This is the same mentality that gave us SWAT teams executing "dynamic entries" for parking violations.
Firefighters, let's keep those. You can protect your own household from property crime and you can protect yourself from violent crime but you're boned confronting a brush fire by yourself.
How ‘bout I give you the infantile Hollywood comic book name “Douchebag”? Or maybe not.
Hotshots is a name that has been in the fire service for a long time. It denotes a specific level of training. Those guys in Arizona didn’t make it up to glorify themselves—they earned it.
Not so they could fleece taxpayers like the public employee unions you rightly criticize, but because they want to serve their communities and because they like a little adrenaline. Sometimes they get too much of the latter. And I don’t blame their families if some were conveniently labeled “seasonal” when they were in fact full time, for wanting the same benefits as the rest.
BTW, I’m a volunteer firefighter, in a small department full of old farts like myself. And yes, we more or less worship “Hotshots” only because we’ve had just enough of a taste of real firefighting to know what these guys do on a regular basis.
Hotshots is a fire term that is used for certain crews, the Granite Mountain part of their name is what they came up with, or the original team members there did- hotshot crew is what they were in fire lingo. That term has been used to designate certain fire crews long before any of that crew was born. It is not something they came up with from a comic book.
http://www.nwcg.gov/pms/pubs/glossary/h.htm
Hotshot Crew
1.Intensively trained fire crew used primarily in hand line construction (Type-1).