Thank you for your intelligent, experienced and sincere posts on this thread... you've added a great deal to this discussion.
BTW, I live in a small community with a "Public Safety" Department that was created to issue traffic citations, patrol properties, etc... There was a movement about a year ago by local liberals to have the officers stop carrying guns because we are a "family community" and their carrying was "dangerous" to the children around. I came out strongly and publicly that it would put the officers in enormous danger to require them to confront trespassers and pull over strangers driving through our roads without their having any means to defend themselves upon encountering a hardened criminal. It's generally a fairly decent area, but we had a murder here a few years ago, several robberies per year, drug arrests, and one of our residents wound up as a defendent in a mob trial in New Jersey.
Enough of us were against pulling the officers' guns that the issue was dropped, thank goodness... just having the debate felt like insanity.
Thanks for the nice words, and thanks 1,000 for helping to give your LEO's some deterrent force.
The idea that if we disarm first, the bad guys will follow not only affects Democrat international policy but also some police. In one of my books, and no I don't know which, there's a tragic story of a cop who laid his weapon on the ground in an effort to persuade a bogey that the cop meant him no harm. The bogey killed him.
While I was proud to wear a badge, it never escaped me that a badge makes a nice target.
This link to the New York Times MAY provide useful info. The NYT has pretty much forsaken its claim to reliability, but still even a sea of lies sometimes throws some truth on the shore.
