This normally wouldn’t be a story– police departments need guns.  Can you say, “Duuuhhh”?  But it is a story over on WCBSTV (brought to our attention by Uncle).

Apparently, our police departments haven’t gotten the loon’s memo; “Violence never solves anything.”
Or the other loon memo; “Having a gun is more likely to endanger you than to stop an attacker.”
Or; “Arming yourselves will do nothing but ‘provoke’ the bad guys (sorry– victims of American imperialism) and escalate the violence.”

Then there’s;
“It increases our range and our accuracy,” Sgt. Brian Lyman said.

Uh…9 mm parabellum in a submachinegun = “range” and “accuracy”?  OK I’ll play; compared to what?  I hope he’s referring to an M-4 rather than the UMP mentioned in the article as an “assault rifle” (for those of you in Rio Linda; a submachinegun [or machine pistol] is not an assault rifle [the former was created decades before the latter] but given their level of education on controversial, hot-button political issues, we don’t expect a single journalist in the U.S. to know the difference [UMP stands for Universal Machine Pistol, IIRC]).

“I think if they think they need [submachineguns], then it is good that they have them,” one woman said.

OK, granted, so we can throw out all the silly arguments that say you must have criminal intent, or be paranoid and/or racist and/or a redneck drunken testosterone-poisoned yahoo, before you’d ever want a gun.  Glad we got that cleared up.

“When you have to wait, five, 10, 15 minutes… during that interim people could be dying…”

That one is the best.  I guess when a cop says it it’s clear and sensible, but when we’re talking about an armed citizen in the absence of any police, it’s a totally different paradigm.  Five, 10, 15 minutes, or any amount of time for that matter, to wait for police to arrive after calling 911, is a perfectly acceptable amount of time for people to be dying.  Just ask any anti gun-rights organization.

“Many departments in Bergen County are using Homeland Security grants to purchase these weapons.”

You mean more submachineguns are needed in the civilian population to secure the Homeland (police are in fact civilians, no)?  That makes no sense in light of the fact that, as we’ve been told, 9/11 was an inside job and there is no terrorist threat (I heard Mike Moore say the latter himself, so we know it has to be true– he got an Academy Award didn’t he) guns are more dangerous to their owners, violence never solves anything, and having weapons provokes your enemies.  Obviously then, the Homeland Security assertion is just cover for the “real reason” police are acquiring automatic weapons.

But I’m forgetting something– the Left hate police almost as much as they hate liberty (remember; in the 1960s police were referred to collectively as “pigs”) so I expect they’d go along with the above criminal-intent/paranoid/racist/yahoo theory to explain why police want guns, and let it go at that.