Sydney Siege

It seems that every time an event occurs that receives a massive amount of media attention and has multiple law enforcement agencies involved, all the interesting small arms in use come out of the woodwork and make themselves available to the viewers around the world. It’s a pity that there is usually an event where someone is killed that is apart of these times, such as when the Ferguson riots and in this case, the two innocent victims in the Sydney siege. These photos are a compilation of photos in the news depicting the New South Wales Tactical Operations Unit. if you need a good recap of how it unfolded, Sky News has a good video report out.

The fact that any of this footage became available to the public is quite impressive, on the same level as when the SAS handled the Iranian embassy hostage crisis (which ironically, is just like Sydney in that a violent Iranian is taking hostages and gets cut down by law enforcement). Even if it is just the breeching and entering portion of the operation, it’s still fascinating. In this case the large blasts at the start of the video appear to be the shotgun in use by the hostage taker. Tragically, this is probably when the first victim of the crisis was killed when he tried to disarm the hostage taker. After some of the team is inside, you can hear the smaller reports of the M4s going off, and notice how most of the fire, if not all of it, is all semi automatic. None of this full auto fire going on in the movies.

This is another video from the siege, and shows alot more than the first video. Why didn’t the snipers on scene just shoot the gunman through the window? Contray to popular movie belief, when bullets enter glass, unless the target is right in front of the glass, there is no telling where that bullet is going to go. NRA Blog has a post about it as well as a report published in 1993.