May 25 2007
Gun control…or not.
As long as we’re all treated the same when we make mistakes, right?
…A loaded nine-millimetre police pistol and 45 rounds of ammunition remain missing after an intense but fruitless search by Waterloo regional police yesterday for an officer’s knapsack, stolen from a sidewalk near Kitchener-Waterloo Collegiate….
Whoops.
…Insp. Bryan Larkin estimates the bag was left unattended for between 15 and 20 seconds before the officer realized he had left it behind. By the time he returned, it was gone.
“Mistakes happen in our business,” Larkin said. “We are going to look into how this happened.”…
Mistakes happen to everyone, and while I have nothing but sympathy for the officer involved, and concern for the community this affects, I have no doubt that had this been a private citizen he would already have been charged with a string of firearms offences and universally condemned by the press.
…”We are concerned that we have a police firearm out in the community,” Larkin said. “The reality is it is already in the hands of someone who ought not to have it.”…
Anti-gun types would undoubtedly say the person who ought not to have it was the one that left it unattended. Personally I’d be happy with the firearm being recovered and the officer given a reprimand (unless this has happened to him before). I would like however for the police to remember this the next time they paint a civilian gun owner as careless or reckless when they suffer a similar momentary lapse of judgment.
Entire article here
Hmmm … leaving an unattended gun at KCI?
Boggles the mind.
The mayor of Toronto and the premier of Ontario tell us that private citizens shouldn’t be allowed to own handguns because they get stolen from their “collections”. Applying that logic here proves that the police shouldn’t have handguns either.
Hmmmm … The Metropolitan Police Service in London, England, one of the largest (and often violent) cities in the world, still goes about its duties largely unarmed.
Erik, you always used to say, “Cops are just people, too.”
I’m sure you’ve said that to a cop, like I have, just to see how upset they get. Unfortunately, most of the citizenry looks up to them like mortal angels, too.