As long as you ignore the fact that the shooting victims were innocent bystanders, hitting two people with three shots represents unusual excellence in marksmanship for the NYPD, matching another recent incident in which skilled NYPD officers were able to hit their target and nine bystanders with only 16 bullets.
Ken White
December 5, 2013
NYPD: Baby, You Know We Love You. Why Do You Make Us Angry Like That?
[See also some of the experiments done by Barron and I with our shooting club.
One should not make the assumption that because the police have such a terrible problem with shooting the wrong people that private citizens are worse. The last I heard innocent people were accidently hit by private citizens at a rate of about 2% of the time.
H/T to Sebastian.—Joe]
It’s almost as if knowing that you will not be held responsible for your stray rounds makes you careless about where they go or something.
According to federal law enforcement data, you are about 6.5 times MORE likely to be accidentally/mistakenly shot by law enforcement personnel than by the “average citizen” using a gun to stop or prevent a crime? (DESPITE the fact that “average citizens” justifiably kill far more bad guys than the police each year.)
For example, NYPD officers, shooting at a gunman on the streets of NYC a few months ago, shot 9 innocent bystanders in their zeal to dispatch the bad guy. It happens far more frequently than most people imagine.
Police training isn’t nearly what it’s cracked up to be (I know – I was a sworn police officer).
MANY of us with concealed carry licenses have FAR more training and skill than most police officers. And concealed carry licensees commit virtually NO crimes … Fewer crimes than active duty law enforcement officers.
(More in next post)
(Something I saved from another article)
Here’s some interesting data “the special ones” should consider …
How often do police officers commit homicide compared to concealed carry permit holders? Of the two, which is more common?
It appears that a person is three times safer with a concealed carry permit holder than they are with a police officer.
Attempting to determine how the homicide rate of people with CCW permits compares to that of police officers is not an easy task. There are several sources that show that people with CCW permits are far more law abiding than the general population.
One would like to believe that the same is true for police officers, but data is much harder to obtain for them. Agencies that employ sworn officers do not like to tarnish their name with the misdeeds of officers, and unlike a few states that track crimes committed by CCW permit holders, I do not know of any government database of crimes committed by peace officers.
The best reported crimes are homicides. It is a significant event that is difficult to ignore. There is usually a body. Media usually reports all the homicides that they learn of.
I found two sources of data that seem roughly comparable: One being the anti-gun Violence Policy Center (VPC) ( http://www.vpc.org/fact_sht/ccwtotalkilled.pdf ) who attempts to track all homicides that are committed by CCW permit holders. The data is incomplete, in that it relies on publicly reported stories, but it gives us a useful figure. It does not seem likely that many reported stories are missed. (we can also assume by the source that VPC data is biased against lawful gun owners)
For police, I used a web site that tracks domestic homicides committed by police officers, and another that does the same for police involved domestic violence. The data is comparable to the VPC data in that it relies on publicly reported stories. Data was available for complete years from 2008 – 2011 for comparison of the two groups.
Florida was chosen to represent CCW permit holders, because accurate numbers of permits were obtainable from the Florida Department of Agriculture. Florida has the highest total of CCW permits of all the states, and the number of resident concealed carry permits in Florida is reasonably close to the number of sworn state and local peace officers in the United States.
The Violence Policy Center (VPC) says that Florida tops the nation in killings by people with concealed carry permits. VPC has complete years in their data base for 2008 – 2011 for Florida. There are 27 total killings that are unjustified homicides by CCW permit holders, and 14 of those are domestic homicides. The rate of domestic homicides per 100,000 per year is .583 per 100,000 for CCW holders.
The homicide rate nationally dropped from 5.4 to 4.7 per 100,000 during this period, and the Florida homicide rate dropped from 6.4 to 5.2 per 100,000. Since we are only looking at CCW holders in Florida, we would expect those rates to be a bit higher than the national rate for this period
When we look at the numbers for sworn officers, I found 52 domestic homicides committed by sworn police officers from 2008 – 2011. For the police, nationally from 2008 through 2011, the rate is 52/2,818,924 or 1.854/100,000 domestic homicides per 100,000 police per year.
For the data that we have, police appear to be three times as likely to commit murder as a concealed carry permit holder.
If we include all unjustified homicides (suicides were not included) found in Florida by the VPC for CCW holders for the entire four years, the rate is only 27/2,400,713 or 1.125 per 100,000 population per year. This is comparable with the homicide rates in developed western European countries. It is 61% of the rate for police officers for domestic homicides alone.
There are no complete and definitive sources of data that will give us an accurate ratio of unjustified homicides committed by police compared to CCW holders. The numbers are very small and no one keeps a national record of them.
However, the numbers found for domestic homicide cases, which are some of the easiest solved and most highly publicised cases, offer strong evidence that CCW permit holders are less likely to commit unjustified homicide than police officers, as little as one third as much.
©2013 by Dean Weingarten: Permission to share is granted when this notice is included.