A police officer is on his beat today, after grazing a thirteen-year-old girl with a bullet fired from his gun. The Milwaukee officer, who claims that a bullet was accidentally shot from his holstered firearm, will face no days off and no discipline for what is an obvious bold faced lie. According to the Milwaukee Police Department, the officer’s gun discharged while he was attempting to gain control of a combative student at the Thoreau Elementary School. The student was sent to the hospital, but suffered only minor injury.
The gun not only discharged, it grazed the thirteen year-old, indicating that the barrel was pointed in her direction. The police attempted to defend their sergeant, who obviously lied to his supervisors over the incident. The Milwaukee PD spokesman, Sgt. Timothy Gauerke, advised the media that the accidental discharge was due to the fact that their issued duty weapon, the Smith and Wesson M&P .40 caliber semi-automatic pistol, does not have an external safety. He made no attempt to address the fact that a gun that is seated in a holster, has mechanisms in place to prevent accidental discharge.
According to Smith & Wesson, the first shot of their M&P requires six to eight pounds of pressure to pull the trigger. A hard feat to accomplish with a holstered weapon. A similar model was adopted by the LAPD who attempted to claim the weapon was responsible for a doubling in accidental discharges. The complaints about the weapon, from the LAPD, addressed the “ease of trigger pull,” but in the cases investigated by the LAPD, not once was an M&P holstered at the time of discharge. Police holsters are typically double or triple retention, meaning that some action has to be done before the gun is able to be removed from the holster and fired. It is impossible for a bullet to have been fired unless the gun was removed from the holster, and/or the necessary six to eight pounds of pressure are applied to the trigger. If the M&P fired in the holster, it is more likely that it was being fired as it was being re-holstered.
Captain Ray banks delivered a statement to the press, summing up the incident as “an accidental firing of a supervisor’s firearm.” He stated that the Sgt, who is yet unnamed, was questioning the student over a previous incident when she became combative. The school was not put on lock down, and parents were not notified of the incident. Police are brushing this off as an accident, despite the blatant improbably that the incident happened as the Sergeant involved, described. No statement has come from the parents of the student involved.
Video courtesy of the Free Thought Project.
Sources: The Free Thought Project, LA Times.
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