"When only cops have guns"
Fri, 10/02/2009 - 13:56 — livefree
Those of you who know me, know this is one of my pet peeves. Some people think that only the police should have guns. Imagine if that were true, in light of the following story:
On Wednesday, nine months later, Sgt. Harold David Setzer, 41, a 17-year veteran of the Waterbury force, was charged with seven counts of illegally transferring or selling firearms, one count for each of seven handguns he owns that he can't account for, including a .40-caliber Sig Sauer pistol that police say was used in five shooting incidents in New Haven between December 2008 and June of this year.
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This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License [dh]
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License [dh]
Comments
And I'm not anti-cop, for sure
I wanted to clarify my previous blog posting about "when only cops have guns". I'm not saying cops are bad, or anything like that. What I am saying is that some people think that "regular people", such as the butcher, the baker, the candlestick maker, should not have guns, but instead, only the police should have guns. I disagree with those people.
They even go so far as to call us "citizens" or "civilians" to differentiate us from the police (it turns out that police are both citizens and civilians, by the way, but that is a rant for a different time).
Here is another story that illustrates that just because someone is a police officer, it doesn't make him or her magical:
"An off-duty NYPD cop was part of a gang accused of beating up a black man while yelling racial epithets outside a Long Island deli on Sunday, police said Monday.
"Police Officer Juan Nunez, 32, of Freeport, was one of four Hispanic men charged with assault following the 8:10 a.m. attack on 52-year-old Daryl Jackson of Roosevelt." -- Off-duty cop was part of racist gang that beat up a Long Island black man, say police
http://www.nydailynews.com/news/ny_crime/2009/03/09/2009-03-09_offduty_c...
http://tinyurl.com/bfwbgt
Now think about this for a minute. Who would say "It's a good thing that the police were there to protect that guy." That doesn't work, because the cops had to show up to protect the guy from a cop. How about "Too bad that guy didn't have a gun to protect himself." That won't work either, because I'm sure if the poor slob had shot an off-duty cop, there would have been an entirely different story reported.
I have to believe that the reported behavior by the cop that was arrested might not have happened in the first place, except that living in New York, he knew that Joe Q. Public is probably already disarmed.
Who would start beating up a stranger if he thought the stranger might be carrying a weapon to defend himself?????