Cop Talk Becomes Deadly Force
More for Armed Citizens
We’ve covered a lot of change in 43 years in this column. It’s time for one more. Where the heck is the Cop Talk column usually found in this space? That bears some explanation.
I wrote the first Cop Talk column in American Handgunner for the July-August 1981 issue. Founder and editor Jerry Rakusan told me at the time that a reader survey showed up to 40% of the magazine’s readership were police officers. Their world certainly deserved their own corner of this magazine.
Sadly, Jerry Rakusan passed away. Other editors took turns leading Handgunner, including career San Diego policeman Roy Huntington, now retired from both SDPD and editorship but still Special Projects Editor. Current editor Tom McHale told me there has been a lot of readership push for something covering armed citizen trends in gear, tactics and techniques, and self-defense law. While we still have tons of law enforcers reading this magazine, they no longer number 40%.
Why is that? One reason is that recent trends of anti-police sentiment in the media and in politics have reduced the number of police personnel, period. Another is that our magazine group has long since offered the lawdogs their own magazine, American Cop, first in print and now digital: AmericanCop.com, expertly edited by Erick Gelhaus. There is no more gun-oriented law enforcement publication in current electronic journalism than American Cop.
What To Expect
The current feedback Tom received from readers was they wanted input that armed citizens, as well as police could benefit from. The fact is America’s police and law-abiding citizens are natural allies in the eternal War On Crime, as much as the gun prohibitionists try to drive them apart.
Historically, American citizens have modeled their choice of sporting rifles on what their military used (the bolt action did not begin to dominate the hunting fields until our military adopted the 1903 Springfield, and the autoloading rifle didn’t become really popular in the deer woods until M1 Garand-trained vets came back from WWII and Korea). However, they tended to model on police for their defensive handguns: The 2″ .38 revolvers of detectives and off-duty cops were long the choice of those with carry permits until the universal adoption of the police service pistol presaged the dominance of the autoloader for “civilian” concealed carry and the AR15 patrol rifle supplanted the 12-gauge “riot gun” and is on its way to doing so as a home defense weapon.
The Cop Talk column began when the double action service revolver and the slide-action shotgun were the majority armament of American police and went on to see them replaced with a light-mounted (and increasingly, optics-mounted) high-capacity autoloader in most police duty holsters and an AR in most patrol cars. We watched training progress from square-range rote shooting qualifications to high-tech electronic simulators and actual simulated gunfights with Simunitions.
That’s where we’ve been. Where we’re going will emphasize more the techniques of discreet but rapidly accessible concealed carry, the experiences of armed citizens as well as cops in lethal force encounters, and input from those who make and test state-of-the-art guns, holsters and ammunition. We’ll be looking at law and case law, and trends in the courts. (Hint: Soros-funded prosecutors don’t like armed citizens any better than they like the police.)
The Background
Nineteen years as chair of the Firearms/Deadly Force Training Committee of the American Society of Law Enforcement Trainers and 20+ years now on the Advisory Board of the International Law Enforcement Educators and Trainers Association have given me access to a great many police sources. Those have the only impartial databases for info on how the given firearm or ammunition performs “on the street.” Two years as co-vice chair of the Forensic Evidence Committee of the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers, as well as 46 years as an expert witness in gun cases and shooting cases, has afforded me a lot of access and knowledge as to how these things go down in court. Training like Tom Givens’ outstanding annual Rangemaster Tactical Conference is one of my regular teaching stops, and while there, I soak up as much as I can from the many Subject Matter Experts, which I’ll try to distill in this column to those who couldn’t attend.
Stay tuned. We’re not abandoning cops: Everything we write for the armed citizen will be relevant to the off-duty or plainclothes law enforcement officer caught up in the exact same situation under discussion.