Concealed carry Driver

Police are just people; if you treat them with respect (and don't take it personally when they pull over for speeding) they will return your respect. 

So that's why I have never disrespected police for giving me speeding tickets .. which I quit doing!

I've talked before about carrying a weapon and being stopped by police for a traffic offense.   I'm going to repeat it because of the following published story from a policeman:

Purse Carry, CCW, and Police Interactions | Active Response Training: I do what I can to avoid treating CCW carriers with paranoia.  I work hard to ensure that should I stop a CCW licensee, the encounter goes positively for both of us.  After all, if the person I’m stopping has gone to the trouble of getting a CCW license, I know he doesn’t have a serious criminal record.   If the CCW carrier informs me that he or she is carrying, I know that the person is trying to obey our state’s LE notification law and probably isn’t trying to kill me.

After I was stopped (this wasn't the incident reported above), the police car sat behind me with red-lights flashing for two or three minutes while I fished out my drivers license Concealed Handgun License, and other identification cards ... plus my insurance form.   I did this because I knew the cop had called in the license plate, identified me as the owner, and ran a check on my name.   He knew I was (probably) carrying a gun and exercised proper diligence when he left the car and approached me.

When the cop finally got out ot the car, he had one hand on his pistol and the other hand held a flashlight.  I had already killed the engine and turned on the interior lights (it was a night-time stop) so he could see clearly that I had both hands on the steering wheel, I was holding my papers in my left hand, the window was rolled all the way down ... and I had not opened my door.

When he asked for license and insurance, I simply gave them to him while my right hand remained on the steering wheel.  I kept my face toward him, and wore a chagrined grin.   (Well, I WAS speeding .. I was going to the drug store to get a refill of pain medication for my Significant Other.)

I explained why I was hurrying, admitted that I exercised poor judgement, and asked him to please just write the ticket and let me go before the pharmacy closed.

Perhaps I wasn't as calm as I should have been, but he recognized the situation as I explained it to him and returned my papers with a simple caution to obey the speed limit; it's better to be slow returning home than to not return due to an accident.   Or something like that.

Abuse of Authority:

I know that there are "Bad Cops"; my distant cousin was married to one.  I never liked him, and after a few years he lost his job.  Not because of anything I said or did ... I was only 12 at the time.

My cousin divorced him, too, which was A Good Thing; I liked my cousin, but she wasn't the brightest bulb on the Christmas tree.

 One nice thing about shooting matches, folks just naturally assume that if you're carrying a gun at a shooting match, you're probably not a convicted felon.  Or a druggie. 



During the 30+ years I was a competitive pistol shooter, I met a lot of police who were both more competitive than I (they always beat me at matches) and were ... just people who happened to be police.  Or deputies.  Whatever.

(At one match in the 1990's I was squaded with a guy who, when I asked what he did for a living, revealed that he was a Police Psychologist for the local Sheriff department.  I spent some time talking to him ... he was one of the most interesting people I've met at a shooting match, but he quit attending matches after the day we talked.   Bummer; I liked him.)

I know that there are "Bad Cops" out there, but there are "Bad Geeks" out there, too.
Police aren't like other people; they have to assume that everyone they meet is, to some degree, a danger to the community.    That's why they are so careful when approaching a driver ... who has all the advantages over them, if the driver has malicious intentions.

I never wanted to be a cop.   But my son is the Navy equivalent of a cop ("Master at Arms") and he is one of the gentlest people I know.  Go figure.   I think he got some really good genes from his mother.