I am a gun owner. I have no cowboy fantasies - I got my gun, joined a gun club, and go practice shooting 1 or 2 times a month ONLY for protection.

AND I would be perfectly happy if we had a nation-wide ban on guns.

HOWEVER. It's never going to happen.

Criminals do not FOLLOW the laws ... ergo, we call them criminals. They will ALWAYS have guns. If not one more gun was manufactured, there would be enough guns for all the criminals to have them for another century or two.

That cat is out of the bag. It will never go back in.

We have to stop trying to stop people from having guns. We have them. We're going to keep them. We need to spend all that time, energy and money on education to ensure gun safety.

I would never have a gun in my house, but I still support the 2nd ammendment.

Police officers could benefit from the media and Liberal groups not attacking them for political purposes.

Most people, liberal or conservative, have a love-hate relationship with the police. The scariest people I deal with are the ultra-right, religious fundamentalists who seem to have a dash of schizophrenia with their religion. Some liberals give us a lot of grief on the political front, but if you want to be loved by the public, find another profession.

During bird hunting season, a lot of hunters hunt every evening. Instead of taking gun out of the trunk, putting gun back in the trunk, taking gun of out of the trunk, putting gun back in the trunk, they leave the gun in their vehicle. Others keep the gun in their vehicle for protection, which is defeated if you have to keep the gun at home every time you have to go to (or by) a school.

99 % of the cops understand this, which is why it is rare to see an arrest for a school zone - gun violation absent the person waving the gun around.

There are always going to be some cowboy types with guns, but most gun owners are responsible. In addition to needing it for my job, I enjoy target shooting. I own a Thompson submachine gun - its a real joy to fire. I laugh when I see a movie where someone handles a Thompson with one hand, as the gun itself is heavy, and it really gets heavy when you add the .45 ammunition. I keep it and 6 30 round box magazines in my trunk when I'm on duty. If you ever need stopping power, its got it.

Fortunately, we don't have agencies with the SWAT only mentality where no one responds in a major crisis until SWAT arrives. This caused unnecessary deaths at Columbine and, I suspect, a Virginia Tech. Compare those responses to how the LAPD responded to that Heat-style bank shoot out where the officers used pistols, initially, to engage in a firefight with bandits with fully automatic rifles and body armor. They finally went to a gun store and borrowed some better weapons.

When someone is shooting up some place, you cannot sit around and wait. I saw a video from Tyler Texas where a man was shooting a AK47 around the courthouse. A patrolman, who was on the SWAT team, rode on the hood of a patrol car so that he could roll off and fire at the suspect. The suspect had left, but the same officer ends up taking him out on the highway a few minutes later.

Had he waited for a SWAT setup, more people would have been killed.

You have to do some things NOW, like this:

Rural patrol has own risks

By Noah Haglund (Contact)
The Post and Courier
Thursday, August 7, 2008


Deputy Sheriff Dennis Compton shared a risky occupation with colleagues who patrol rural areas when most people are sound asleep.
Though most law enforcement officers are killed in urban areas, police work in less populated areas brings its own perils, especially at night. Problems may be fewer and farther between, but when they arise, deputies usually face them alone, with backup 20 minutes or more away.
"I've had a lot of people ask me over the years, 'Why don't you have two people in a patrol car?' " said Jeff Moore, executive director of the state Sheriff's Association. "It basically comes down to budgetary constraints."
Compton, 39, was shot dead while responding to a home alarm early Wednesday in the Smoaks area of northern Colleton County.
Michael Smith, chairman of the University of South Carolina's Department of Criminology and Criminal Justice, said no study he's seen can offer statistical proof that assaults on officers are more common in urban areas than in rural ones. But the discrepancy is well-established in law enforcement circles, he said.
Still, a beat measured in square miles, instead of square blocks, presents challenges.
"The danger that rural officers face is that they typically operate alone with assistance a long way away," Smith said. "Although it would be fairly standard to send two officers to an activated burglar alarm in urban areas, rural departments don't often have that luxury."
Even in most big cities, two officers in the same car is not the norm anymore. "But backup is often only minutes or even seconds away," Smith said.
Moore thinks that given the choice, most sheriffs and police chiefs would prefer to have two officers respond to calls. But that's often no safety guarantee, as recent shootings in South Carolina have shown.
Two Beaufort County deputies were shot to death in an ambush while responding to a domestic disturbance call in the Burton area near Beaufort on the afternoon of Jan. 8, 2002. On March 25 of last year, two Moncks Corner police officers were fatally shot on a daytime domestic disturbance call.
"The job in and of itself is inherently dangerous," Moore said. "That's why they wear bullet-proof vests to work every day.

You have to do things NOW because you foster a culture in which gun ownership is not just accepted but encouraged as a "God given ' right.

Didn't God give those countries the right to carry guns??

Why does these shooting incidents happen so much in America but hardly ever in Canada, Australia, Europe, Japan etc?

Could it possibly be related to the US gun culture and that lingering cowboy mentality?