Police officers in many places are leaving their guns in their vehicles, only to have them stolen. This is a problem, and one Tennessee state senator is upset.

After all, while Republican senator Jon Lundberg may be pro-police, he doesn’t see any excuse for guns to be stolen. To prove his point, he challenged a reporter to spend a full minute plundering his vehicle looking for his gun.

How did it go?  See it for yourself.

As you see, it is possible to hide a gun in your vehicle without it being obvious.

However, for police officers who are leaving their duty weapons inside their cars, all I can do is shake my head. To me, it makes no sense, and it’s not a matter of insufficiently hiding a gun. If you’re a police officer, you make your living doing something that will invariably anger someone. Even if you only write traffic tickets all day, someone’s going to get mad at you.

The thing is, police officers rarely just write traffic tickets all day, every day, and nothing else. They routinely make arrests of people for various things, and you better believe some of those people are furious at the officer who arrested them.

With that in mind, knowing that you’re angering some pretty violent people on a regular basis, why on Earth would you leave your gun in your car? Ever.

Most states allow off-duty police officers to carry in places the rest of us aren’t allowed, and it’s for good reason. In addition to the often mistaken idea that police are better trained than most of us, there’s the fact that police officers run the high potentiality of encountering someone who wants them dead in almost any environment.

That second reason is very valid, and it’s why I can’t understand why a police officer would leave his weapon in his vehicle. Ever.

Alright, maybe if he’s out drinking, then he probably doesn’t need to be carrying a firearm. I don’t trust myself with a gun when I’ve been drinking, so I don’t blame anyone else for thinking the same thing. In that case, leave the gun locked up at home. Don’t leave it in the car…where you’ll be sitting after you’re done drinking, thus negating the wisdom of not carrying in the first place.

Look, I’m not trying to come down on police officers. They have a damn hard job, and when they screw up it tends to make headlines. Most folks will never understand that kind of pressure to walk the line all the time, especially for the relatively low wages police officers get compared to others who may find their mistakes on the front page.

That said, it’s not unreasonable to expect this admittedly handful of police officers to exercise a little gray matter and not leave their weapons in their cars. If you have to, then yes, do as Lundberg suggests and hide it well; but otherwise, don’t be an idiot and leave it where the criminal element can get hold of it.