re: #51 Rightwingconspirator

I’d love to have him in the chat and first, set some “givens”. By easy I don’t mean easy like folding a paper airplane or stand and deliver shooting. I meant easy compared to rolling up on a gunfight in progress or coming under fire first. You pull a car over and the guy bails out shooting at you and approaching your car fast. Shooting on the advance. Having all that gear on slowing you down. Complicated use of force policies.

But most of the time you have advanced knowledge, as a cop in the field, of what you’re up against, and have other cops. At night, the person breaking in may be some local kid who’s drunk or doing a dumb prank, or it might be an armed intruder, or it might be your daughter who forgot her keys, or it might be a cop.

Easy compared to the streets.

But my premise in the spirit of exploring your concept is finding that minimum starting standard for that guy at home.

Develop a test that’s a proxy for a crisis situation at home (and another, obviously, for CCW holders) and test people to that. I’m not claiming I’d design the test so I’m not sure why you keep pressing for details on it.

Does your friend agree that a sleeping/wake up test to a certain accuracy and speed standard should be imposed on police that take the gun home and would use it if attacked? Would he correspond so i could communicate with him on this at all?

I didn’t propose a sleeping/wake up test. I suggested a test that would test for that sort of thing. I don’t think that you can accurately or safely do it with someone sleeping and waking up. And yes, he thinks that the standards of police training for firearms are far too low and should be higher—along with my other cop friend who I’ve discussed this with, who cites the recent shootings in LA and NY as examples of how rough cop training can be. One of the main reasons for this, of course, is that cops spend very little time actually engaging in gun fights, very very little time, and many cops go their entire careers without having to fire their weapon.

But he also has a lot of other reservations about cops with weapons at home, mostly being that it limits the freedom of the cop. Most cops like to drink. It’s a bad idea to drink and have an accessible gun. Yet cops are basically mandated to do this, if they keep a gun at home. It also puts the children of police in more danger.

I keep being confused with why you’re constantly talking about cops because cops being attacked at home is not a very frequent occurrence, right? Why do you keep talking about it?

Oh almost forgot-easy with a gun compared to trying it with a different weapon or none at all. That accommodates the less than athletic in a fight. This frame of comparison is very different than “easy” like easy as pie.

You were the one who called it easy, so I’m not sure why you’re putting it in scare quotes. And do you get that the point of the test is to show that you can use the gun safely, as in, show that you’re identifying your target properly, that you’re doing good gun safety even while distracted and panicked, etc?

I mean, you’ll never be able to actually simulate a crisis, so this test is always going to be easier than the real world situation, but we can make it as good as we can.

Or would he contribute any outline of a minimum standard test to pass for civilians to take a gun home for protection?

I’ll ask him. But this is mostly based on what he said: That gun training isn’t crisis training, and that people need to be crisis trained if they want to use their guns in a crisis.

I’m really, really not understanding why this is so outrageous and weird to you. It seems very common sense and straightforwards to me, and your resistance to it is baffling.

I’ll ask him and my other cop friends if they’d be willing to post here or communicate with you, but I doubt they will. I’m not sure why you want them to, either.

You have not yet given any clear reason why, if as you insist POST training is sufficient, you’re objecting so strenuously to POST-trained people being tested. Can you provide a reason?