Experiment goals

As nearly everyone already knows there is an experiment in progress in southern California. I would like to share the design of the experiment and the questions I hope to answer.*

Why a new experiment was required:

After Columbine law enforcement had to reevaluate how they responded to this new situation. Their training was for a “hostage situation” and they handled it as such. Of course this was completely the wrong response. They didn’t even have a name for the type of event. It is now called “an active shooter” and the tactics and training have been modified to respond in a much better fashion. The D.C. snipers comes close but those two were of below average intelligence and had only a moderate amount of military training between the two of them, no law enforcement training, no knowledge of how law enforcement would respond, attacked random private citizens, and attempted to extort money which resulted in important clues being left behind.

This too will be something almost completely new to the police. No known data can be confidently extrapolated to this new situation.

Subject selection:

I wanted the subject to be a black lesbian with a strong affinity for leftist politicians. This would deflect the knee jerk “angry right-wing white male” response from the gun hostile media and politicians. But finding one in possession of a variety of firearms, the skills to use them, plus a law enforcement and military background proved too difficult on the tight schedule. The substitution of a black male was considered adequate.

Experiment location:

The location of the experiment was chosen as California because of the large geographical area with repressive guns laws. A multi-jurisdictional response is expected to yield a more confused and less effective response by law enforcement. A minimal set of variables were desired in the initial experiment.

New York and New Jersey were also considered but were rejected for the following reasons:

  1. Smaller geographical area for the subject to take advantage of.
  2. The higher population density makes detection and reporting of movement by the public more likely.
  3. Higher population density increases the risk to innocent private citizens.
  4. If the experiment could have been run as original scheduled in May, when I have time after Boomershoot but before the hot summer months, NY and NJ still might have still have been given serious consideration but the frenzy of anti-gun legislation in December and January pushed the schedule ahead. The winter climate of NY and NJ this time of year would have put the subject at an disadvantage.

The Los Angles police department also is one of the largest, outside of New York City, in a repressive gun law environment. This gives us important data on the effectiveness of extensive hardware and well developed command and control.

The existence of the repressive gun laws was important to demonstrate that the laws are useless or at least any effect they have still leaves the subject with sufficient opportunities.

Plus my parents honeymooned in the Big Bear Lake area and I have always wanted to visit.

Questions to be answered:

  1. Just how much damage is likely by a relatively smart and sane, well-trained, well-armed individual?
  2. How do the police handle being the hunted instead of the hunters?
  3. Do the police have any training for this situation?
  4. Does law enforcement even have even have a name for this type of situation?
  5. What changes in training will result?
  6. With the police spending significant resources on one subject what are the effects in other areas in their jurisdiction?
  7. Does the general crime rate increase during the time the subject is active?
  8. Do the targeted law enforcement departments quit their jobs or otherwise decrease the effectiveness of the police force when subject to increased stress?
  9. Do the politicians and/or media advocate for new laws to prevent events from happening again?
  10. If new laws are advocated what are those laws?

Although further experiments will be required for confirmation, the data will be used to extrapolate the expected outcomes from a small team targeting a police force. Multiple team information is desired but it is not expected to accurately extrapolate from this one experiment.

Applicability to other situations:

I would caution other experimenters to not attempt drawing conclusions from this experiment as to the expected results if it were politicians, the media, a corporation, or other group instead of law enforcement being targeted. The dynamics, mindset, strategy, and tactics of being the target versus protecting a target are different and probably cannot be accurately accounted for without actually running the experiment.


*Yeah, right. If I had the mind control technology to do something like this from 1000 miles away with no contact with the subject I would a be a multi-gazillionaire. Furthermore the entire world would have a free-market economy with free-minds and the political discussions would be over who had the purest principles and which politicians best exemplified the principles expressed by Ayn Rand, Thomas Sowell, Milton Friedman, and Robert Higgs.

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17 thoughts on “Experiment goals

  1. “Yeah, right. If I had the mind control technology to do something like this from 1000 miles away with no contact with the subject I would a be a multi-gazillionaire.”
    I was thinking more in terms of the song, “money for nothing and chicks for free.”
    There are some lessons to be learned here, but I think for many on the left it will be the lesson learned by the hammer: Everything is a nail and you always need a bigger hammer.

    • By Dire Straits! I liked that song.

      “Chicks for free” aren’t nearly as interesting to me as they once would have been. I prefer a peer-to-peer relationship with stimulating conversation along with the sex.

      I’m not sure what lesson, if any, will be learned by the left. You could be correct. It would be easy to for them to conclude that “this proves we cannot allow private citizens to have guns! We must take them away NOW!!!”

      • I expect their lessons will be that the cops need MORE surveillance to track movements, so that people cannot evade them for so long, and mandate smart-guns so they can be disabled remotely by the police.

        • In short, they’ll conclude what any authoritarian will have concluded in advance– that they need total power, that the peons are incompetent and a drain on the system, etc…

          The basic premise in an indictment of humanity in general. We suck, and so therefore the very concept of liberty is a silly notion concocted by old, dead, white, misogynist, violent, racist fools at a time before the smart, reasonable people were born.

          Everything the authoritarian sees reinforces his mindset. This will not end well.

      • Just as there is no such thing as a free lunch, there is no such thing as a “free chick”. One way or another you’ll pay for it. What were the words I heard, that rang so true? “One day you wake up realizing you’re losing a war you didn’t know you were fighting.” It took me 20 years of marriage to even begin to understand that.

        Actually, that applies to our whole country. The principles are exactly the same, so this comment is fully apropos the OP.

        I’ll be glad to explain if you like, but it may strike close to home and piss off a lot of people who think they’re liberty-minded. I bet you can connect the dots well enough.

  2. I can imagine the morale effects on any organization when a bullet, just one, can come from anywhere or nowhere, at any time, regardless how attentive you are, how careful your security. Just one a day, and catching the shooter is between impractical and impossible. Could be anywhere up to a km. Going to cover every square meter? In thousands of locations. Every day. If you wear the uniform, or walk the talk, any day could be your last. How long would you keep going out and doing that?

    • Yeah, they do. But they also have air support, arty on call, and are surrounded by on-duty folks with belt-fed machine guns much of the time. And they are in an environment that cares much less for collateral damage. OTOH, the cops work their shift then go home to family for the night, and are effectively alone for many hours a week.

      • If a Marine shoots at a suspected terr and kills a goat farmer, he’s up on charges and flayed on national TV. Will we ever even learn which LAPD officer lit up two ladies delivering newspapers? And what, if any, consequences will result from that action?

        • This. Our military in an active combat zone has stricter rules of engagement, and more open discipline for violating those rules, than one of the largest police forces in the nation.

          What’s wrong with this picture?

    • Providing basic security at an OP in the field for long periods of time is also a squad sized task, at a minimum. That is what it takes to provide 24/7/365 security for one specific point.

      GIs don’t patrol alone or in pairs, and when they sleep they have overwatch, and since 1864 the families of most GIs have been in relatively secure rear areas.

      Requiring police to patrol in 10 man groups like an infantry squad and evaccing police families to a secure compound is obviously not sustainable for the long term.

  3. I suspect that gun rights folks all over the country are watching this with great interest. The situation definitely puts a score of the antis myths to the test:
    Only the police and military should have guns.
    Armed private citizens have no chance against the combined capabilities of police, state patrol, etc.
    The list goes on. The Feinsteins of the world need to watch this chaos, then multiply by what, 400 million?, if they enact registration or confiscation schemes.

  4. Another interesting though – Dorner published his list. Given the current temperament of the nation, one wonders how many politicians will want to “self list” by signing on to oppressive gun legislation as co-sponsors?

  5. Joe – Done any projections on change in experimental results from scaling it up? 10X, 100X, 1000X, 10000X, 100000X data would be interesting. Probably above 40X the experimental area would have to be expanded, but 10X – 20X would probably still fit within the geographic confines of the existing experiment.

    100000X or greater would, obviously, require a substantial increase in both experimental area and data collection methodology to estimate the experiment results. As you noted, such expansion of experimental area would induce variability due to atmospheric interference and other factors. And, at 100000X or greater the experiment may not be sustainable for sufficient time to perform a reliable estimate of experimental results. But, hey, that’s why we have petabyte databases and multi-core processors, right?

    • No. Not in the slightest. This experiment isn’t instrumented particularly well and extrapolation is further handicapped due to the extreme nonlinearities in the system.

  6. Pingback: Results Can Be Interpreted Different Ways | Random Nuclear Strikes

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