APD - Personally Owned Weapons

[LittleLebowski]

Yeah, on Joe Rogan's podcast. Literally heard that part of it on the way to work today.

Yeah, I listened to it at work. Good stuff.

[LittleLebowski]

Which I think is a colossal error in judgement on behalf of the officers, but to each their own.

I ran an in-service a few weeks ago and all of the 1911 shooters failed...

Failed at time/accuracy or weapons malfunctions?

[KevinB]

Failed at time/accuracy or weapons malfunctions?

Both (this is my shocked face...)

[TCinVA]

Page 37...

That may have been one of the stupidest things I've ever read. I got a little woozy and had to sit down for a minute...

[KevinB]

It's a horrible stretch at best.

I would agree that great deal of OIS's they refer to appear to be bad shoots - however I view that as an issue with the Command levels of the departments in question.

The NM DPS Shooting Qualifications have no decision making criteria -- everything is a Shoot, and its horrible easy to pass (if you don't shoot 100% there is probably an issue).
The answer is training and education and perhaps better selection of Police in those departments - not making some asinine assumption about Personal Weapons.

[JRB]

As another resident of ABQ and having close friends in APD, one of whom competes quite successfully on APD's own shooting team, I can't help but see some writing on the wall with that sort of baseless edict.

Their issue isn't with the weapons themselves, it's the fact they're personally owned. To the perspective of folks from DC and the like, the idea of sworn officers owning the weapons they carry is offensive, because ultimately, most of those bureaucrats disagree philosophically with the idea of private arms ownership. They equate gun ownership with 'gun culture' and want to discourage it in every way they can, even if they're discouraging it among the Police in their hometown. In most cases, ESPECIALLY if it's their home town.
Like many of the anti-gun sorts of folks that tend to 'protest' downtown and crash a city council meeting by being an unruly mob, these sorts of people can't help but let their ignorance equate having an interest in weapons ownership & proficiency to having a desire to shoot someone with that same weapon.

We've seen it time and again with the straw-man arguments and all the other emotional, wildly inaccurate fallacies they use, and how they emotionally project their own lack of personal responsibility & self control with arguments like 'I don't want my neighbor to own guns, because he might shoot me if he doesn't like my cat' etc.
They disagree with some or all of the OIS's. They learn that APD officers might own their own guns, so obviously they bought that big, powerful gun because they want to shoot someone with it. QED - to those sorts of folks, anyway.

I can't help but conclude this is an underhanded but very direct attack at gun ownership itself, by the same sort of ignorance and (as already mentioned by Abu Fitna) profound lack of true qualifications to make a fair assessment.

To a large extent, though, there's a very real resistance to anyone with bona fide knowledge of firearms and their use among the 'cultured' elite. Nowhere is that more prevalent than politics, and the DOJ is a political entity if it's anything at all. So it's quite predictable that they'd have someone unqualified making these assessments, because by our standards, anyone qualified to make such assessments would be a 'gun nut' in their eyes, and they'd feel any assessment given by a 'gun nut' would be akin to letting the inmates run the asylum.

A sad state of affairs, no matter how you slice it.

[jlw]

Somebody should look said author in the eye and ask, "So, if the shootings were all with agency owned and issued guns, would that make the shootings more justified?"

[TCinVA]

Somebody should look said author in the eye and ask, "So, if the shootings were all with agency owned and issued guns, would that make the shootings more justified?"

All you'd get in response is the person repeating their inane statement and the strong smell of smoke in the room.

[Dagga Boy]

"The answer is training and education and perhaps better selection of Police in those departments - not making some asinine assumption about Personal Weapons."

Burn the witch...........stop with your heretical speech. No sense bringing all that logic combined with a need for leadership into the conversation.

[jlw]

The answer is training and education and perhaps better selection of Police in those departments - not making some asinine assumption about Personal Weapons.

Unfortunately, the applicant pool is a population by and large uneducated on its own Constitution. Thankfully, we are small enough to be choosy. At my prior agency, when I was an FTO, I spent as much time being a civics teacher as I did teaching procedure and skills.

I'd really hate to be hiring at the numbers of some of the big cities as I am rejecting applications at about a 75:1 rate here lately.

All you'd get in response is the person repeating their inane statement and the strong smell of smoke in the room.

I'm so happy to be working for a Sheriff instead of a council who got elected by the garden club and folks who ran because they were mad over leaf and limb pickup.