Incident #1, 1983
Like many young cops off duty, Smith was casual about armament and had only a 2″ J-Frame .38 Special in his truck as he waited outside a strip mall for his brother, who was getting a haircut. An armed robber caught his attention by quickly exiting a nearby grocery store clutching a paper bag like a football. Smith saw a black & white patrol car approaching swiftly and silently, and so did the robber, who opened fire on the uniformed officer, who stopped and stepped out of the vehicle. The cop returned fire as he doubled over and went to the ground.
The gunman ran down an alley around a building to where his getaway car was parked. Smith grabbed the .38 and ran around the opposite side of the building to intercept the gunman where he thought he would appear. Unbeknownst to Smith, the gunman was in his getaway car alone; he had parked it out of sight on the other side of the building.
Smith fired at the man he thought he’d just seen shoot a cop, but none of his five bullets hit the mark, and the suspect escaped. Smith ran back to help the officer, who turned out to be unharmed; he had merely ducked and hit the ground when the perp shot at him and had fired at his antagonist until his service revolver jammed on the sixth round.
The cop reloaded his own revolver with one speedloader and handed another to Smith, who jumped into the patrol car with the uniformed officer to join the vehicle pursuit. However, the uniformed officer was carrying a larger caliber gun, and the rounds wouldn’t fit Smith’s .38 snub. He asked the cop to unlock the shotgun rack for him, but he couldn’t: It was a key-lock gun rack, and the key was on the key ring that was in the ignition. Smith couldn’t get a loaded gun in hand until the vehicle came to a stop, by which time they had lost the suspect, who, it turned out, had later broken into a private home and taken hostages before finally being captured.
Lessons: Now you know why, thereafter, Smith’s off-duty gun was the same full-size Colt 1911 .45 auto he carried on duty, backed up by a couple of spare magazines. The theory that a pocket snubby with five shots is enough because “I’m off duty” and “I just need a ‘get off me’ gun” is fallacious: None of us can predict a future gunfight. A short-range, hard-to-shoot gun with only five shots is a very limited resource.
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