Roman Philosopher Seneca stated, “Constant exposure to dangers will breed contempt for them.” We have to remember that firearms are, by design, dangerous and deadly. Now, every single one of us has muzzle swept SOMEONE or SOMETHING. Keep your finger off the trigger until ready to fire.
Never point a firearm at anything you are not willing to destroy. OBVIOUSLY, we could have followed the basic safety rules of firearms. What could we have done to prevent that tragedy? It is absolutely a preventable, senseless, tragedy. In the interest of NEVER repeating the mistakes that cost a young police officer her life, we look at the situation, and we talk about it, and we learn from it. Yet here I was being notified that a student at another class had been killed. I was in a class, surrounded by other cops, in a place where you had to be a staff member or a cop to even be within a hundred yards of where I was. In a line of work that keeps me more alert than the average bear I was in the safest place I could be.
I was in a training class at one of the state academies when I was informed a student was killed in a classroom demonstration using live firearms. One particularly bad notification wasn’t an email. When a cop gets killed in the line of duty, I now get an email. We have studied the details of officer deaths with the interest of never repeating them since the beginning, but the information age takes it to the next level. One of the worst parts of it has always been hearing about cops killed in the line of duty. I’ve worked the better part of the last two decades in law enforcement.