The Nogales Police Department took a public relations shellacking last week, proving the old adage, “No good deed goes unpunished.”
It was a classic Homer Simpsonesque “D’oh!” moment on May 10 when the department posted photos to its Facebook page showing children handling assault-type weapons during an NPD appearance at a middle school. The text of the post read, “Career day at Coatimundi Middle School.”
Within hours, the photos showing the students handling the guns had been removed from Facebook – but not before Chief Roy Bermudez’s phone blew up and members of the public had posted stinging comments of dismay.
Law enforcement is an honorable career. But common sense would have gone a long way that day and spared NPD the embarrassment. There’s no doubt in my mind that the presenting officers had the best of intentions to inspire the youth. But we should probably leave gun-handling instruction to the experts.
Bermudez gets it. Referring to a recent spate of threatening messages left at various area schools and the April 10 incident in which NPD officers fatally shot a 31-year-old Nogales man, he said, “I understand the optics weren’t good, especially right now with all the threats that we’ve been getting, the shooting that we had last month, and everything that’s happening around us right now,” he told the NI.
(Meanwhile, there was yet another mass shooting in Farmington, N.M. on Monday – the 225th so far this year and counting, according to Gun Violence Archive.)
The photos with the students handling assault-style rifles were shocking to many. But NPD officers demonstrating “tools of the trade,” as Bermudez called the firearms, was not wrong, per se. In fact, such a demonstration can serve to instill respect for firearms in an era where more than 500 people die annually from unintentional shootings, according to The Johns Hopkins Center for Gun Violence Solutions. Experts agree one way to stem unintentional gun deaths is through education.
In the same way I believe book banning and history revisions have no place in schools, we should not try to shield students from guns to ostensibly preserve their innocence, as some may advocate. That would only serve to pique curiosity and, by nature, spur some kids to seek out firearms without proper instruction and supervision. And since guns are so pervasive in our society, that is not such a hard thing to imagine.
Bermudez is not recommending abolishing firearms from NPD presentations. “We’ll probably have (the guns), but not have them physically hold them or anything like that.” Good idea, Chief.
(Coppola is publisher of the Nogales International. Contact him at publisher@nogalesinternational.com.)
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