Most notable quote no one picked up on
I do have a small armory of handguns, mostly from family members that have went to prison or passed away.
Cool family; let's not ask HOW they passed away and you got their guns! (just ribbing you, friend!)
I reckon the way this whole gun thing gets handled here bugs, bores and scares me more than anything else on this Forum.
Since they are not standard issue, it's really not about equipment. Since they all basically work the same, identifying the rod you pack has no real relevance to EMS whatsoever. May as well expound on what brand of Band-Aid you carry; that's about as interesting and relevant!
All you get is a visual picture of an object whose primary purpose is to injure or kill people being brandished by its users like something out of
Reservoir Dogs. Is that REALLY what anticipating coming on to a scene is like for these medics?
Of course not. Perhaps that's what throws me though because here are people who really DO love the field and do their best to be responsive practitioners, yet, give them a soapbox and they get you thinking they'd just as easily pop their patient or someone nearby as they would save someone's life.
That's part of the Dirty Harry complex though, isn't it? Don't carry if you don't intend to use. And for some reason, a lot of the gun carriers here want you to see their rods and make it clear they would use them!
It's the implication of that intention that stands COUNTER to the purpose of our jobs AND this Forum. The image leaves a really bitter taste in my mouth.
Personally, if I were carrying or COULD carry on the job or on my person a concealed weapon, nobody, but no-body would know about it! Why reveal the one secret advantage I have or let someone else know that on my person is something they could kill ME with?
Sorry, maybe I got a little hung up on the word "concealed"!
A firearm for personal protection is not something to be bragged about. It's something that you have SO MUCH RESPECT for -- precisely BECAUSE it is lethal -- that it is something you NEVER want to have to use. The absence of that interpretation here is what worries me the most.
That is, of course if you're talking EMS. But that's not what the talk evolves to here. It all gets wrapped up in the right to talk, just like the right to carry. But how much of the talk is about bragging and how many of the responses are about "Shut up, you're a Cretin!"? If you're going to look at it at all, look at it in a larger context.
And it's all about "carrying" isn't it? I can't recall ONE INSTANCE where someone here actually popped a perp while on-duty. I'd like to hear about that, so let me start with a FULL-DISCLOSURE:
One day, having just transported a woman about to deliver a baby to the ER, I found myself holding a Police Service revolver on her boyfriend, who had accompanied her to the hospital in my ambulance. As it happened, the P.D. had escorted us to the hospital for an emergency delivery and one recognized the guy's face from an FBI Wanted poster for a bank robbery and shooting in Washington D.C.
An Officer asked me to get a positive ID of the man (who would NOT leave the side of his g-friend in the delivery room!) from a tatoo and then bring him out to the Waiting Room for them to arrest. I did so, he bolted, and the next thing I knew, the cop pinning him to the ground handed me his revolver and I was standing there ready to protect my Brother and ally.
I know what I would have done. Had the tide turned and the cop been in danger I would have pulled the trigger. Maybe I wouldn't have gone for the head, but any torso shot could easily have been fatal. I wouldn't take a chance of just wounding the perp either. Why? because I had a lethal weapon available to me and that means predictable outcome! I would no more adjust my LifePak down to 200 Joules before defibrillation.
What I learned holding that gun, was it really would have been all or nothing at all, and no matter what the law says, I, who have pledged to save lives, would have taken one. That's a dilemma I NEVER want to face again. Just the fact that I would have used it without hesitation haunts me enough because from that moment on in my life, I would NEVER be the same person.
So how many of you have actually killed another human being with a firearm? I know there are some here who have and maybe they are the ones that should start the threads.
And then, there are the legal issues. Were we to spend as much time looking at the sources of emergency care and tracking them back to the Constitution, we might learn something relevant to the profession!
But not here; it's more of an emotional issue than threads on dead babies!
All the above is non-official, but as a Community Leader I would ask that in the future, any talk of guns be limited to footnotes in larger issues of personal scene-safety threads, and that as ILLUSTRATION only.
