I'm a Target, You're a Target, Your Kid's a Target!! - Granite Grok

I’m a Target, You’re a Target, Your Kid’s a Target!!

No More Hesitation - Desensitizing Police and Federal Officers to dealing with atypical threats - IE You, your wife, your mother, your kids!
No More Hesitation – Desensitizing Police and Federal Officers to dealing with atypical threats:
IE You, your wife, your mother, your kids! (Click for full impact)

A story that’s been brewing this week, and got hot enough that the vendor involved pulled their images and descriptions from the web, involves training law enforcement and federal officers not to hesitate before shooting – YOU!

And the government wonders why we cling to our guns, even as they stockpile bullets by the billion, and award large contracts to the company which produces ‘civilian’ targets.

The news that Law Enforcement Targets, Inc., was selling these targets and featuring them prominently on their website, was first broken on Tuesday by Reason Foundation’s ‘Hit and Run‘ blog, asking “Is your local police department using pictures of women and children for target practice?“, and was rapidly picked up by Glen Beck’s “The Blaze” and Joe Miller’s “Restoring Liberty

Life is cheap - practicing to take yours, that is.
Life is cheap – practicing to take yours, that is.
(Click for full size)
What they discovered was that the thoughtful folks at Law Enforcement Targets, Inc., in the People’s Republic of Minnesota, had designed a new series of targets (“No More Hesitation”), specifically designed, in their words, “to give officers the experience of dealing with deadly force shooting scenarios with subjects that are not the norm during training”. Feel comforted yet? They also sent this quote to Mike Riggs at Reason:

“The subjects in NMH targets were chosen in order to give officers the experience of dealing with deadly force shooting scenarios with subjects that are not the norm during training.

I found while speaking with officers and trainers in the law enforcement community that there is a hesitation on the part of cops when deadly force is required on subjects with atypical age, frailty or condition (one officer explaining that he enlarged photos of his own kids to use as targets so that he would not be caught off guard with such a drastically new experience while on duty).

This hesitation time may be only seconds but that is not acceptable when officers are losing their lives in these same situations. The goal of NMH is to break that stereotype on the range, regardless of how slim the chances are of encountering a real life scenario that involves a child, pregnant woman, etc. If that initial hesitation time can be cut down due to range experience, the officer and community are better served.”

And check out their customers:

We are proud to call some of America’s most trusted and relied upon groups and organizations, our customers. This includes:

Military Branches – U.S. Navy, U.S. Marine Corps, U.S. Coast Guard, U.S. Army, U.S. National Guard, U.S. Air Force

Government Organizations – Dept. of Homeland Security (DHS), Dept. of Justice, U.S. Treasury Dept, and many more…

Law Enforcement – Thousands of law enforcement agencies at the municipal, county, and state levels.

Now I really feel comforted, don’t you? Just imagine, a drug bust goes bad, the jackbooted thugs kick down the wrong door in the night, granny grabs her gun, but thanks to the genius of Tom Ahonen and Phil Knopik at LE Targets, the agents don’t hesitate to splatter her all over the room.

Just imagine the outrage if the NRA sold a nice line of home defense targets consisting of black uniformed ATF agents, jackbooted State Troopers, and police officers? What if every armed citizen was trained not to hesitate if threatened? Unthinkable, isn’t it? And yet, our supposed protectors are training to assume WE are the bad guys, and shoot sooner rather than later. God help us!

Here’s the full list of target descriptions, left to right in the montage above – spelling errors in original:

NMH-1 Non-traditional threat dipicting a hostile pregnant woman in a nursery.

NMH-2 Non-traditional threat target of an older man holding a shotgun.

NMH-3 Non-traditional threat dipicting a hostile older man in his home holding a shotgun.

NMH-4 Non-traditional threat dipicting a hostile older woman in her home.

NMH-5 Non-traditional threat dipicting a hostile young mother surrouonded by children on a playground.

NMH-6 Non-traditional threat dipicting a hostile school aged girl on street.

NMH-7 Non-traditional threat dipicting a very young boy holding a real gun.

Each target description carries the following helpful information (again, errors in original):

Designed to prepare officers for the worst possible situation.
Background is faded further highligting and highlighting the threat.
Full Color realistic target.
Size: 23″ x 35

If it’s any consolation, our friends Tom and Phil at LE Targets must have suffered a twinge of conscience, or maybe some bad PR, because all reference to “NMH” targets has vanished down their memory hole. Not before a lot of bloggers got screen grabs, however, and so the images above are brought to you by a combination of Google cached pages and The New Press.

Have a nice Sunday, folks, and perhaps time to ask the local police “What’s on YOUR target?”

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