Last week two strangers got into an argument in downtown Seattle. During the argument one of the men dropped a gun on the sidewalk. He bent over, picked it up, tucked it under his belt in the small of his back, and walked away.

The other man called 911, as did several merchants who saw the confrontation, according to Hector Castro of the Seattle PI Reporter.

Within a few minutes, two Seattle cops arrived and spotted the man walking away from them. They ordered the man to show both hands and get on the ground. The man wheeled around, reached behind his back and came out with a gun.

The cops ordered the man to drop the gun, but instead he "squared off against them," a police report later said. In response to the gunman’s aggressive actions, both cops "fired in response to a deadly threat," a Seattle police spokesman said. Using Glock .40-caliber semi-automatic pistols, one cop fired four shots, the other fired three.

The gunman was killed instantly. One of the police bullets found an odd target. According to Castro’s newspaper account, "One of the (police) bullets ended up in the gunman’s gun — jammed into the cylinder of his revolver."

A photo later released by Seattle police "showed the cracked brass of a bullet shoved out of the rear of one chamber" of the dead man’s revolver.

That’s a pretty clear example of a cop responding to a threat. For the police bullet to enter the chamber of the gunman’s weapon, the gun had to be aimed directly at the officer.

Police are trained to "fire at the threat." In this case, the threat was the bad guy’s revolver.

There was a similar case many years ago in the South Carolina Midlands when a police officer shot a gun-brandishing youth. When the youth’s gun was examined by forensic scientists it was found that the bullet that killed the gunman had first skidded and left a lead trail along the top of the barrel of the would-be shooter’s gun.