I commented in another thread that I sometimes think it would be best if uniformed police carried classic looking DA/SA revolvers in .38 Special even today.
Someone sort of dared me to start a thread about it so here it is.
My reasoning will seem stupid to some folks and that’s fine. we are just sitting around the cracker barrel jawing and I am not yet named Emperor to simply will it so, so no threat to Static Woe.
#1. I believe a Barney Fife gun looks less threatening to the vast majority of common folks. The militarization of police is one of the reasons for the distancing of the police and other citizenry. How police look to the public IS important.
Old Bobby Peale over in England understood the Need of the Citizenry to not feel oppressed by their Government’s military forces, of course he went so far as to have Police armed only with billy clubs and a whistle, and no firearm.
Unfortunately if a cop today was using his billy and began to get the worse of things and whistled for the Hue and Cry the folks that showed up would just as likely join the bad guy as the cop.
Believe it or not Colt made a lot of money selling his 1849 .31 revolvers to pre war American police many of whom belonged to departments that did not allow a policeman to be armed with a fire arm. They liked being able to carry concealed (and against department regs) so much Colt Started his Police line on that frame.
Still the guns were in those days concealed so as to not upset the populace.
But I digress.
By the 20th Century many Police openly carried and up into the late 1980’s what most carried was a revolver.
A semi-auto matic was considered by most to be a military weapon and a weapon of war. Hollywierd even typically gave bad guys autos and good guys revolvers.
To this day there are many that see a revolver as a cop’s gun and a semi auto as a weapon of war and the revolver as a necessary thing and the semi auto as “excessive”.
Now before the LEO’s jump on my case let me say if I knew I was walking out the door now into a fight and had to have something .38 caliberish …. yes, I would personally rather tote my CZ75 than a S&W M15 Revolver…. but the whole point of policing is to serve the needs of community and not the desires of individual officers (whew, here it comes)
#2. The number of shots fired to stop a bad guy has gone up since revolver days…. and more importantly the number of MISSES has gone up. Is having more bullets flying about that missed better for the community?
Traditionally Private citizens in a “gun fight” fire less rounds than police to stop a bad guy and have fewer misses…. and as semi autos have pretty much taken over police work the numbers got worse … oddly more “civilians” (police are civilian, too) are using semi autos but still do not seem to blaze away so much as officer no longer so friendly.
If you study any sort of stressful shooting, whether shooting games or actual “combat” you will likely find that the first and second shots are most likely the ones to go where you wanted. Visit a man on man plate match some time…. sure the hot rodders never miss, but most folks have to go back for a plate, typically number three of four.
Now no one wants to send out a cop with a two shot, but for a century six was plenty.
Watch some of the officer camera films on line, you see bursts of fire with four to six shots as fast as a trigger can be pulled…. and seldom a hit.
We talk a great deal about today’s improved training and “Professionalism” but burst ofsix shots where most miss say an entire car do not look like professionally trained shooters, only shooters using “spray and pray”
Not having a 15 to 19 round magazine fed hand gun might reduce that.
#3 Todays ammunition is MUCH better than Barney’s one round of .38 Special LRN “Widow Maker”. Back when departments started going over to Semiautos most were restricted to FMJ as HP and such of the time were less than reliable with all semi autos. A.38 SPL today loaded with today’s Personal Defense Ammo is not 1Adam-12’s “Widow Maker” loaded .38.
# 4. Training flex ability.
I know “train with what you carry” but any trigger time beats NO trigger time.
Yes there are new electronic training devices but many departments are lucky to have access to older training material now stored. When I was coming along many departments did close range training with things like the Speer Plastic training round for training in such things as being attack during a traffic stop
Machines that projected moving images on a screen and one popped primed cases and the machine saw and registered where shots would have gone.
One could train with reloads that barely left the barrel on say a Hogans alley so one could concentrate on tactics more than say recoil control or sight recovery.
Revolvers gave more training options with less new equipment.
Well there I have said it and await my savaging.
Nope, not going to provide cites, this is a cracker barrel, not the reserve section of the library!
If you wish to provide cites feel free.
please keep personal attacks down to civil in case my kids are looking over my shoulders.
Have fun guys.
-kBob
I quoted you so I could easy look back up and address your comments. And for the record I work at a cop shot and will retire in ~3 years....so been here a bit, not the revolver days, but a while.
#1, you are forgetting the other side of that coin, not counting the......deal.....in Texas a little bit ago there is a reason why the "young guys" walk around looking like they are ready for battle, and that is they should be and are. When things go sideways you run to the gunfire not away, and you don't stand outside. So you are going to need that tool on your side and likely that rifle in your patrol car. Just a few years ago we went from under the shirt body armor to outer carriers, it looks so much more "military" but the trade off is you are so much cooler. Body armor does not breathe and on a 98deg day with 98% humidity it is just horrid. I had one person kill his issued cell phone with sweat...he got that sweaty it killed his phone. The days of having something like a "cool cop" are over. A cool cop is basically a hose that clips onto your AC vent and you can put the other end down your shirt. It can be 40 in that car and you are still sweating.
So it can be nice knowing these guys are....or at least should be ready to come to your aid when some crazy starts with the flying bullets.
#2, shots fired, yes the number of rounds has gone up, and personally I think this is due to the larger round count in the modern hand guns. Back in the "old days" they still had what a target shooter would call a pretty horrid rounds on target ratio. Personally I think this is very different from being in the military, there you are with your buddies day in day out.....a bad stop you are alone. And if you have never been on a two way shooting range it is a pretty stressful deal. If you go back to something like Newhall, you will see the many lessons learned, and how things changed. If you go to the North Hollywood shootout several years ago you will again see lessons learned and changes made, each one of these changes brings us closer to that "military look" for cops. You can even go back to the 30's and the hay day of people like Bonnie and Clyde or Machine gun Kelly and see the police are out gunned and they learned lessons to be on par with the "bad guys". Police type agencies are nothing but .gov and generally don't get the money they need to start with, let alone the defund the police and don't want to spend money on rifles in every car, but north hollywood told us we really do need that.
#3, true, and a few years ago we moved from 45 to 9, this is good or bad depending on your point of view, yes the performance is there with the smaller and lighter bullet, and you don't deal with the recoil as bad, helping the smaller in stature people, it also adds to your round count you have on hand, and that could be a good thing or bad thing.
#4 Training is really a non issue, different places have different policy, we just qualify once per year, but we are a pretty rural county and most of our folk shoot and hunt, some don't but with current budgets we do what we can. We also have Sim rounds and guns for training, and what could only be called the most cool video game you have ever seen with CO2 powered side arms, rifles and shotguns all tied into a computer that will lock the slide back when you go empty....cool stuff, but not equal to lead down range.
I can see where you are coming from and do understand that, but sadly in this day and age where the bad guy is likely to be wearing body armor you don't want to be stuck in a law enforcement not equipped to deal with the X. That kind of crap will really weigh on you.
