Shooting to wound

Shooting to wound refers to the practice of using a firearm to harm someone without killing them. This is a common and widely accepted practice in countries with extensive two- to three-year police training (e.g. Finland 3 years, Germany 130 weeks), but discouraged and frowned upon in countries that provide much shorter police training (e.g. USA 10 to 36 weeks), which doesn't provide time to train police officers for much more than self-preservation.[1][2][3][4][5]

Shooting to wound is controversial in such countries and it is claimed that the unpredictable nature of firearm wounds could result in the wound failing to incapacitate or missing the target, which presents a risk of unintended casualties. Limbs are one main area often targeted when shooting to wound. In countries with short police training, police organizations often point out that limbs are smaller and can be moved faster and more radically than the torso, so that the option of shooting to wound is generally viewed with skepticism by law enforcement in the United States, for example.[6][7]

This is however not a logical argument since police organizations in countries with much more extensive training specifically practice hitting the upper thighs since these move at most slightly more and often even less than the torso, which can be easily voluntarily moved to duck while running, for example. In Finland, for example, the police even purposely shot a terrorist in the leg to wound instead of kill him in 2017, and only four people were injured by a police bullet that year, but no one was killed.[8]

Despite extensive training in countries such as Finland, Norway, and Germany, police officers sometimes miss the thighs and hit the lower abdomen ("stomach"), but this is still much less dangerous than purposely aiming for the torso, which is illegal in these and many other countries except in extremely rare situations, for example in liberating hostages by a sniper, and even then only if extensive negotiations have failed and only if there is imminent danger of hostages being harmed. In addition, even in countries with extensive police training there is room for improvement, and people with severe psychological problems are regularly killed by the police in Germany, for example, because they still don't get enough training to deal with these cases in accordance with legislation and human rights.[9]