Protecting The Protector

You carry to protect yourself, as do we all. But we all have a secondary reason, which is to protect those around us whether it’s your family, friends, or the general public. Or in some cases you may even need to protect those that protect us: Police Officers. An Officer’s backup is almost always going to be slower to the scene than the individuals who are there when something happens. Officers have a ridiculously tough job to do and sometimes they aren’t even able to call for backup as the situation escalates so quickly that conditions can go from safe to the officer being in dire need of immediate assistance in less than a second.

You carry to protect yourself, as do we all. But we all have a secondary reason, which is to protect those around us whether it’s your family, friends, or the general public. Or in some cases you may even need to protect those that protect us: Police Officers. An Officer’s backup is almost always going to be slower to the scene than the individuals who are there when something happens. Officers have a ridiculously tough job to do and sometimes they aren’t even able to call for backup as the situation escalates so quickly that conditions can go from safe to the officer being in dire need of immediate assistance in less than a second.  As I’m sure most of you’re heard this just happened in Florida with a CCW holder stopping his car at the scene of an officer getting attacked on the freeway and engaging a suspect who was brutally beating an officer. Now the news has already forgotten about this story and while it upsets us CCW carriers the reality is that it’s a good thing the news forgot about this story. News today as we all know only shows bad things and when people make mistakes. The hero of this story did everything right and so there is nothing for today’s media to scrutinize. Again while annoying to the rest of us I can promise that if this situation happens to you, you want the media to forget all about you as fast as possible.

This individual probably saved that officers life and I cannot commend him high enough. I will be careful to talk about details as at this stage things that are put out by the news initially usually change over the next few days. But there are a couple key things they did that I got from multiple sources that are important. The reason and context I am going to talk about them is this: The most important thing about a CCW shooting isn’t your grouping, it’s not your stance, and it sure as hell isn’t your choice of gun or caliber. What is most important is the thing that people train for and talk about the least, which is: “Tough decision making under life-risk stress”. Notice that I said: “Life-risk stress” and not just “stress”, this is a VERY important distinction to make. We all have stress and have been in stressful situations, but there is a distinct difference in how your mind and body react when you or someone else life is on the line. I’ll talk about this more in an upcoming article, but for now just realize that the type of stress encountered in these situation is different than most people have previously encountered.

So what things did this individual do that not only saved the life of an officer, but also reduced his personal liability?

• He gave the suspect (from multiple eye witness reports) three warnings to stop beating the officer or he would shoot.
• He shot until the person was no longer a threat, which happened to be three times. (I am somewhat speculating on this but he shot 3 times and it was been reported that the suspect fell onto the officer which in my mind means the individual stopped shooting when he fell)
• He stayed on scene and continued to assist the officer till backup arrived. (This info I had to call someone I knew to get)

As I said earlier the media has forgotten about this because it doesn’t fit the narrative they want and we all know what that is. He warned the suspect that he would shoot if he didn’t stop, he didn’t so then he engaged enough to remove the threat to the officer. Then he stayed on scene and was completely cooperative. Media: Wait, a good guy with a gun made sound decisions under stress, gave the suspect a chance to live, he refused so then he saved a life with a legally carried gun? Yeah that’s not going to be news for more than once on the 11 O’ clock.

My point that I am making is twofold:

• One: train for decision-making. That is the real difficult part about ANY fight whether military, LE, or civilian. Notice I said fight and not “Gunfight”. Anyone who has ever been in a fight knows the decisions you make are more important than the punch.
• Second: realize that you don’t want to be on the news.  You don’t want to be scrutinized so think about the things that the hero of this story did that make the media move on.

As much as we as a community want to know more and have this get nationwide coverage about the value of “a good guy with a gun”, the reality is that those who think the opposite of us won’t change by just this story, and the privacy of this hero is far more important than our desire for changing other peoples entrenched perceptions, especially if that hero is you.