Wednesday, December 23, 2015

NFL, Don’t Be A Soft Target

Lift ban on concealed carry for off-duty active and retired law enforcement officers.
A holiday party for county employees in California. A soccer stadium. A Paris concert hall. The office of a French magazine. A peace demonstration in Ankara, Turkey. A marketplace in Beirut. Nearly 300 people dead — killed at the direction or in support of the Islamic State terrorist group. These were non-combatants, people unrelated to the international war on terror but for the country on their passport. The terrorists who killed them deliberately chose soft targets — places and venues with large crowds at which they had a good chance of penetrating security, avoiding detection and inflicting as much death as possible on as big a stage as possible.
But what if there were people in these venues, there to enjoy the game or the music, who were also off-duty or retired law enforcement officers properly armed and trained and known to the venue’s security forces? Then you could have had an incident more like the attack on a French train that was thwarted by three traveling Americans, two of whom were trained servicemembers, who neutralized the threat before any violence was carried out.
The college bowl game season is about to start, and many of the games will be played in NFL stadiums, which adopted a strict no firearms policy at the beginning of the 2013 season. The ban extends even to off-duty and retired law enforcement officers, including federal agents, who under law are able to carry concealed firearms with them when outside their jurisdictions. This policy creates soft targets for terrorists who now know that tens of thousands of fans, players and NFL personnel will be absolutely helpless if they can get through the gate.
Read the rest of Chuck Canterbury, National President of the Fraternal Order of Police HERE.

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