Fairfax's Finest

Jeff has the story of a teacher who accidently fired a gun during class. Turns out the guy was showing his middle school students how to load a black powder rifle and it went off (he forgot there was a round in it). Jeff calls him a dummy, but I think he taught a valuable lesson and should be complimented for following the first rule of gun safety - muzzle control.

He certainly showed more sense than Fairfax County, Virginia's finest this weekend.

You see, it was McLean Day here in McLean, Virginia - a fun carnival type day filled with politicians, rides, flea market (albeit of the very expensive kind), hay rides, and a table exhibiting all the police departments cool tools. They had riot shields you could hold, helmets, motocycles, off road motocycles, police cars, mountain bikes, riot shotguns, and even a couple of MP5s the citizens could hoist and check out.

Of course, the MP5 being easily concealed and highly valuable, there were a couple of armed SWAT team members standing watch. One of them, a mid 40s woman named (if i remember correctly, Linda) was talking to a little 10 year old girl and her mother about the dangers of MS-13 and how evil concealed guns were. The entire time she was doing this she had her Sig strapped to a tactical thigh holster - it had a magazine in it and I assume it was loaded - and at one point she put her foot up on the picnic tables bench so that her thigh was parallel with the ground, pointing muzzle of the Sig directly in the girls face, about 6 inches away.

Not that guns go off accidently, but it was interesting to observe this SWAT team member so blatantly violate the basic rules of gun safety and put this little girls life in such danger. But, she was more interested in lecturing on the evils of concealed weapons to actually care about the danger she placed average citizens in from her very dangerous gun handling habits. (I could also blog about the idiot New Yorker - based on accent - who was trying to convince the cops and all around - that .50 caliber rifles were cannons that needed to be banned because its not fair that the SWAT team face that much firepower "on the street" and that its only a matter of time before "MS-13 starts packing them and taking down cops from miles away with them." He also threw in the "no reason for anyone to have one" argument. I, of course, pointed out that no one was concealing a 30 pound four foot long bolt action rifle that costs $5000, that a .50 caliber ban would also outlaw muzzleloading hunting rifles, and that target shooting is an acceptable reason to have one (not that I need one). The idiot - and his cop buddy - just looked at me like I was crazy. Maybe I'll blog about this in more detail tomorrow.)