Very valid question and Chris answered it well. Officers from agencies all over the country deal with armed not bad guys every day. In some, like mine (state level wildlife law enforcement), everyone we interact with is armed with a long gun and many are also carrying a concealed weapon legally.

Anyone who has been deployed in the past decade has spent every day outside the wire sorting out who the good guys and bad guys with guns are. Non-uniformed people with weapons, both going about their day and/or actively involved in fights are far from being automatically a bad guy – training to identify hostile intent or hostile acts is part of every day and every mission brief.

You’re welcome and thank you for answering.

Steve,

I cited a few instances of people who believed all soldiers are armed on base (including one personal, anecdotal instance). It was a common enough belief that someone like Piers Morgan could proclaim it on national TV, and even the extremely pro-gun guy he was debating didn’t know enough to completely shred that claim.

The concern about “how can police tell who the bad guy is?” comes up in every debate about citizen response to active shooters. I have two main answers to it:

1) Off duty police officers have a duty to act if they’re ever confronted by an active shooter. An off duty officer will be in civilian clothes, will have no vest or radio, may be in an area where none of the responding officers know him, and at best will only have a badge that will likely not be immediately seen by the responding officers. In other words, an off duty officer faces the same challenges as an armed non-LE civilian. So should an off duty officer not respond to an active shooter, in order to make the responding officers’ jobs easier? And

2) The object of an active shooter response is not to make life easier for the police. The object is to stop the killing as quickly as possible. In most AS incidents, by the time police arrive the incident is over (or the shooter kills himself as police arrive). The officers can usually spot the shooter, as he’s the guy with a gun in his hand dead from a self-inflicted gunshot to the head. Even if the officers arrive as the shooter is killing people, the shooter will likely appear and/or behave dramatically different than an armed citizen would. At the Trolley Square Mall shooting in Utah, an off duty officer did engage the shooter. Arriving police did not kill the officer, were able to recognize that he was trying to help instead of murder, and killed the shooter instead. In fact, I’m not aware of a single instance where responding police killed an armed good guy at an active shooter incident.

As far as training goes, police are not taught to shoot just because someone has a gun. We know any number of armed people can be at a scene: off duty or plainclothes officers, security guards, CHL holders, etc. Wes’ re trained to look at the entire person, to evaluate their appearance and demeanor. Being armed does not automatically make someone a bad guy (although it does initially make them a potential threat).

And yes, there is always a possibility a good guy might shoot another good guy. I know of 4 incidents off the top of my head in the area I work where officers were hit by friendly fire. Two of them were killed, and two of the incidents involved officers in uniform. An AS incident is a difficult, dynamic situation, people are suffering from the physiological effects of life and death stress, and mistakes are made. There’s no way to eliminate that risk.

Thanks for commenting Steve, and for asking good questions.

So just to recap, we have a gun inside a gun free zone, inside a gun free country. How’s that legislation working out again?