People need training in all areas of life. This is particularly true if you’re a member of law enforcement.

When lives are on the line, you don’t rise to the occasion. You revert to the level of your training, so it makes sense to get as well-trained as one possibly can.

Police will often time seek out regular citizens to step in and take on roles for roleplaying exercises. Many are eager to do this because they want to help the police.

Yet for one citizen, it didn’t work out well.

Michigan State Police say a civilian role player was shot during a training accident on Sunday at Heritage Park in Taylor.

…

According to Michigan State Police, the training involved auxiliary officers, and one of the officers in the training discharged a round from his service weapon. That hit a civilian role player in the abdomen during the scenario.

Well, that didn’t work out for crap.

I understand why someone would want to help law enforcement with training. I understand it because I’ve been a roleplayer before, though not in a context that involved firearms. The local horse patrol did a demonstration and needed someone to run from them. As I was in high school and played basketball and ran track, they figured I was a good option.

They wanted an athlete, but they were willing to settle for me.

Anyway, I get why someone would want to do such a thing. However, as police officer and firearm trainer Greg Ellifritz notes, that might not be a great idea.

Meanwhile, it should be noted that these are the same police that some think are the only ones who can be trusted with firearms, who are the only ones trained enough to possess firearms.

This isn’t something that happens with most armed citizens.

In fairness, it’s often hard to find good force-on-force training in the civilian world. A lot of people who know what they’re doing don’t want to work with armed citizens for various reasons. So, we good guys without badges are a bit less likely to find ourselves in a situation like that.

Plus, most of our trainers aren’t going to allow a firearm with live rounds anywhere near the training ground for obvious reasons.

Honestly, there’s no way this should have happened. It’s a failure on pretty much every level imaginable.

The good news is that the victim is in stable condition, which means they should make a full recovery. It’s not every day when we see a case like this, thankfully, but even once is far too often.

I also can’t help but remember a certain DEA agent who proclaimed he was the only one “professional enough” to handle the Glock in his hand an instant before he shot himself.

Folks, I don’t dislike law enforcement. I respect them and recognize they have a tough job to do.

But I can also say that a lot of police are clearly not getting the training they need so as to not do things like this.

Meanwhile, some will continue to be upset that Georgia no longer requires training that it never required in the first place.