The Temple here hired off duty policemen at Passover. This seems a little much. People like me, who think they know about firearms could injure others.
Off-duty policemen, however, are fully qualified on the pistol range, and most importantly are trained when to engage and when not to engage.
Indeed. The presence of a uniform may also cause the bad guy to reconsider whether this is such a good idea.
Are they trained by the same folks who train the police in conflict de-escalation or in identifying guns in black people’s hands? Or was it by the same people who train the police in how they don’t have to tell the truth? Or was it by the folks who train the police not to rat out bad cops?
At some point the experiment will be run (unintentionally) to find out “what happens if a shooter goes to a place with a large number of CCW holders?”. Will all the “good guys” know exactly who to shoot, and the bad guy goes down with a dozen bullet wounds? Or will it be pandemonium, with no one knowing who to shoot, and several minutes of a chaotic gun battle and many dead by “friendly fire”?
In all likelihood, we’ll find out one of these days.
I’m just going to throw that question into the quarry.
It has happened, some idiot tried to hold up a gun show. No innocents were harmed, altho I heard the building did have some extra bullet holes. IIRC.
Do you have a link? And was this an attempted mass shooter, or just a petty criminal?
Petty criminal.
I found this:
I’m not sure if that tells us what would happen if it were a mass shooter. But we’ll probably find out one of these days.
A few mass shootings have been stopped by CCWs. But honestly, even in a area with open carry and easy CCWs, you wont find many gun toters in a average crowd.
The local Jewish Federation and at least two of the synagogues in my county have former police and military CCW holders permitted to bring firearms to events and services, and for large community events they enlist the local police and/or hire additional off duty police to help with security. Along with the security cameras, door buzzers, and bullet resistant windows they’ve had for years.
Not that we’ve had any incident I’m aware of, but Jews have had to worry about being targets for [del]centuries[/del] millennia. This is not an entirely new thing in Judaism.
I don’t worry about one smart and cool-headed guy with a CCW – I have little doubt that having someone like that on the scene of a potential mass shooting would be likely to improve the outcomes. What I worry about is idiots and incompetent gun owners (which, in my experience, is at least half of gun-owners). Having an idiot with a CCW is likely to make things worse, IMO. Having 5 or 10 idiots could be catastrophic.
Not much we can do about that legislatively, but in the gun-loving and violence-worshipping society we live in, there are a lot of idiots with guns. And I think it’s reasonable to worry about those idiots, even if they’re well-meaning. Were I a Rabbi, that’s why I would be hesitant to encourage my congregants to arm themselves – because many of them are idiots.
One of our local gun shops was held up years back. Yeah, not too smart a thief. He pulled out a gun and yelled it was a robbery. Everyone else in the place pulled out a gun, too
Actually, no one fired. The thief reconsidered his plans and when the cops arrived to arrest him he was still face down on the floor with his hands behind his head and the gun some distance away where he had skidded it away from himself at the urging of others in the store, and many, many other guns still pointed at him.
But I would not view that non-harmful outcome as a guarantee that the next time someone tries something stupid around gun-carriers there won’t be a blood bath.
It’s not like this is a problem unique to CCW holders or that cops are immune to this issue. A lot of cops show up in a chaotic situation, and sometimes they shoot the wrong person:
CNN - A Vietnam vet kills an intruder. Then, cops show up and shoot him dead by mistake
Me, personally, I’d prefer to be in the situation with too many “good guys with a gun” nearby rather than too few (like the New Zealand mosque shootings).
Me, I’d prefer cops not shoot innocent persons. But whaddya gonna do, eh? Cost of doing business.
As a pro gun guy, I find it difficult to argue with this. Half might be bit much, but the general idea is right on.
Fully qualified? Maybe, but shooting once a year doesn’t exactly instill me with confidence in the average cop’s ability to hit his/her target. Numerous examples of shootouts with the cops can be found with dozens of rounds fired and very few hits scored.
You are placing too much faith in those two beliefs. I don’t think they mean what you think they mean.
“Fully qualified” on the pistol range varies with the department. I don’t know anywhere with a “Magnum Force” type range (I am sure there are, somewhere); most are just a range with paper targets. And how those targets are scored and how often they are required will probably make you sad.
Engage/ not engage? Training? Maybe, but too many officers forget what training they may have had.
My niece is a local police officer. She will frequently accompany me to the range because she does not get the opportunity often enough. I put a fair number of rounds downrange, far more than most officers in the region, and I am well under the mean for private citizens that practice shooting.
Just as a Winchester was recommended for every black family, just as now a firearm is suggested for LBGQ+ in some areas where legislators have made stupid comments, I believe every law abiding citizen has the right to keep and bear arms for self defense. As some marginalized groups should remember, sometimes it IS the government you need to guard against. And violent criminals are a small but real risk for everyone.
I don’t have high confidence in off-duty police as security gaurds.