The view from the conference room

Seated directly across from the Police Captain, I placed the photographs of the weapons on the conference table in front of him. He responded, “These look better than they really do!” It was a compliment and I took it that way. There was an immediate burst of energy throughout the room and we started to talk about guns.

After a few minutes of a mostly one-sided conversation (I really didn’t have much to offer), all this talk about ammunition, reliability and marksmanship led me to confess that I was conflicted about all this loaded dialogue (no pun intended) we were having. Lawmen don’t have the luxury of ambivalence about a stance that is almost certainly a life and death scenario. Self-preservation has a way of cutting through the crap. I struggled to be certain to convey my respect with any question I asked. A private audience with a Police Captain is something I very much wanted to get right.

I started to press a little bit about my ambivalence on the issue of gun control/rights and began to court an opinion that I knew would be honest and forthcoming. It was. “Just be sure”, he said, “to always keep your finger away from the trigger, make sure the safety is on and check to make sure there isn’t a bullet in the chamber.” There, that was easy. Everything the Captain told me was plain and simple, nothing at all like the conversation I imagined we might have.

 We spoke about the lawfulness (and it is lawful) of making photographs in public, even discussing the general guidelines of accepted decorum of wielding a gun in public. You can do it, you just can’t point the gun “at” anyone. Seems fair enough to me… There was absolutely no anxiety or self-consciousness in the Captain’s words. This was not new territory for him and we spoke of his weapons in the same way I spoke about my cameras. We talked about our tools.

Gun ownership and safety doesn’t really sound like it’s that difficult. Apparently most of the problems are actually caused by the bullet.