Rifles?

Not that we regularly read the New York Times, but this article made sense and points to a glaring flaw in the recent CPD regarding rifles:

• The basic concept is that hitting several targets at once, even with just a few fighters at each site, can cause fits for elite counterterrorist forces that are often manpower-heavy, far away and organized to deal with only one crisis at a time. This approach certainly worked in Mumbai, India, last November, where five two-man teams of Lashkar-e-Taiba operatives held the city hostage for two days, killing 179 people. The Indian security forces, many of which had to be flown in from New Delhi, simply had little ability to strike back at more than one site at a time.

Al-Qaeda has been refining these types of attacks for several years according to the article - Kabul and Mumbai being the recent examples, but foreign compounds in Saudi Arabia, Tunisia, Turkey and Yemen have been the testing grounds.

While most police department SWAT teams are up to the task of a lone individual, lightly armed in an isolated setting with a hostage or two bent mostly on revenge or trapped following a botched action, we have our doubts that any police department in this country, big or small, is prepared to confront something like Mumbai where five two-man teams, heavily loaded with ammunition and a "mission," killed almost 200 people and wounded another 300 over the course of two days.

The obvious solution would be to train and equip a larger number of first responders with adequate firepower to suppress and eliminate such individuals. This alone would seem to negate the requirements being placed upon officers to pass physical test to shoot a rifle. Officers aren't carrying the rifle from a mile-and-a-half away - it's in their car. Officers aren't lifting fallen trees and breaking down doors to get the rifles into their hands - they're opening a trunk. We don't require this sort of nonsense to carry a pistol and that's an inherently more unstable platform than a long gun is.

Now we know we're going to be deleting a bunch of crap that's going to go along the lines of "You fatasses..." or "You want a rifle get in shape..." and "blah blah blah." Save it for the trolls and trollops at the bar - we'd rather have a shotgun anyway. The point we're trying to make is that the Department is deeming you expendable if you've been in two or three car wrecks, have some back problems from sitting in crappy squad car seats for 20 years, or have a bum knee from chasing or slipping or falling or just getting old.

We are all still expected to respond to the sound of gunfire, preserve life and defend citizens from whatever is out there or whatever comes to our city. Even if you've owned a shotgun or rifle for decades, served in the military, fill your deer tag every November and can clip a quail on the fly, if you can't pass an arbitrary test that has no discernible impact on your ability to evaluate situations and take proper police action, you are "unfit" to carry a rifle or shotgun that may save your life, your partner's life and the lives of countless citizens.