FTLComm - Tisdale - May 26, 98 -
So, have you noticed anything different about your local members of
the Royal Canadian Mounted Police lately? I have, they are wearing bullet proof vests. As it turns out that is really old news. The RCMP issued protective vests in the mid 80s an then as now it was an option for members to choose to wear the equipment or not. About a month ago the RCMP issued new holders for the chest and back panels that can be worn outside ones clothing, rather then under one's shirt. Having this option members are choosing to wear the equipment, many did in the past but because it was less obvious.
All of us want our people to be as safe as possible in the dangerous work that they are so often called upon to do on our behalf. But it is disconcerting to have the danger of their work pointed out to us with their need to wear protective clothing. I suppose in some ways it is no more confusing then construction workers having to wear crush proof footwear but the hazard of other humans being the potential danger is perhaps the unsettling part.
In the mid eighties there were some serious studies carried out on the level of stress that law enforcement officers face it was surprising to discover that Canada's policemen and women both municipal and federal hardly rated in stress compared to their counterparts South of the border. In questionnaires it was learned that few Canadians working in this role ever were called upon to draw their weapons and it was almost unheard of for them to actual use them. One serious and continuing issue exists on both sides of the border is that violent toward police officers is at its greatest potential not from felons and what we normally consider the "bad guys" but it is in domestic situations. Police most frequently have to use controlled force in these situations and there is always the possibility of a situation becoming uncontrollable.
In discussing this issue with a local member the irony of the only people who move about who are armed are the police themselves and surprisingly each year a few police officers are injured by accidental discharge of their own weapons.
As a kid it was common place for Roy Rogers and the Cisco kid to foil the bad guys by shooting the gun out of their hands. During the fifties and early sixties there was an enormous popular cultural emphasis on hand guns. That glamorisation is fortunately rapidly declining, as North Americans in general, are concerned about these weapons. A hand gun has no other function then to do harm to other humans and they are inordinately lethal. Consider trying to hit a target with something that has an aiming radius the length of a short pencil and weighing the same amount as a dictionary. Putting a round in an area as small as one foot square is enormously difficult beyond ten feet. Clint Eastwood and other Hollywood types aside, a drawn hand gun is about as dangerous an object as there can be and no one is safe as its destructive force is available at more then the length of a football field despite the difficulty of control. What is even more terrifying is that these things are rarely brought into action until emotions and heartbeats are well near the top reducing control by perhaps a further factor of ten.
It would be absolutely marvellous if no one had access to these things, but the moment you leave your house the only people you are likely to meet wearing a hand gun is a member of the RCMP. His or her weapon is a seventeen 9mm shot Smith and Weston semi-automatic. Consider him or her, armed and dangerous.