SWAT, Dubbya, FEMA, IRS—& Disasters Waiting to Happen Generally.

Yeah, year, YEAH!

There is simply, absolutely NO REASON for an "accident" with a gun in the hands of a SWAT team member. NO ONE who is not an expert should be the member of a SWAT team, and experts do not put their finger on the trigger of a firearm until they mean to kill something. Or somebody. They don't put it in the trigger housing or guard. PERIOD.

There's more, and since I'm going to put it on my website shooting page as instruction, I'll include it here, too. The behavior and methods I see everywhere these days where SWAT is concerned - and I speak of both the movies and the professional versions - are clownish. The civilians aren't alone, either. Watch the videos from Iraq and Afghanistan and count the number of times you see a soldier with his rifle shouldered and finger on the trigger, the weapon pointed directly and at point blank range at another soldier.

Taught to walk forward (or, for that matter, backward) with the weapon in front of their faces, I can only wonder how many are wounded or killed by a mere stumble, by being jostled, or by being startled. I wonder how many times the same posture gets somebody killed from a ditch or low place he can't see, too. It will suffice to say that seldom - if I say "never," some loon will write to ask about ricochets - is anything or anyone ever shot by a weapon that isn't pointed at him. I realize that instructors teaching policemen and soldiers these days are often faced with teaching young men and women who have never fired a shot in their lives, but every human endeavor has fundamentals.

And, yes, I know what I've just done. So tell me this: why do you think the training our troops are getting is any better than the care they get once they've gone to war and come home all shot to hell and maimed?

Experts who are moral do not walk around with a loaded weapon shouldered or raised, certainly not with a finger in the trigger guard. An individual in that state is pointed death everywhere he looks, and things like what happened to Dr. Salvatore Culosi are too damned often the result.

When I wrote, in 1958, the first paper on "The Mongoose Trick" - i.e., SWAT - I said that to accomplish its goal, to kill an armed hostage-taker before he could kill his hostage, required a top gun. At the time, I demonstrated what I meant. In 1966, when as a student of University of Iowa Professor Stuart Holcomb I reprised my paper, I went further, to state the criteria by which to judge fitness for SWAT. That was simply the fact of having fired 50,000 rounds of ammunition (roughly, five-hundred rounds a week for two years), plus the ability to shoot a thrown golf ball out of the air nine times out of ten, having drawn the weapon being used in less than two-fifths second. A lot of people won't be able to do the latter, even having done the former. With extremely few exceptions, to be a competent gunfighter means that one must have spent at least fifteen years around and routinely handling guns.

There are, by way of elucidation, far fewer people capable of The Mongoose Trick than there are capable of playing the major professional sports. And this isn't a god-damned game.

I note that Dr. Salvatore Culosi's death took place fourteen years after the Branch Davidian slaughter at Waco, Texas. Experts investigating that particular atrocity expressed astonishment at the fact that no one there or at Ruby Ridge, Idaho a short time before (where an FBI SWAT team killed an unarmed woman holding a baby) thought they had done anything wrong (!). In my mind, it's no mere co-incidence that many of the same people were involved.

I'm sorry, but I can't help equating all of these things. The utter nonsense of turning an emotionally immature, poorly-trained warrior wannabe loose with automatic weapons, high-powered handguns, and SWAT gear and that of turning a George W. Bush loose with the U.S. military are similar folly to me. In my mind, Ruby Ridge, Waco, and the national disaster of Iraq are causally related. They're related to the death of Dr. Culosi, too. More, in fact, the incidents are not unlike the way we have loosed upon the public the Internal Revenue Service, still another Congressional Frankenstein Monster with the power to destroy.

Of course, one shouldn't be surprised. We also turn loose with the power to make law and of oversight of our most powerful weapons people of the lowest possible character and ability, the greediest and most power-addicted among us. These things all relate, as I said. They're a sociological syndrome, a "complex." They relate, too, to the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina and matters, to the raging monster that is indifference everywhere in our society. While corporations pay CEOs and their like multi-million dollar incomes, there are forty million poor in the Land of the Fee, and black citizens get far less consideration and concern from their government than do illegal aliens.

As Diego de la Vega said in the movie, the nobility never look directly at a servant.