In the course of a debate on gun control--if you can call it a "debate" when one person takes an informed position and a half-dozen others with no expertise on the topic pile on calling him an idiot--somebody asked me if he could respectfully ask me how many times I've been shot at. Following is my reply.
**********************************************************************************
I'm not sure how that question could possibly be perceived
as respectful, nor what its relevance is (after all, there are plenty of people
who've been shot who don't know the first thing about defensive tactics, while
the most elite tac teams can subdue a suspect before he's able to get a shot
off), but I've seen enough conversations like this to know that evading the
question will only feed the confirmation bias of everyone here. Telling you
that's really none of your business would only result in delighted squeals of
"See? See? He's full of hot air! He doesn't know what he's talking
about."
If we're talking about live, off-the-shelf ammunition being fired specifically
at me with hostile intent, that's only happened twice, and I was unarmed both
times. The first time, I was about 12 years old, out hiking in the woods with a
friend. The other time I was maybe 19 or 20, driving to school (I commuted an
hour to college). And I only just realized, it happened not a quarter mile from
where I was shot at the first time!
Live fire in training where they were shooting over my head--once, in Army
basic training. At the final assault course, after doing a patrol and having
several testing stations along the way where we had to demonstrate different
skills we'd learned, we got to a part where we had to climb out of a trench,
low-crawled under barbed wire, and charged the target while a machine gunner
fired tracers over our heads and small explosions were going off in little
holes throughout the course. The drill sergeants hyped up how dangerous it was,
saying that if we stood up, we'd be shot by accident. Frankly, we were all a
little disappointed to see the bullets whizzing by ten feet in the air.
Obviously, there were plenty of blanks fired both at and by me in Army basic.
Really no different than the hundreds of cap gun battles we had as kids, other
than that the real guns malfunctioned more frequently. We did one laser tag
drill where they put these sensors all over us, told us to crawl up a hill
toward a machine gun nest, and then a drill sergeant walked along telling us we
were dead.
When I went through the basic police academy in 1997, it was a small department
that didn't have wet ball guns, so our instructors got creative. They loaded
probably a couple thousand rounds of ammunition with primers only (no powder)
and bullets made of paraffin and Vaseline. We fired these at each other from
revolvers during Stops & Approaches. At the distances we were engaging each
other at (distances encountered in a normal traffic stop), the primer had
enough oomph to push that wax bullet hard enough to put it on target and to
feel it hit, but not enough to injure anybody.
To date, that's been some of the best training I've had. Most of it was traffic
stops. One team would be the bad guys (usually four of them), and two students
would pull them over in a police car. At some unknown point, the suspects would
start shooting at the officers. Sometimes as soon as you stopped the car, other
times when you were right up face to face, or anywhere in between. Sometimes
after you'd issued a ticket and were walking back to the car. Very tense. And
we did it over and over and over until we were always primed for a gunfight
when pulling someone over. 
For safety reasons, we weren't allowed to reload. The first few times, you
panic and pop off all the rounds at once, and then find yourself empty and
still getting shot at. Then you start learning to stop yourself after the first
couple shots and make each one count. Years later, I attended a police mountain
bike course where we did officer rescue drills. The scenario was that an
officer was struggling with a suspect over a gun. We had to ride an obstacle
course, dismount, run up to them, place a (real, unloaded) gun against the
suspect's body such that the (hypothetical) bullet would travel a maximum
distance through his body without harming ourselves or the officer being
rescued, and pull the trigger, all while they were wrestling.
Another good one was shot-avoidance drills. We would stand against a wall facing our Defensive Tactics instructor, who would draw an Airsoft pistol from a holster or a waistband and shoot at us. Our task was to watch his body language, anticipate the shot, and move out of the way before he actually fired, so that when the pellet arrived, we weren't standing there. You fail at this one a whole lot of times before you get it right.
I've been present at several shootings (off the job) where I wasn't the one
being shot at. The most recent of those was just in the last year, and my
teenage son was with me. We were out in our car and saw one car pull out in
front of another one, the driver of which got angry. I hurried up and pulled
behind a bank--a big, brick building--and waited there. A bunch of shots went
off, tires peeled out, and then we continued about our business. That's the
closest one I've been to since I moved here in 2004, when one of our neighbors
shot at another one. I intervened there, because I was still a cop at the time,
and the folks across the street were more freaked out to learn there was a cop
living here than they were about the fact that there'd been a shooting. But
hearing shots go off within a few blocks of our home is something that's been
happening at least a few times a week for more than the last decade.
As a teenager, my buddies and I once spent spring break in the woods playing
what would be paintball today, only we used bottle rockets and Roman candles.
(Being trapped in a thicket and seeing fireballs flying at you is an experience
that sticks with you.) As a pre-teen, I was shot at by strangers in a park with
bb guns (not the same incident as the dude with the shotgun shooting at us in
the woods when I was 12). And since I came from a military family and grew up
in Appalachia in the 1980s, most of my free time outdoors with friends was
spent in play battles with cap guns, water guns, and toy guns that fired all
manner of weak projectiles. I grew up hiding behind cover and practicing small
group tactics. Our Boy Scout campouts were basically FTX. Army basic training
was boring by comparison, with the exception of the hand grenade course. When I
was a teen, my family moved to a rural area where I often had no friends
nearby, so I spent a lot of time in the woods using air pistols in speed
shooting drills. The move-and-shoot, multiple attacker drills we did on the
police firing range were, again, pretty pedestrian by comparison. I was faster
with a revolver than a lot of my classmates were with their semi-autos.
Pretty much my whole life up to 2007 was training me to be
mass-shooter-neutralizing machine. I’ve had both classroom and practical
training specifically on engaging school shooters. Every time you've heard of
cops or security guards hiding outside during a mass shooting, I'm the guy you
want there instead of them. I made the decision to become a cop after I
realized that I run *toward* danger when I hear it, and that I was going to end
up getting myself in trouble doing so if I didn't have a badge. So imagine how
I feel when a bunch of pacifist ninnies who’ve never even seen a gun in real
life get scared and say, “Guns are scary! I don’t know what to do with them, so
you shouldn’t be allowed to have them.” It's like pulling a sheepdog's teeth
and telling him to live as a sheep while the wolves are still stalking the
flock.
**********************************************************************************
And the thing about this is that I'm nothing special in this regard. People like the ones arguing against me probably see the above as bragging that I'm some kind of action hero. But for people who pursue a career in arms, what I described above is nothing impressive. I wasn't on any kind of elite team. I've never been deployed. I've never been in a gunfight. I've never fired a real bullet at a human being. The very few times I've pointed a loaded gun at an enemy, they've complied or run away. I've been pretty thoroughly trained to shoot enemies, but even that was pretty basic. I was never on a SWAT team. I've never even completed a SWAT course (though Columbus SWAT did train some of us in QUAD).
The department I worked at was at a state college where the college president was one of those same pacifist ninnies who's afraid of guns. Although we were fully commissioned police officers who had the same (and often more) training than the city police, she would not allow the campus police to carry guns, neither on nor off duty. And because she had such disdain for the campus police, when there was a special duty assignment which did require an armed officer (like guarding the bank or cashier's office), she'd sometimes hire city cops (at a pay rate higher than ours). Other times, we'd just have to do it ourselves, but unarmed. Even more absurdly, the college had its own police academy for Law Enforcement students who chose that track. The college owned guns for them to train with, and these were stored in a locker in our department. We actually had to protect these guns and sign them out to the firearms instructor when needed, but we weren't allowed to use them ourselves, even in an emergency. In the event of a school shooting, our job was to secure the perimeter, hide, and appoint one unlucky fellow to unlock doors for the city's SWAT team. We agitated for the right to be armed, to the point of joining the Teamsters and later the Fraternal Order of Police. It was such a problem that about half our officers had part-time jobs with other agencies just so they'd be allowed to carry off-duty. (This was before concealed carry licenses were a thing in Ohio). Eventually, shortly after I left over a labor dispute, President Val Moeller finally relented and let the campus police be armed. The straw that finally broke her was the Virginia Tech massacre.
I've never shot competitively, other than informal competitions among classmates and friends. I'm not claiming to be Rambo. I'm claiming basic competence at what I was employed to do--fight the wolves and protect the sheep. It was my (perhaps misinformed) understanding that every cop in America had this level of competence. When I hear about incidents where cops mill around outside, Columbine-style, when there's a mass shooting in progress, I'm as stunned as anyone. More so, maybe, because I and my peers would all have been like dogs tugging at their leash eager to get into the fight. We simply can't relate to a coward wetting his pants hiding while children are being murdered. We'd be too enraged to sit still. I haven't kept abreast of every new morsel of information coming out of Uvalde, but the apparent dereliction was so uncharacteristic that I'm inclined to suspend judgment until I have the whole story. I'm thinking that either they thought it was a hostage situation rather than an active shooter, or they were actually ordered to stand down for whatever reason.
My experiences described above are nothing extraordinary, at least from my point of view. My peers' lives were the same. From coast to coast, this nation is full of cops and former military personnel who played with cap guns as kids, who hunt and shoot recreationally, and who keep a weapon for self-protection. And I don't just mean full-time, currently commissioned law enforcement officers and current, active-duty military personnel. Add in every weekend warrior, every police academy graduate working security or maybe an unrelated job while they go through the sometimes-years-long process of getting hired by a police department, all the retired or former police, all the people who served a couple years in the military and then moved on with their lives, and all the people who volunteer as auxiliary or reserve police and special deputies. Then add to that all the people who were never felt called to public service or who never got selected, but who enjoy shooting and martial arts, and train in these things privately. Often they're some of the most skilled, because for them it's a passion, not a job requirement. A lot of the top marksmen never wore a uniform.
Sometimes they're just actors or people training actors.
Altogether, we're talking about millions of people, probably tens of millions, who are trained to use guns responsibly and effectively. These are the people who protect us from the screwballs who commit mass shootings. These people are our militia. It's unfortunate that the media doesn't make as big a deal of when an act of terror is thwarted. You hardly ever hear about all the shootings that didn't happen because someone on-scene stopped the bad guy before he could hurt anyone. Too many people are under the impression that that's because it doesn't happen. It happens far more often than the acts of violence do. But those same ignorant people want to disarm the very people protecting them and creating the little bubbles of safety that allow them to think of violence as something distant and unusual.
Safety from gun violence comes from guns, not from their absence. Look at the places with the lowest rates of violence, and you will find people with guns quietly keeping watch over them, perhaps out of view, so as not to disturb the illusion that violence isn't possible there. In the same way that we tuck pipes and furnaces and dumpsters away in unseen places, people like to hide away the homeless, the desperate, the janitors and garbage collectors, the prisons and military bases, and the people who protect them from violence. Ironically, seeing the presence of heavily armed men hired to protect them doesn't make them feel safer; it reminds them that they were in danger in the first place. Some of them are so disconnected from reality that they'd rather preserve their feeling of safety at the expense of their actual safety by banning weapons and abolishing the police and the military. It's like removing the airbags and seat belts from your car because you're afraid of getting injured, and in every car accident you've heard of where people got hurt, there were seat belts and airbags involved.
One of the things that irritates me about the whole conversation around this is that it's a perfect example of the Dunning-Kruger effect, demonstrated by the very people who most often like to cite the Dunning-Kruger effect. These are medical experts used to arguing with anti-vaxers, or economists used to arguing with proponents of austerity, or diplomats used to arguing with Trump supporters, college professors used to arguing with people who never went to college, and so on. Because they're so used to arguing as experts against idiots, they get into the habit of thinking of themselves as experts about everything, and of thinking of everyone who disagrees with them as idiots. When they get outside their area of expertise and they're the idiots, it simply doesn't occur to them that they are, and that they should sit down, shut up, and listen to the grown-ups, because they're not used to thinking of themselves in those terms, except perhaps in deference to even greater experts in their own fields of expertise.
No comments:
Post a Comment