15Aug05

Info on training, from a friend and student who is a guard at a nuclear plant:

"We had three weeks of firearms training in pistol and rifle. It c ould have easily been condensed into four days, but bureaucratic clog stretches it out, ad nauseam. Our instructors were competent, but they, like everyone e lse in this industry, are hamstrung by corporate grasseaters.

'Clearing barrels' populate the landscape like horsecrap! W e are forever unloading. We are trusted to carry weapons on property, but nowhere else, and we're not trusted to clean them. Rifles are shared, and have (you 'll love this term) a 'general' zero, supposedly at 100m, but we neve r get a chance to verify that.

They value us only so far as we fulfill some bureaucratic requirement, but they hate us as people and consider our lives and health utterly inconsequential. No effort is made to conceal that sentiment.

Glocks all worked fine. Rifles are a mixture of Colts and Bushmasters. Colts ran fine. Bushmasters didn't."

Comment: Several weeks ago we had two, active Secret Service Agents in an Urban Rifle Course at a military base in VA. Both were assigned to the personal protection detail of a high-profile politician. Both had, of cour se, received training, but both expressed the sentiment that all their instruct ion was designed to prepare them to competently protect someone else. The nuclear industry is obviously not much different. Little was said, and there was apparently little concern, about them personally or their good health. So, they had decided to come to us in order to learn how to competently protect themselves!

/John

15Aug05

Reply from a friend with many years of service as a police executive with a

large, state agency:

"This last Quip complements your previous email regarding Castle Roc k vs Gonzales, which (yet one more time) established that government cannot, nor

should ever be expected to, protect us on the personal/individual level, whi ch is, curiously, the only level that matters! Yet, our civilization has been

brainwashed into thinking all individuals will be fully protected, all the time. Politicians like nothing better than to persuade naive citizens to suspend

reality long enough to actually believe such an obvious impossibility, at least during election season.

As cops, we are frustratingly amused with grasseaters who have chosen to bu y off on such piffle. We cops are so much smarter. Aren't we?

Yet, so many of us cops fall victim to the same pernicious deception when w e foolishly persuade ourselves that this same government will provide us with

all necessary training and equipment that we need to stay healthy. In so doing, we openly ignore that everything we use, from the weapon we carry to the training that goes with it, comes to us through a bureaucratic sewer pipe of ' appearance' concerns, political correctness, 'feelings, =99 executive promotions, and a persistent 'low-bid' mentality.

Some of us allow ourselves to become so brainwashed that we actually rely upon advice from legal counsel that represents the union, or the government, instead of securing counsel that represents us, and only us. When will we realize that we, too, are on our own?"

Comment: Politicians predictably engage in a more-or-less, continuous confidence scam, promising the impossible and, when they fail to deliver, ma king feeble excuses and persuading the electorate that they really didn't mean what they said, that last time. The smart among us reject these predictable, smooth lies that come at us like a river, particularly during election seas on. We realize that our safety, our future, and our destiny is in our hands alo ne, and we take unilateral action accordingly!

"A wise man never tries to warm himself in front of a picture of a fire."

/John