THE MAGIC POLICEMAN | 2003-08-02
Conservatives insist that anybody who puts on a uniform becomes superhuman. So they insist that the police should have guns anywhere.
Liberals and conservatives agree that you are not magically endowed with the power of putting a gun to good use if you are not wearing a uniform.
No decent person questions this. So I will.
So far permit holders, hundreds of thousands of them, have a perfect record of using their weapons. By contrast, the rate of suicide and heavy drinking among policemen, for good reason, is very high. The real statistics favor the permit holders. But SLED will never mention that.
What really ticks me off is the fact that liberals and anti-gun people like SLED are always saying ridiculous things, and they never lose an ounce of credibility for it.
One outstanding example was the "forty-three" myth. For years liberals told us that an honest person with a gun was forty-three times as likely to have that gun taken away and used against him as he was to use it for his own defense. No conservative challenged this number.
No police official debated it. They promoted this kind of thinking.
Then career policemen began writing a few letters to local papers. A typical one pointed out that he had been a cop for twenty-five years and he had never even heard of some criminal genius taking a gun away from somebody and using it against them.
Other cops wrote in, saying they had never heard of that, either, but all of them knew of people who had successful defended their lives and property with a gun. They referred to themselves as "street cops" or "working cops." A policeman who tells the truth about gun control will never get that gold braid on his hat.
Please see WorldView for September 7, 2002 - THE COP WITH THE DEGREE