I participate in those practical shooting sports and it is both fun and adrenalin raising. Occasionally local LEO participate and generally don’t do as well as you’d expect. We do have multiple LEO agencies that use our facilities, but it’s usually just for qualification and practice, not shoot and move. I guess it’s a matter of cost, although it’s only $300 a year for them to use our ranges.
I can’t lecture the USA, because my country, RSA has terrible police training, and probably as many guns and definitely more illegal guns per capita. An AK47 is cheaper than a Harry Potter book. at around US$15 largely due to weapons saved from local country’s independence wars.
But:
Your military go through live fire training. Why not the police? Your military get training in civilian harm mitigation. Why not the police?
In this country, mass shootings are almost unheard of. But we have the guns, sociopaths and ability.
Just not the culture.
Also, every hour a LEO is at the training range is seen as time s/he’s not on the beat, or else it’s overtime. Police Agencies (or rather the politicians and bureaucrats that pass their budgets) are often quite penny wise and pound foolish at this.
Speaking anecdotally, I was next to a LEO at the local shooting range with my Father-in-law 3-4 years back (pre-COVID). He was bitching (loudly!) that the ammunition budget for his department for practice was a fixed sum, but ammo had been going up in price to the point that he couldn’t keep up his proficiency without buying more to practice out of his own pocket.
I’m sure the spikes of intervening years (even if it’s down from the absolute highs) made things much, much worse.
One article I read about that incident also suggested PTSD as a cause of his overreaction, If that’s the case, I’m sympathetic, though perhaps it’s best that he’s no longer a police officer.
Sounds like he shared his PTSD with the poor guy in the back of his patrol car. The article says the cops kept screaming at him to show his hands, which he couldn’t do because they were cuffed behind his back. He’s quoted as saying he just ducked down and hoped not to be killed and also that he’s “damaged for life.”
If his hands were still cuffed, then who else could have thrown the acorn? Even worse, what if he were armed with fresh fruit?
That’s not what I saw. Her partner said he was hit, so she just started blindly firing in the general direction of the police car. Then, she yelled for “somebody” to get the sobbing woman next to her inside.
Both cops were recklessly endangering the entire neighborhood.
Most people who engage in irrational violence are emotionally disturbed in some way, and feel lots of complicated ways after the incident.
We still prosecute them for their crimes.
He should be criminally prosecuted. He had no reasonable basis to discharge his weapon.
Well, technically that is not a “stupid” gun news. Heck, it could be seen as a good outcome from both sides of the aisle.
Ahh, shit, wrong thread. My apologies.
I think there used to be a Smart Gun News of the Day thread but it was so small it got lost in the couch cushions.
Here is the most recent post in it, from August of '23
The ammosexuals and gundamentalists posting in it were getting irked by criticism from other people. Bone, who started it and was a mod at the time, was especially annoyed by the pollution of their happy happy bang bang fun time.
I’m embarrassed to say I haven’t heard that one before. It’s a perfect poetic combination with ammosexuals.
Then again there was a specific mod note on that thread that it was not the place to be adversarial about it.
But heck, even the Positive Gun Control News thread, died even faster.
TBF I suppose that as neither of those were Pit threads people felt it was no fun.
ETA heck, as I mentioned last time around, even this thread has become almost as often not about “stupid” gun news per se.
I was thread banned from that thread, even though i only posted relevant good news about guns.
“Hey! Not like that!”
Oh well…
Moderator Bone was an asshole.
Are you allowed to insult an ex-Moderator, or is it one of those things like the Presidency where you are supposed to respect the office?
Bone seems to have retired from the board entirely. His last post was a bit over 4 years ago. So we probably should not make a habit of speakng ill of him, but the mods mostly will not care.