Here is an interesting story from Sharp as a Marble. There is a debate going in Columbia, Missouri to determine if people with permits to carry pistols should be allowed to be armed at the local high school. The debate is raging because the smart people realize having armed faculty could stop a mass murdered before he killed enough people to be considered a mass murder.
The local police showed up to comment. The first comment that was made by a law enforcement officer was the stereotypical, but true, cop line on the subject:
Other officers say arming everybody makes it harder for them to tell the good guys from the bad guys.
“And when you have multiple people potential pulling out guns, that’s gonna totally go against our training and potentially create a chaos that we may not be prepared to handle,” said a police officer in the audience.
That is a concern but in most cases it won’t be an issue. If the shooter has been stopped then the armed citizen will have holstered his weapon. Remember most mass shooters are cowards and end up offing themselves the second they are presented with armed resistance. And if the mass murder was still going at it when police arrived and the armed citizen was in a firefight with the said murderer I’m sure they would be good enough to not point the gun at the police or even holster the weapon when the cops arrived. Like I said it’s a valid concern but probably not one that is going to be an issue. The next commend was made by the Sheriff:
Sheriff White argued that armed civilians on campus have the potential to end the threat quickly. And he stunned the room with this assertion.
“In actual shootings, citizens do far better than law enforcement on hit potential,” said White. “They hit their targets and they don’t hit other people. I wish I could say the same for cops. We train more, they do better.”
I like this Sheriff, he’s smart and honest. On average armed citizens do have a better hit ratio. This may be due to the fact most civilians with carry licenses that carry practice shooting. Many police officers only shoot when they do their qualifying and as many times as their department requires. But this is entirely theory.
Either way it’s good to see an honest Sheriff talking about arming citizens in schools.
” Other officers say arming everybody makes it harder for them to tell the good guys from the bad guys.
“And when you have multiple people potential pulling out guns, that’s gonna totally go against our training and potentially create a chaos that we may not be prepared to handle,” said a police officer in the audience. ”
This isn’t true. Either this guy is lying or their training really, really sucks.
Police are trained to deal with CCers, off-duty cops, and plain-clothes cops, feds, etc. They don’t shoot first and ask questions later, or at least they aren’t supposed to. They identify the possible offender, and then tell him to drop the weapon and lie down on the ground. If he’s not the offender (cop, fed, CCer) then he immediately complies and shows corroborating evidence that he’s not the offender and was either responding to shots fired or was defending himself.
I’ve had this confirmed by many cops in many different districts around the country.