Police officers afraid of their own firearms

When England and Australia confiscated just about all private firearms from their subjects, one of the arguments made at the time was that a well-trained police force made such ownership unnecessary.

Well, you can now take the "well-trained" part out of the equation, at least in New South Wales, Australia, where "authorities" are now being forced to build a 2 million dollar virtual reality simulator because the currently mandated one day a year firearms requalification training isn't cutting the mustard and "senior officers blame a lack of training for recruits being frightened of firearms."

Practicing any skill just one day a year, whether it be shooting firearms, playing guitar or salsa dancing, ensures that one will certainly be unprepared to utilize that skill successfully should the need for it arise.

The fancy new videogame simulator is apparently necessary because there is only one official six-lane live shooting range in all of New South Wales (a 309,500 square mile state approximately the size of California, with a population of over six million people) and all of the private shooting ranges have apparently gone out of business due to the forced lack of firearm ownership among the peasants.

"'We have a lot of young cops who are scared of guns,'" a senior officer told The Sun-Herald."

That doesn't generate a lot of confidence in one's public safety officers, now does it?

One can scarily imagine an officer who doesn't know which end of the pistol to hold, or who is forced to discharge their weapon and subsequently drops it while shrieking madly like a horror movie refugee.

"Opposition police spokesman Michael Gallacher said officers should have more firearms training.

'These simulators are very advanced but quite simply nothing will replace live fire training needed to allow officers to learn how to use their weapons at a moment's notice,' he said. 'The idea of the training is to get a feel for the pressure of the situation of actually using the firearm that you're going to be issued. I'd be concerned we're now reducing live fire training and replacing it with the Nintendo Wii.'"

Absolutely correct. "Virtual" shooting has no distracting noise, no blinding flash to adjust for, no realistic tactile feedback and no provision for equipment failure drills, among many other deficits, and it definitely has no place for being used as a primary qualification exercise for those who are given the power to use officially-sanctioned deadly force as part of their profession. It will certainly not solve the problem of the laughably inadequate training schedule of these Australian police officers.

"Mr [Assistant Commissioner Michael] Corboy said he had received no complaints about the yearly training program or officers being concerned about using their guns."

Consider this a complaint then, you blissfully ignorant fool.