you with his right) it will happen so fast that nobody who is watching will really know who threw the first punch."

The ICE/Weaponized Vehicle event in Minnesota

This is what I think I saw on the video.

One ICE agent is engaging the driver through the driver's side window. 

A second ICE agent moved right-to-left (from the cameraman's/driver's perspective) in front of the vehicle.

The vehicle, which had been traveling in reverse, started moving forward.

The quality of the video is good enough to ascertain that the left, front wheel was "spinning" relative to the ground. It was also apparent from the perspective of the video that the driver was cranking her steering wheel to turn toward the right, away from the ICE agent at the driver's side window as she accelerated. 

Given reaction times and angles of view, the ICE agent who was in front of the vehicle would be unlikely to see the angle of the front tires. He would not know that the driver was cranking the steering wheel and was turning to the right and might have missed that agent.

• There is evidence that it was a "righteous shooting". The tires were clearly spinning as she accelerated with great vigor as the vehicle was pointed toward the ICE officer who was stationary and in front of the vehicle.
• There is evidence that she was not trying to hit the ICE agent in front of her, i.e. the front tires (which he probably could not see from his angle) turning to the right.

And this is why I don't go stupid places at stupid times with stupid people and do stupid things. People who do that sometimes get unlucky and die. Things happen fast. Adrenaline. Fog-of-war. Tunnel-vision.

To play a theme on what the Master was lecturing about to the students at the dojo, we do not live life in real-time. It is impossible. Due to scan-rates and the time it takes for our nerve impulses to travel to our brains, what we see as "reality" is at least 0.200 seconds old. It is history. Then our cognitive processes (FIFO through the stream of sensory data) and "quality checks" adds another 0.30 seconds. Sadly, when shit-is-going-down, the people who are in-the-soup do not have the luxury of slowing down the video to 25% speed and viewing all 5 viewing angles multiple times. They are acting on information that is half-a-second old.

Her demise was unfortunate. I suspect that she was hyper-focused on the agent who was at her car window and never saw the ICE agent who had moved in front of her vehicle while she was backing up. If so, the ultimate issue is that she was accelerating her vehicle forward with incomplete knowledge of what/who was in front of her.

When I shoot a gun, I need to be aware of what is downrange in a cone that is far greater than the +/- two minute-of-angle cone that my bullet might travel in. Fleshy targets influence bullets the way glass lenses bend light. Bullets ricochet off of the ground or branches they encounter.

At a minimum, the angle of the cone of risk is more like +/- 60 degrees with is approximately 2000 times greater than the "theoretical" cone.

I believe that drivers of a motor vehicles are also responsible for a generous cone-of risk to either side of them most likely path