Just
idly wondering about the correlation between those who say only police should
have guns and those who go nuts when a cop busts a cap on someone. I'm thinking it's probably pretty high, but
certainly not 100%.
In
the article about the deputy sheriff in Colorado who stopped the shooting at
the school last week, some of the remarks from readers pointed out that the
deputy was trained professional, and highly skilled in the use of arms, as
opposed to teachers and janitors who are hopelessly and eternally unskilled.
Before
I write another word, I want it understood that I am NOT impugning the
dedication, integrity, or courage of police officers, in general. Yes, there are a few who shouldn’t be in
uniform, but that is only because we are limited to choosing our officers from
the human race, a notoriously un-omniscient population – which is actually
trenchant to this essay.
In
this particular incident, the officer never fired a shot, so his skill or lack
of it is not even a matter for discussion.
In fact, the very presence of an armed person stopped the attack. Just the PRESENCE of an armed person. How much skill and training is required to be
PRESENT? This fact is actually
consistent with another statistic you won’t hear in the news: Americans use firearms in defense of
themselves or others at least 3 million times a year. As much as the dipsticks in DC and the media
would like us to believe we shoot 3 million of our neighbors every year, I hope
it is obvious that we don’t. That means
that in millions of instances, firearms are used in the defense of life WITHOUT
A SHOT BEING FIRED
See? When you are speaking the truth, it can be
verified from other perspectives. I have
been in at least a half-dozen situations in which my being armed prevented an
assault or worse, without having to fire a shot – usually without even having
to draw my weapon. Just having it gave
me the presence and the confidence to stand firm in the face of a threat. No, that’s not true. Just having a weapon did nothing, and if that’s
all there were to me, I’d be a hazard to myself and others. A more accurate statement is that having a
weapon and knowing that I know how to use it effectively gave me confidence and
presence, and I got that knowledge by spending a lot of time on the range with
some great coaches.
Police
officers are not a specific sub-species of humanity. They are just men and women who have a
fully-developed sense of duty and honor, and anyone could achieve that with the
requisite effort. Police officers have
neither a gene nor an implant that gives them superlative powers of perception
and tactical sense. Nothing makes them infallible
in any way. They make mistakes of
judgment. They make mistakes in
tactics. They make mistakes when firing
their weapons. How many times in the
last few years have NYPD officers shot innocent bystanders? (It has been said that due to the ammunition shortage,
NYPD has set a limit of five rounds per innocent bystander.) That’s a vicious and demeaning joke, but it
is not without reference to fact.
I
started shooting a Colt 1911 pistol when I was 17 and borrowed my mom’s .38
Super. I continued to learn in the
Marines, and even though the pistol wasn’t officially my standard arm, I
qualified expert with it. Since I got
out of the Marines, I have probably fired 10,000 rounds in concentrated
practice. I could count on one hand the
number of state or city police officers whom I have met who have fired half
that much. The training plans for
metropolitan departments devote orders of magnitude more time to filling out
reports and sensitivity training than to focused marksmanship and
gunfighting. (And there’s a huge
difference between those two!) I
personally know career officers who fire their weapons less than 100 times a
year. I have seen them turn their backs
on potentially armed suspects. I saw one
take a pistol from a homeowner who had called about a burglary in progress,
then lay the pistol on the hood of his car, in full view of that woman, and
walk away! I have shot next to them at
target ranges, and observed that a lot of them couldn’t hit a bull in the butt
with a bass fiddle. I have heard them
utter the most idiotic ideas about how guns and bullets work.
There
is no reason in the world why any citizen possessed of normal intelligence and
physical strength and coordination could not be as tactically savvy as the vast
majority of police officers, and a hell of a lot better shot. They will need training, and I’ll bet you a
dollar to a donut the NRA would provide it for free. I know I would gladly participate in that effort! There is no question that it takes a special
breed to become a hardened professional gunfighter. There is also no question that few police
officers fit that description, and even fewer teachers.
But
it doesn’t matter.
We
aren’t talking about turning Our Miss Brooks into Bonnie Parker or Annie
Oakley. We are talking about giving her
enough training to protect herself and her students one time in her life, and
the odds of any one teacher being called upon to do that are nearly zero. We have the resources to train them. Front Sight, in Nevada, has a 4-day defensive
handgun course that would make any graduate a better, more savvy, more skilled
gunfighter than the majority of professional police officers. We have the resources to comfort and nurture
and heal them if they ever have to shoot someone. I submit that the resources we have spent on
therapy for Sandy Hook survivors would have paid many times over for the
training of a single teacher who might have put a stop to that outrage, and for
any counseling or therapy she might need afterward. Getting roses and apples and hugs from all
those little children she kept safe would probably help as much as anything.
Here’s
another little contradiction in the hoplophobe’s vast array of contradictions. They say the lack of training prevents
average citizens from competing with criminals in gunfights, but… wait a minute… WHO TRAINED THE DAMNED
CRIMINALS? Criminals are, for the most
art, mentally unstable and stupid. That’s
why they can’t work out their lives in other channels. They are not gifted with superlative skill at
arms any more than are police officers.
For the most part, they are not trained, at all. Some, like the Aurora theater shooter, have
gained some skill by playing violent video games for thousands of hours, but
that doesn’t make them infallible.
Most
significantly, it doesn’t make ‘em bulletproof, and THAT is where we can defeat
them.
Rebsarge
17 Dec., 2013
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