Open Carry Advocates: Shooting Themselves in the Foot

Pajamas MEdia ^ | April 29 | Bob Owens

[CHICAGOFARMER]

There are no national statistics on how many times officers’ guns are taken away. But the FBI says that of the 616 law enforcement officers killed on duty by criminals from 1994 through 2003, 52 were killed with their own weapon, amounting to 8 percent.

You need to expand your research criteria and not narrow it down to a single year from a single source.

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Couple of comments

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Yes, there is data and how many officers are killed with their own firearms.I have studied it years ago.

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This is old data.you’re assuming that law enforcement officers are still using the old holster equipment of wild West. Since about 2003 law enforcement officers are using bolsters with double and triple safety locks. Like the Blackhawk Serpa bolster.

These newly designed oldsters, improve training, has reduced the number of officers being killed with their own firearms from 8% down to less than 1% annually. My statement is still true 45 to 50% of law enforcement officers are killed in automobile accidents. 30 to 40% are killed with firearms..

It is still disingenuous to say that law enforcement officers killed with their own firearms is a major problem.

I train year-round with federal, state, and local law enforcement.everything comes SWAT tactics to deployment of a shotgun from patrol car. Your statement is still overstated and that was my point, and the statistics in 2009 proves the point.

Train like you fight, fight like a train.

Blessed be the Lord of trained my arms for battle. Psalms 144.1

He that has no sword, let him sell his garment and buy one Luke 22.24

stay safe brother

[RedMonqey]

It is still disingenuous to say that law enforcement officers killed with their own firearms is a major problem.

Never said that, nor do I believe it. I just pointed out that officers are not immune to having their weapons turned on themselves.

And my original point to another poster was Concealed Carry was preferable to Open Carry for citizens for various reasons.

A friendly discussion among allies of the Second Amendment....

[CHICAGOFARMER]

We had this discussion Officers killed with own firearm and with assault rifles in April 2010.

Have more data.

To see chart go to website

http://www.denverpost.com/ci_16687250

Police officers 511 killed by firearms since 2000

By Cheryl W. Thompson
The Washington Post
Posted: 11/23/2010 01:00:00 AM MST
Updated: 11/23/2010 01:27:18 AM MST

Darryl Jeter, above, is serving a life sentence in Indiana for killing state Trooper Scott Patrick in 2003. (Ricky Carioti, The Washington Post)

Hattie Louise James was sitting on her front porch in Charlotte, N.C., when two police detectives emerged from their car. There had been a shooting, they said. Two officers were dead. The gun had been traced back to her.
“I liked to had another heart attack,” said James, 72, a retired hospital worker.

The .32-caliber revolver used to kill Charlotte-Mecklenburg police officers Sean Clark and Jeff Shelton in April 2007 started out as a legally owned weapon. James bought it in 1991 at Hyatt Coin and Gun Shop in Charlotte, but it was stolen a year later from her husband’s car.
Fifteen years after that, it passed into the hands of 25-year- old Demeatrius Montgomery.

Last September, Montgomery was convicted of Patrick’s mother, Sandy. (Ricky Carioti, The Washington Post)

gunning down the officers outside a low-income housing complex in northeast Charlotte.

Clark and Shelton are two of 511 police officers killed by firearms in the U.S. from the beginning of 2000 through Sept. 30.

To trace these guns, The Washington Post did a year-long investigation, including building a database of every police officer shot to death in the past decade. (More than 1,900 officers were wounded by firearms during the same period.)

The 511 police officers in the study are among more than 95,000 Americans killed by people using firearms in the past decade.

“It is extremely easy in this country for anyone who wants to get a weapon to obtain one, particularly a handgun,” said Norfolk, Va., Police Chief Bruce Marquis, whose department has lost five officers to guns since 2001. “There is not a lot we can do about it unless the laws are changed to restrict guns to make it harder to get them or severely punish those who knowingly obtain weapons stolen or used in other crimes.”

Federal law prohibits felons, people who have been committed to an institution for mental illness, and drug users from buying a gun. Buyers of handguns must be at least 21 years old, and the minimum age for buying a rifle or shotgun is 18. States have wide latitude to set limits on how many handguns may be bought at a time and to require additional background checks, purchase permits and the reporting of lost or stolen guns.

“There’s such a disparity between the gun laws in different states,” said Lt. Howard Schechter, head of the forensic investigation unit for Albany, N.Y., police. “Down South, their feelings about guns and gun control are completely different. Both Carolinas, Florida, Georgia, they’re generally very easy places to get guns.”

The number of legally owned firearms among the guns The Washington Post was able to track — 107 out of 341 deaths — surprised Garen Wintemute, a professor of emergency medicine and director of the Violence Prevention Research Program at the University of California at Davis.
“That’s high,” Wintemute said. “That’s very unusual.”

Wintemute said people charged with felonies often plead guilty to misdemeanors. And he noted that although a felony conviction makes it a federal crime to possess a gun, a misdemeanor carries no such restriction.

“We are finding here cases in which felons have been able to acquire guns even though they shouldn’t, but we are also finding cases in which people who have criminal misdemeanor records but remain eligible to buy guns do buy those guns and then kill cops with them,” he said. “Any effort to find a pattern in these tragedies is helpful because patterns often lead to solutions.”
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Facts and figures

The Washington Post’s review shows how guns got into the hands of officers’ killers and, in a nation with more than 250 million guns in circulation, how a moment of panic can have deadly consequences. Among the findings:

• Legal purchase was the leading source of weapons used to kill police officers. In 107 slayings, the killers acquired their firearms legally.

• Stolen guns turned up in 77 deaths. Separately, guns obtained or taken from relatives or friends who legally owned them were used in 46 killings. Fifty-one officers were killed when their department-issued firearms or other officers’ guns were turned against them. In 41 instances, guns were illegally obtained on the streets through sale or barter. Sixteen times, someone bought a weapon for a person prohibited from having a gun.

• Ninety-one of the officers were killed while making traffic stops; 76 were responding to domestic disturbance calls. Officers killed at traffic stops were generally slain by felons wielding illegal guns.

• More than 200 of the shooters were felons who were prohibited by federal law from possessing firearms.

• The two most populous states led the nation in police officer shooting deaths: California, with 47, and Texas, with 46. Next were Louisiana, with 28, and Florida, with 27, even though Florida has four times as many residents.