Saturday, August 25, 2012
New York Police Commissioner Ray Kelly said all nine bystanders wounded in Friday's Empire State Building shooting had been hit with police gunfire, CNN reported Saturday morning.
According to Kelly, of the nine wounded, three suffered gunshot wounds and six were hit by fragments.
Gunfire broke out shortly after 9 a.m. on Friday when a gunman identified as 58-year old Jeffrey Johnson shot and killed former coworker Steve Ercolino near the Empire State Building.That's right, all nine of them. One more reason I oppose license to carry sidearms unless a job requires it. These were professional law enforcement officers. According to another report, neither had previously fired a gun in performance of duty. Most cops go through their entire careers without firing their weapon. But they do undergo training for situations where they may have to. They must re-qualify on their sidearm annually at the police range.
In both the Colorado theater shootings & the Sikh Temple shootings, some eyewitnesses, people under fire, believed there was more than one shooter. One might find that mistaken assessment in most mass shootings. There's fear, panic & turmoil, few if any clear minds. Some law enforcement & military personnel train as specialists in those situations. The average cop does not. Civilians desiring such training have to attend special camps & courses. The vast majority of gun owners do not. But a lot of gun owners believe they would be the exceptions, the cool heads, if caught in an armed robbery or an insane situation where a heavily armed lunatic is intent on killing as many people as he can. This is nonsense. Even with "cool heads" cops & civilians wrongly assess what they're up against. These two NYPD cops had one target. They hit it plus nine others.
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In a story I'm writing piece by piece out of sequence, I wanted to give a private investigator a license to carry concealed. Since such licenses are extremely difficult to obtain in New Jersey - we are in effect a no-carry state, I concluded it would be easier to create a brief back story implying that an unnamed government agency employed my P.I. character in order to have him granted the permit, as payment for some investigating he did benefiting national security, & that he traded the information for the permit. All local police depts in South Jersey, as well as the state police, are aware he has the permit. The P.I. himself never explains how he obtained the permit. The story is considered only the most plausible & commonly accepted one.
