"The
 bullet hit Matix just forward of his right ear, below the temple, shattered the cheek
 bone, hit and fractured the base of the cranium, and entered the right sinus cavity under
 the eye. This hit bruised the brain (but did not penetrate the cranium or brain) and Dr.
 Anderson believes it most probably knocked Matix instantly unconscious."



"Dr. Anderson’s report is
 the most thoroughly researched and documented account of the FBI-Miami shoot-out that has
 ever been made public."



http://www.firearmstactical.com/briefs7.htm
Just going off what I have.
 

This is something that I've often wondered about. Not so much in regard to this incident, but to armed encounters between LEOs and criminals in general.

One guy did pretty much quit right away. This fight was carried out primarily by one person.



ETA: Perhaps "quit" is the wrong word. "knocked out early" would be better.





 

+1, look at the Trooper Coates shooting, where the bad guy in this instance was able to take 5 rounds to the chest and return one last fatal shot.  Blackburn was just a big fat crazy person.
 

That part is the basular skull fracture.

He is mixing up the Norco CA Bank Robbery shootout (CA Highway Patrol) with the Miami FBI shootout.  CHP Officers were found dead with empty brass in their shirt pockets.  They were not "trained" to do this but it is what they did during training back then.  When they reloaded they dumped the fired cases into their hands and put them in their pockets so they would not have to bend down later and pick them up.  May have cost them their lives.  It just goes to prove that in a stressfull actual shooting situation you fall back to your training and practice.

Train like you fight and fight like you train.

So if these guys kept fighting out of sheer will and determination, can we apply that mindset to self-defense?

Can your mind convince your body, "You've taken 3 rounds to the chest, and you've got a punctured lung, you've got 2 minutes before you lose consciousness, get up and kill this motherfucker before he gets your family!" ?

Dammit just agree with me he was "knocked out"    





Anyways, people are able to bounce back from some pretty wicked wounds.  My buddy survived internal decapitation and is up walking and living a semi normal life.  
Matix was able to regain enough to get to the other car, I wonder if given little more time, he could have gotten back in the fight?






 

This

Maybe?





The amount of chemical soup your brain shits in situations like that is AMAZING.  There are a TON of sub-concious actions and thoughts going before your conscious brain even decides to let you think "What should I do?"?
You can train, and train, and train, to get your body to the point where everything is nearly instinctive, then you still just have to rely on you having trained hard enough, that your brain allows you to use it.  





(I mean that all in a neutral way).



 

Don't bring a pistol to a rifle fight is the lesson.   The PD's in my area now all have carbines in the trunk and it's good that they do because they won't be outgunned except against a tank.  It's a shame that they had to learn the hard way but they learned.

I think the perp's backgrounds could have some bearing on their mindset during the fight, but really the key here is that for whatever reason, they wouldn't quit.  Adrenalin is a hell of a drug.

Yes,the problem is training this into people who are not naturally predisposed to it (MOST are not).  Lots of time and effort goes into training Infantrymen,Marines,and street cops to be able to get aggressive and carry the fight to bad guys.  Even then some (most) don't really get it.  I would imagine it would be harder to prorgam the accountant or UPS driver who is not surrounded by an environment that promotes violence daily to do it.  Not sure you want to......

Like Runcible said,people who are really good at violence generally aren't good at much else.

Yeah, my bad.  I'm short on sleep and long on flu right now, 5000 miles away from home, and the bed I have sucks gluteal fold warts.

Training is what the Miami shootout was about, and we have heard very little detail on it for all the parties involved.

People who have been conditioned to live in physically abusive training regimens and succeed will usually excel when things go south.  The same goes for the street gangs who "jump" each other in at young ages, with extreme physical violence, while students of McDojo martial arts practice in sanitized, organized training sessions that very seldom resemble violence.

herp-derp



 

Most PDs did not learn this lesson after Miami. It would take another decade for them to learn it from North Hollywood Shootout.





 

Listen to the old guy, he knows of what he speaks...

 

Pellet wounds to the feet rarely stop gunfights.

Did the official FBI reenactment of the firefight ever become available to the general "non-LEO" public?

eta: Here's the FBI's records in PDF on the firefight

In this case, would rifles in the trunk even made for a difference in the outcome?

Yes.  Lots of people die from survivable wounds or situations because that's what they think is supposed to happen.

 

I guess if they had been able to get to them.
IIRC one agent had a shotgun in his backseat, but he couldn't get to it because of the incoming fire.

Seeking an equipment solution to a training/mind set problem is what we always seem to do.
Military/police/ or whatever.

Until you see their brains outside their skull, the fight is still on.

In the trunk, no.  Because one of the other things to come from this incident is a lesson about deploying equipment.  At least two of the FBI agents that were riding solo had a shotgun in the car.  However, the shooting started so quickly that neither was able to deploy the shotgun.  The only agent who deployed a shotgun was Mireles, who was riding with another agent.  Other agents left body armor in the car because they couldn't grab it quickly enough.

The Answer to this is YES, I had a friend who taught that after he survived the encounter that eventually killed him.
He took hits to the chest that severed his spine, as he lay there bleeding out and unable to do more than orient his pistol upward from the waist.
the shooter approached to execute him (finish the job) and he fired a single shot upward through that man, and the guy fell on top of him dead.
He used to travel around doing motivational speaking after that incident, one of the rounds that put him in the wheel chair was not removable so they left it there.
it migrated around somehow and killed him several years later. He spoke on Mindset and Surviving deadly encounters.
If you are shot at you are not hit
if you are hit you are not dead
if you are dead you don't know it.

I fired honors at my friends funeral at the personal request of his wife. I was the guard captain that day.


The Bottom line is that you DO NOT QUIT EVER....

I attended a federal LE training course where Agent Ed Mirales was a guest lecturer for a full day.  He covered the Miami shoot out in detail and used portions of the FBI investigation into the shooting to reconstruct what happened at the shooting.  He's a humble guy who will tell you he is lucky to have lived that day.  One thing to remember was that the way they contacted Platt and Maddox was not what they anticipated and Platt and Maddox executed the offense in the contact with the agents being on the defense.  The agents had developed Platt and Maddox as suspects and started conducting what they believed would be a surveillance of the suspects and maybe observe them commit a robbery and confront them.  They didnt anticipate that Platt and Maddox would make the surveillance and allow the agents to follow them until Platt and Maddox were ready to shoot it out with the agents.

probably had as much to do with the outcome as anything.....

I think MadCap72 makes a good point about more effective weapon and ammo changing the outcome. Intestinal fortitude doesn't matter if bullet hits your spine or shreds your heart. There is limit on how much the body can take before it can't function. The job of ammo and weapons is to get you past that limit as fast as possible.

Also LrrpF52 is definitely onto something here. Their military backgrounds decided a lot of what happened. The weapons they chose, how they used them, the tactics and mindset. A big lesson the military teaches is you don't stop just because it hurts a little. They want you to keep going even though it hurts and not stop until your body physically quits on you. You can see the influence of their training with  Platt's "closing with and destroying the enemy".

In this and in other similar incidents you can see that when law enforcement goes up against something that is way outside the norm they often pay a big price. Most criminals who fight are fighting because they want to get away not because they want to fight the cops. And the ones that do want to fight are often nuts and don't have the skills or weapons, strength etc. to do it well enough. When law enforcement runs into someone who wants to fight, has the skills to fight, and has the tools to fight, they are in for a bad day. If their opponent knows they are in for a fight today and the cops don't, then they are in for a really bad day.

There is a reason people always talk about tools and equipment when something like this happens. It's easy enough to buy a bigger hammer. When it comes to confronting people like Platt and Mattix it isn't so simple. The tactics that the military teaches may not be applicable to a civilian law enforcement setting. Suppressive fire is great on a foreign battleground but no one wants people doing that in their neighborhood. Cops aren't supposed to inflict enemy casualties or take ground the way soldiers do it is a way of thinking that works for soldiers but could be a disaster for police. Law enforcement naturally bases their tactics against the people they usually confront. The junkie robbing a convenience store with a .25 that may or may not be loaded. Taking cover behind your vehicle and calling for backup is a good idea in that situation. You don't want to close with this guy and shoot it out because that brings all sorts of liability and you are hoping he will just give up and fight it out in court. If you run into someone like Platt those same tactics can get you killed.

Runcible brought up a good point about the sort of people you have to worry about, "mean and violent". It reminds me of a report the FBI came out with a while ago. They found that the average cop killer spent more time practicing with their weapon than the officer's that they killed. The bad guys who actually killed a cop were people that had practiced drawing and shooting their weapons. Some one who had actually planned this enough to actually go out and practice. Not the sideways shooting idiots I would have expected. There are bad guys out their who train and want to do this, same as their are good guys who train and sort of want to use that training.

Agent Mirales stated as a result of this incident part of what happened is a result of "luck".  Good luck, bad luck.  The agent that was the best shot lost his glasses.  One of the agents lost his gun when his vehicle was involved in a collision.  Platt and Maddox should have been incapacitated from the number of shots they had taken, they just did not realize that at the time.  Mirales said that he has spoke to people who refuse to believe that luck plays any role in situations like this, attributing the outcome to factors of skill and performance.  But Mirales says luck (or "time" and "chance" as he refers to it for those that dont  believe in luck) came into play several times.  When Agent Mirales was shot, he had just raised his shot gun to avoid shooting an agent in front of him while Mirales was moving.  He took a 223 round to the left forearm.  If you see a picture of Mirales back then, he was pretty huge and muscular as he lifted weights alot.  He is sure that the act of raising his shotgun, bringing his left forearm up by his chest and the fact that he had bone and muscle mass where that 223 round hit, saved him from worse injury.  He described going into light shock after being shot and it taking a few moments to kick in that he was shot, seeing his arm and knowing it was not good, but ultimately realizing he had been shot and his friends were being hurt made him very focused.   He also realized after the shooting that he probably came very close to being shot by the responding officers.  This was Miami in the 80's during the cocaine hey day.  Responding officers saw a large, muscular, hispanic male pointing a handgun at an FBI car (Maddox and Platt got into one of the FBI sedans to try to drive away) and shooting 2 white males.  Time and chance.

If you mean the VHS tape with Agent interviews, I never saw it on any public place, though it made the rounds. I think it was at most FOUO. I think the biggest problem was it was pre-Internet and few folks knew of it and since it was VHS it was not easy to share as things are now.



 

Watching the video again tonight and looking at the autopsy photo, the 9mm went through the arm first, then got stuck in the lung, which was ultimately a mortal wound.

9mm or not, that's a lot of meat to shoot through with a handgun!

There are interviews with the Agents? Dang it, I want to see it even more now...

As far as I know it is FOUO, but figured it would of gotten out to the general public by now.
But the reason you give is a pretty common sense reason it wasn't.

I would like to read more about how these guys got weapons from people. It was written that they would haunt shooting areas and kill people to obtain guns. Has there been a comprehensive list of possible victims/crimes related to these two men?

Went to "Street Survival" years ago. (Yeah, I'm that old.)

Yup. pre-internet VHS. Technology can be the reason. Besides, the video linked here is almost correct from what I hear.

Very interesting information. I remember sitting through classes based on this incident in the early 1990's when I started in Law Enforcment. That was a wake up call for sure in LEO circles about what happens if dealing with trained motivated suspects.

I believe it's called "Firefight."  I was looking for it online a year or so ago and found referernces to it being shown at a firearms instructor's conference sometime that year. Evidently there was a copy available on the net for conference participants to download but it was removed after the conference. So, it does exist in digital form and someone out there has to have a copy.

I've thought of making a FOIA request for it but I'm not 100% sure of the process.

Found the FBI official video on youtube I think with the agents involved talking about it.  Very interesting
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WlSCE88UhyA

Well, hell. That looks like the one!
Just uploaded a couple of weeks ago, too.

Thanks! I've been looking for that for decades!

While the outcome of the shooting may or may not have changed if the agents had been using "XYZ" caliber pistol... and the focus should most definately be "tactics", one shouldn't ignore the importance of carrying the most effective caliber/pistol combo possable.


Think about this..... there are literally hundreds of variables that can affect your chances of survival in a gunfight.  Your experience/training (not to mention your opponant's).... lighting, cover, weather..... dumb luck.   And you really can't control any of them, except one.   What "tool" you bring to the job.

Thanks for posting this.....I remember seeing it years ago...

Yep.

Yeah, except that's counter to ... well, everything written and learned about the incident. Ammunition was the failure in this case, and is the reason the FBI created their ammunition testing protocols.

Tag to download at home later.



Also, there was a podcast interview with a Chicago PD veteran involved in some ungodly number of shootings. It's long, but has some INVALUABLE information. Including the story of him and his partner unloading a j-frame, a .44 magnum and a .357 magnum (IIRC) into a bad guy it it took 10 days for the guy to eventually die in the hospital.  It was posted here a year or two back.

There Re 6 large. Freedom of Information Act.  Reports available on the FBI website. They have a lot of redacted sections but are a good read. They Include a complete inventory of all cars in the fight with an ammo and gun list.

The bad guys were using crap Chinese .223 ammo  and #6 shot. Things would have been worse for the good guy's if they had made different choices.

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The .38 round got the job done. How much more dead that dead do you want?

BTW, the only .40 caliber rounds available then were the 10mm and the .38-40 WCF.