{"id":3672,"date":"2016-04-11T10:07:18","date_gmt":"2016-04-11T14:07:18","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/backwoodshome.com\/blogs\/MassadAyoob\/?p=3672"},"modified":"2016-04-11T10:07:18","modified_gmt":"2016-04-11T14:07:18","slug":"a-sad-and-meaningful-anniversary","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.backwoodshome.com\/blogs\/MassadAyoob\/a-sad-and-meaningful-anniversary\/","title":{"rendered":"A SAD AND MEANINGFUL ANNIVERSARY"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Thirty years ago today \u2013 April 11, 1986 \u2013 what may have been the most studied gunfight of the Twentieth Century took place in Dade County, Florida. Eight FBI agents on a rolling stakeout engaged two well-armed robbery\/murder suspects. Circumstances allowed the bad guys to get the first move, and minutes later, both perpetrators were dead\u2026but so were Special Agents Ben Grogan and Jerry Dove. Ed Mireles, John Hanlon, and Supervisory Special Agent Gordon McNeill suffered wounds that would impair them for life, and Special Agents Gilbert Orrantia and Richard Manauzzi sustained wounds from which they would recover.<\/p>\n<p>The lessons learned from this would profoundly change law enforcement training and weaponry, and to some extent, that of law-abiding armed citizens. For the 25<sup>th<\/sup> anniversary of the event I did an interview with survivor John Hanlon, still downloadable from the <a href=\"http:\/\/proarmspodcast.com\/065-john-hanlon-remembers\/\" target=\"_blank\">ProArms Podcast<\/a>.\u00a0 A few short weeks after the shootout, I was teaching at the Metro-Dade Police Academy and my old friend Dr. Joe Davis, the legendary chief medical examiner of Dade County, was kind enough to come over and give us all a full insider briefing. As the years went on I was able to interview some of the survivors. My take on it, based on that research, can be found in the \u201cAyoob Files\u201d archives at <a href=\"http:\/\/www.americanhandgunner.com\" target=\"_blank\">www.americanhandgunner.com<\/a>.<\/p>\n<p>Some of the lessons:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>The killer who shot first had a Ruger Mini-14 .223 rifle, which proved to be a terribly efficient force multiplier. He used this gun to inflict every serious wound suffered by the good guys. This incident, probably more than any other, gave impetus to make the .223 patrol rifle the almost universal standard issue for police patrol that it is today. Only two of the agents even had a shotgun, and only one was able to deploy it.<\/li>\n<li>At that time, only the agents assigned to FBI SWAT had semiautomatic pistols; the remainder were armed with revolvers. Two of the good guys, McNeill and Hanlon, were permanently injured while they were hopelessly trying to reload their empty revolvers after having sustained wounds to their gun hands or arms. By the early 1990s, most American police had switched to higher capacity, faster-reloading service pistols from the traditional service revolver.<\/li>\n<li>Early in the fight, a bullet from Dove\u2019s 9mm pistol pierced the opposing rifleman\u2019s arm and into his chest, slicing an artery and inflicting a \u201cfatal, but not immediately neutralizing\u201d hit when it stopped short of his heart. It was after that, that he inflicted most of the deadly damage. FBI subsequently adopted a standard requirement that their handgun ammo penetrate a minimum of 12\u201d into muscle tissue-simulating ballistic gelatin, a standard most law enforcement and many lawfully armed citizens subsequently adopted.<\/li>\n<li>Ben Grogan, said to be the best shot in the approximately 200-person Miami FBI office, would likely have been voted \u201cmost likely to dominate the gunfight.\u201d Unfortunately, he was extremely myopic and lost his glasses in the car-ramming crash that preceded the shootout, and this undoubtedly hampered his performance. He died at the scene. Prior to that, this writer had occasionally shot with uncorrected vision; for the last 30 years, I\u2019ve made a point of shooting at least one qualification course a year that way.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>There is much more to it, of course, but my space here is limited. Suffice to say that this is a day to remember the sacrifices of the heroes who ultimately won that terrible fight, but prevailed at a terrible cost. May those no longer with us rest in peace, and may the survivors remember that they and their brave colleagues did not suffer in vain that awful Friday morning thirty years ago. We will never know how many lives have been saved in the three decades since because of the lessons that emerged from this incident.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Thirty years ago today \u2013 April 11, 1986 \u2013 what may have been the most studied gunfight of the Twentieth Century took place in Dade County, Florida. Eight FBI agents on a rolling stakeout engaged two well-armed robbery\/murder suspects. Circumstances allowed the bad guys to get the first move, and minutes later, both perpetrators were [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":9,"featured_media":6428,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[14],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-3672","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-training"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.backwoodshome.com\/blogs\/MassadAyoob\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3672","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.backwoodshome.com\/blogs\/MassadAyoob\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.backwoodshome.com\/blogs\/MassadAyoob\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.backwoodshome.com\/blogs\/MassadAyoob\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/9"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.backwoodshome.com\/blogs\/MassadAyoob\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3672"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.backwoodshome.com\/blogs\/MassadAyoob\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3672\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.backwoodshome.com\/blogs\/MassadAyoob\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/6428"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.backwoodshome.com\/blogs\/MassadAyoob\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3672"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.backwoodshome.com\/blogs\/MassadAyoob\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3672"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.backwoodshome.com\/blogs\/MassadAyoob\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3672"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}