If you talk to someone who advocates for gun control and ask them, they'll pretty much all tell you that they don't want to disarm the police. When you ask why, they'll tell you about how police officers are vetted and trained extensively, far more than we are and so they can be trusted with guns.
Cops can be trusted with virtually anything, in their minds. We can't. Yet a road rage incident in Washington state raises questions about that.
Now, before we get into the incident, let's remember that this is one police officer. Well, there are others, but law enforcement officers are just people, which means you have good, bad, and all points in between.
Based on these allegations, though, this officer is definitely at one end of the spectrum.
An off-duty Edmonds police officer was accused of pointing a gun at another driver in an apparent road rage incident in Lynnwood on Monday.
Around 1:15 p.m., a man was exiting I-5 south at 196th Street SW when a driver in a Subaru cut him off and almost pushed him off the road, according to a police report filed in Everett District Court. The Subaru driver was identified as Edmonds officer Melinda McClements Leen, 35.
“I didn’t see no blinker,” the man reportedly later told police.
When both drivers were stopped at a red light at 196th Street SW and 44th Avenue W, the woman driving the Subaru looked at him. He raised his hands in confusion, according to the police report. She raised her hands back at him.
“Next thing you know, she reaches under either her chair or her side door and grabs a pistol and puts it up to the window” and points it at him, the man told police, according to court papers.
With cars in front of him, the man reportedly told investigators he had nowhere to go.
“I literally just put my hands up, I was like, ‘Well, this is it,’” he reported.
Only it wasn't it.
Thankfully.
The officer was arrested and will, as of now, face trial.
It's entirely possible there's more to this story than reported, but let's take it at face value for a moment. If this is accurate, then this officer was someone who would pull a gun over a mild disagreement. This is unhinged behavior, and this is in someone that many anti-gunners will say is one of the only group of people who should have guns.
Or, at a minimum, certain types of guns.
Yet I don't know about you, but I've had interactions with other drivers that involved all sorts of things that made me nervous. None were outright threatening, though, so I didn't feel like I needed to point a gun at anyone.
But McClements allegedly did, and in so doing showed why law enforcement shouldn't get special treatment.
If you're going to trust the police with guns, as anti-gunners tend to do, then you can't dismiss these incidents while holding up a small number of other incidents as evidence the rest of us should be disarmed. As a percentage of the lawful gun-buying population, very few ever commit a crime, particularly with that lawfully purchased firearm.
There just happen to be a whole lot more of us than there are of police officers, so the numbers just look more terrifying, especially with the poor understanding of just what's happening in the first place, as we've seen earlier this week.
So let's keep incidents like this in mind, not as a way to demonize police officers so much as a way to show they're not any different than society as a whole, so if they can be trusted with guns, why shouldn't everyone else? It undermines the very nature of their double standard of who gets guns and who doesn't.
Of course, if you get one of those who thinks the police should be defunded, even now, then you've got a very different debate on your hands.
