Unfortunately, people who handle firearms everyday often become complacent when handling firearms.
This can lead to really avoidable accidents - such as in this case someone who had the smart idea of bringing a fully functional firearm and live ammunition to a role play training exercise.
The Detroit Free Press: Civilian injured in shooting during Michigan police training exercise.
That a live firearm and live ammunition was present anywhere during a role playing exercise raises a whole lot of question as to safety and planning (or lack of same) that went into that exercise:
A person taking part in a police training program in Taylor suffered a gunshot wound and was hospitalized, Michigan State Police said.
The shooting happened Sunday afternoon during the exercise at a Taylor city park for the city's volunteer auxiliary police program.
The civilian was a "role player" in a training scenario when an auxiliary officer in the training fired a shot from his service revolver, hitting the person in the abdomen, state police said. The person was taken to a hospital in stable condition.
If you're role-playing a scenario with other persons, you should be using blue guns or simunitions (and all the safety gear that requires) for your role play, not live weapons.
The Rule of "Treat All Guns as Though They are Loaded" gets ignored and an awful lot of these totally avoidable incidents occur.
3 comments:
"Service Revolver"??????
Sgt Friday called and wants his gun back.
This "accident" is completely inexcusable.
Nothing but dummy guns should have been there.
Inexcuseable is right.
This a failure of leadership. They should have had someone in charge of the scenario to see that all safety policies were being followed.
As a former offier, I can say our (Very small) department did use live guns in training scenarios. HOWEVER, all guns had to be inspected by the officer in charge; to insure they were loaded with inert training ammo before you could enter the training area.
Matthew W: Yes it is completely inexcusable. It's not like this is the first time something like this has happened and a ton of safety rules had to be violated for this to occur.
ccm2361: Yep, it looks like the safety policies in place were that there were no safety policies. Agencies I know around here not only require officers to remove all live items before entering the "play" area but also get buddy checked to make sure that nothing is overlooked before they can enter the role play area.
This was, exactly as you say, a completely avoidable and absolutely inexcusable incident.
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