A man stabbed six people to death at a busy Sydney shopping center Saturday before he was fatally shot, police said, with hundreds fleeing the chaotic scene, many weeping as they carried their children. Eight people, including a 9-month-old, were injured.

New South Wales police said they believed a 40-year-old man was responsible for the Saturday afternoon attack at the Westfield Shopping Centre in Bondi Junction, in the city’s eastern suburbs and not far from the world-famous Bondi Beach. They said they were not able to name him until a formal identification had taken place but that they weren’t treating the attack as terrorism-related.

The man was shot dead by a police inspector after he turned and raised a knife, New South Wales Assistant Police Commissioner Anthony Cooke told reporters.

  • Voroxpete@sh.itjust.works
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    8
    ·
    7 months ago

    My wife is a reg-force infanteer. At the kind of distances you’re firing at inside of a shopping mall she could comfortably dump a ten round burst into a person’s torso and not miss a shot. Even an untrained shooter could easily land a lot of lethal hits if they were firing into a crowd. And yes, automatic fire is absolutely used in urban combat; at close ranges it is very easy to control a fully automatic weapon sufficiently for that. The standard strategy is to aim for the navel and let your fire carry up the torso; it’s known as “zippering”. When intentionally controlled by the shooter these weapons do not jump around anything like the way you’ve seen in video games.

    Also, generally full auto is not that great for suppressing fire, unless you’re talking about a machine gun. With an assault rifle you’re better off maintaining steady suppression in semi-auto. It’s not so much the volume of fire that keeps a target’s head down as it is the consistency. Dumping a whole mag and then stopping to reload gives them plenty of time to set up and start laying hate on your position. There are exceptions like Aussie Peel Out, but they’re rare. For the part talking guns is the way it’s done.

    That’s without even getting into the fact that saying “automatic weapon” doesn’t necessarily mean “fully automatic” (hence why the word “fully” is usually in there; if there wasn’t any ambiguity, why is it necessary to specify?). It’s much more likely that the previous commenter was referring to any form of self-loading weapon.

      • yuri@pawb.social
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        5
        ·
        7 months ago

        They actually directly refuted most of what you said in the comment they replied to. If you wanna pretend that you suddenly don’t believe all the shit in your initial comment, that’s cool, but don’t act like y’all have been on the same side this whole time lmao