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"You and I have a rendezvous with destiny. We will preserve for our children this, the last best hope of man on earth, or we will sentence them to take the first step into a thousand years of darkness. If we fail, at least let our children and our children's children say of us we justified our brief moment here. We did all that could be done."
Ronald Reagan




Saturday, February 25, 2012

Massad Ayoob - A Reality Check

You’re a New York City cop, driving home with your spouse and kids from a pleasant family gathering watching a game on TV… a pedestrian runs into your car, you stop to help, and discover the pedestrian was being chased by a guy in a mask with a gun. That guy points the gun at you…and you draw your off-duty 9mm and shoot him. He runs away, wounded.

No, it’s not a real case, though it certainly could have been. It’s an episode from the highly regarded TV series Blue Bloods. You can stream it from CBS’s website.

The whole show, well worth watching, is considerably more complicated than that. Ongoing story lines deeply touch what happened on 9/11/2001, and the survivor guilt of those who lived when their brothers next to them died. But, for purposes of this blog entry, consider the following clip. The cop’s son – present at the off-duty shooting, in the line of fire of a couple of bullets fired by the masked man – asks the police parent about guns. See it here



It’s not about genders. It’s a little bit about cops and their loved ones: in the whole show, Tom Selleck classically says that the only thing tougher than being a cop is being married to one. I know female officers, and female armed citizens, who’ve been unable to get the reality across to the men in their lives.

I wish the screenwriters had done a little bit better job of getting the basic safety rules in order, but on the whole, what’s said by the cop in the above clip strikes me as pretty much gospel truth.

What’s y’all’s take on it?


Massad Ayoob


Massad F. Ayoob is an internationally known firearms and self-defense instructor.
Massad Ayoob has authored several books and more than 1,000 articles on firearms, combat techniques, self-defense, and legal issues, and has served in an editorial capacity for Guns Magazine, American Handgunner, Gun Week, and Combat Handguns.
Massad Ayoob was former Vice Chairman of the Forensic Evidence Committee of the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers (NACDL), and is believed to be the only non-attorney ever to hold this position.

http://massadayoobgroup.com/


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