I want to start this one the way I start a lab with my students: with a question nobody wants to actually answer honestly.
If your stated goal is fewer people dying in encounters with federal agents, and someone hands you a tool specifically engineered to end a physical struggle WITHOUT a firearm, do you say “thank you,” or do you hold a press conference to kill it?
Because that is the actual multiple-choice question in front of us right now, and I already know how most of you reading this are going to answer it. Not because you’re evil. Because you haven’t been shown the whole test yet. So let’s look at the whole test.
WHAT THE G.L.O.V.E. ACTUALLY IS (NOT WHAT TWITTER TOLD YOU IT IS)
DHS put out a procurement notice this week for something called the CTG-5 G.L.O.V.E. — Generated Low Output Voltage Emitter. Price tag: $10 to $20 million. Manufacturer: Compliant Technologies LLC, a Service-Disabled Veteran-Owned Small Business out of Lexington, Kentucky. Yes, veteran-owned. Try to contain your shock.
Here’s what it is NOT. It is not a TASER. It is not a stun gun that drops a man to the pavement twitching. It’s classified as a CD3 — a Conductive Distraction and De-escalation Device — a wearable glove that looks like an ordinary patrol glove until an officer flips a switch and makes bare-skin contact. It delivers a short, low-energy pulse to the surface nerves of the skin. Painful, by design. Localized. According to the manufacturer, it produces no burns, no lasting marks, no deep-tissue or cardiac current path the way a probe-based CEW does, and there are no documented injuries from PROPER use across the thousands of applications the company has logged with the several hundred police departments, jails, and hospitals already using it in more than 30 states.
It is designed for exactly one situation: an officer who is ALREADY physically grappling with someone. Handcuffing resistance. Weapons retention. A smaller or older officer trying to control someone bigger and stronger without going hands-to-holster. That’s the whole use case. It’s not a crowd control weapon. It’s not for mouthing off. It’s the thing an officer reaches for in the three or four seconds where the only real alternatives are a baton, a pile of bodies, or a Glock.
And this isn’t some untested prototype somebody dreamed up in a garage last month. This device has already been fielded by several hundred agencies across more than thirty states — local police departments, county jails, and even hospitals managing combative patients, because apparently the same tool that’s “disgusting and barbaric” when ICE might use it is perfectly acceptable when your local sheriff’s deputy or a psych-ward nurse is the one holding it. Funny how that works. The company that makes it, Compliant Technologies, is a Service-Disabled Veteran-Owned Small Business — meaning the people who built this thing to keep OTHER law enforcement officers and their subjects safer are veterans themselves. But sure, tell me again how nobody who supports this cares about anybody’s safety.
Now. Guess who is furious that ICE might have that option.
THE LIST OF PEOPLE WHO’D RATHER YOU KEEP READING ABOUT FUNERALS
New York Attorney General Letitia James stood at a podium — flanked, naturally, by Governor Kathy Hochul — and announced she was “outraged,” warning of “criminal and civil consequences” for any agent who uses the device in her state. Not outraged about agents having NOTHING between empty hands and a firearm. Outraged about the thing designed to prevent that gap.
Rep. Pramila Jayapal posted that the gloves “won’t make anyone safer” and just give ICE “another dangerous tool.” Reps. Maxwell Frost and Delia Ramirez said essentially the same thing within hours of each other, because nothing says “independent thought” like four Democrats hitting the same talking point on the same afternoon. The ACLU’s Jenn Rolnick Borchetta called it a “recipe for harm,” and the National Immigration Law Center’s Kica Matos went with “disgusting and barbaric” — which, respectfully, is quite a description for a glove that hasn’t caused a single documented proper-use injury in the several hundred agencies already carrying it.
Here’s my question for all of them, and I’ll even give you three multiple-choice answers, because I’m a generous teacher: when you fight to strip away an intermediate option specifically built to shorten a physical struggle and avoid escalation, what EXACTLY do you think the remaining options are? Is it A) you haven’t read the procurement notice and are just repeating whatever your press office handed you, B) you genuinely don’t understand what a force continuum is, or C) you understand it perfectly well and you need the outrage more than you need the outcome? Pick one. I’ll wait. (I won’t actually wait. None of you answer these.)
AND THEN THERE’S GERALDO
I have to give special attention to Geraldo Rivera here, because his meltdown on NewsNation deserves its own paragraph. He called the gloves “sickening” and “disgusting,” asked why ICE doesn’t just get “cattle prods” instead, and said, on camera, that he’d like to “put those gloves on and slap around the inventor a little bit” so the man could “see how he likes it.” A grown man, on national television, fantasizing out loud about assaulting a veteran small-business owner because he built a compliance tool safer than a TASER. He then pivoted to seven-year-olds standing alone in immigration court, which, respectfully, has nothing whatsoever to do with a wearable glove used during a physical arrest attempt. That’s not an argument. That’s a topic change wearing a trench coat.
Here’s the part that should embarrass him more than anything: this is the SAME Geraldo Rivera who, after the shooting of Renee Good, publicly said “I love cops, but they sometimes f— up,” called her killing “entirely unnecessary,” and put the blame squarely “on ICE.” So by his OWN stated logic, ICE agents made a fatal, unnecessary decision to use lethal force in a situation that didn’t require it. And his proposed fix for that problem is… to make sure they have even fewer non-lethal options next time? That’s not compassion. That’s not even coherent. That’s Quinn’s Law in a blazer.
The counterpoint came from a use-of-force expert who actually studies this stuff for a living: John Peters, president of the Institute for the Prevention of In-Custody Deaths, told the Associated Press the sensation is “immediate and sharp” — he compares it to a bee sting — and called it “certainly an effective tool” when someone is resisting. He specifically noted the advantage for “smaller officers or weaker officers or older officers,” because it can produce faster takedowns and shorter confrontations. That’s not a company spokesman. That’s an independent researcher whose entire professional focus is reducing deaths in custody, and his read is the opposite of Geraldo’s.
And for the guest on that same panel who compared the glove to “authoritarian regimes” spraying protesters with fire hoses — I’d genuinely love to understand the reasoning there, because an authoritarian regime doesn’t require its enforcers to be re-certified every two years, doesn’t cap the tool at three-second, skin-contact-only applications, and doesn’t log every single activation with a timestamp the way this device’s newer generation does. You know what authoritarian regimes actually do? Detain people indefinitely without due process. Disappear dissidents. Shoot first and skip the paperwork. A logged, time-limited compliance glove that a nurse’s aide is legally allowed to use on a combative dementia patient is not the Stasi. It’s closer to a strong smartwatch than a cattle prod, but “smartwatch” doesn’t get you booked on cable news.
LET’S TALK ABOUT MINNEAPOLIS, BECAUSE THAT’S REALLY WHAT THIS IS ABOUT
Every one of these statements this week landed against the backdrop of Minneapolis, and I’m not going to pretend otherwise, because pretending otherwise would be dishonest and I don’t do that.
Renee Good was shot in her car on January 7th. Alex Pretti, a 37-year-old ICU nurse, was shot on January 24th after a chaotic street encounter with federal agents. The initial administration statements claimed Pretti “attacked” agents, was “brandishing” a weapon, and intended to “massacre” law enforcement. Every one of those specific claims has since been walked back or directly contradicted — by DHS’s OWN preliminary report to Congress. So let’s not argue about the spin anymore. Let’s argue about the documented timeline, because CBP wrote it down, and multiple bystander videos back it up frame by frame.
THE ACTUAL DOCUMENTED SEQUENCE — NOT THE SPIN FROM EITHER SIDE
Here is what CBP’s own report, plus the video analysis done by CNN and NBC, actually establishes, in order:
One. A single CBP officer, alone, was pushing two women out of the roadway during the operation. One of them ran toward Pretti. The officer deployed OC (pepper) spray on Pretti and the woman. This is stage one: ONE officer, empty-hand and chemical spray only, no backup yet involved.
Two. That same officer, still largely alone, attempted to take Pretti into custody. Pretti resisted, and a struggle began. This is stage two: still an early-stage physical resistance, the exact moment every use-of-force curriculum in the country calls the “golden window” — the few seconds where the outcome is most changeable before more bodies and more adrenaline get added to the pile.
Three. Additional agents converged and joined the struggle, forming what CNN’s own reporting calls a “scrum” — multiple officers on top of Pretti, some strikes landed, chaos rising, visibility of hands and waistband dropping to near zero for everyone involved, including the agents themselves.
Four. Mid-pile, one agent reached into Pretti’s waistband and physically removed a handgun — a legally permitted firearm Pretti never drew, according to DHS’s own report, which pointedly does NOT claim he reached for it or brandished it. The agent who found it had nothing in his hand until that moment.
Five. Another agent — who, per CNN’s video review, had been turned away from Pretti entirely, distracted with a different protester — spun around into the tail end of the scrum, heard “He’s got a gun!” shouted multiple times, and drew his own weapon.
Six. Roughly one to five seconds after the gun was pulled from Pretti’s waistband — while Pretti was on his knees, bent forward, already substantially physically controlled by multiple officers — two agents opened fire. Nine or more rounds, by video count. DHS’s own report never says the shooting officers saw Pretti with the gun in his hand, because by every account, he never had it in his hand at all once the encounter turned physical.
A former Federal Law Enforcement Training Center instructor, Marc Brown, reviewed this same footage for CBS and said the tactical decision-making raises “a lot of unanswered questions” — specifically that seeing a weapon “doesn’t warrant shooting” on its own, because, in his words, “the key is the hands.” If the hands are occupied — and Pretti’s were, underneath a pile of federal agents — a weapon nearby is “a concern, but not necessarily a problem or threat.” A former FBI agent, Mike German, flagged a second, separate problem: agents were standing close enough to each other and to Pretti that basic firearms-safety “backstop” doctrine — know what’s behind your target before you fire — was already compromised before the trigger was ever pulled.
So here is the honest, unspun shape of what happened: a single-officer chemical-spray encounter escalated, in a matter of seconds, into a multi-agent pileup, inside of which a weapon was located under chaotic, low-visibility conditions, followed almost instantly by gunfire aimed into a tangle of officers and a restrained man. Nobody planned it that way. That is exactly the problem.
WHY THAT SPECIFIC SEQUENCE MAKES THE “MORE LIKELY THAN NOT” CASE FOR THE GLOVE
I’m a science teacher. I don’t get to just FEEL my way to a conclusion — I have to show my work. So let’s show it.
The entire deadly cascade above hinges on ONE transition: the point where a single-officer physical resistance turned into a multi-agent scrum. Everything downstream of that transition — the lost visibility, the weapon discovered mid-tangle, the “gun” shout into a crowd of officers with drawn weapons, the one-to-five-second decision window compressed to almost nothing — flows directly FROM that transition. Stop the transition, and you very likely stop the cascade. That’s not a hunch. That’s how every documented use-of-force analysis of “contagious” chaotic group encounters works, which is exactly why FLETC and academies train “isolate and control early” as doctrine in the first place.
Now overlay what the G.L.O.V.E. is actually built to do: deliver an immediate, localized pain-compliance response to bare or thinly-covered skin the instant a SINGLE officer is already in contact with a resisting subject — which, per CBP’s own report, is precisely the moment that first officer was in with Pretti, mid-pepper-spray, before backup piled on. That officer already had his hands on Pretti. He didn’t need a second, third, fourth, and fifth agent to physically win a wrestling match. He needed three seconds of interrupted coordination to get a wrist, a cuff, and control — the manufacturer’s own documented compliance window is typically UNDER three seconds. Every agency using this device reports the same basic effect: rapid, brief distraction that ends a physical struggle before it becomes a group struggle.
Play the tape forward with that tool in the first officer’s hand instead of just pepper spray and bare hands. A three-second compliance window, applied at contact, plausibly ends the struggle with ONE or TWO officers involved instead of five-plus. Fewer bodies means the waistband search — if one was even still necessary — happens with Pretti already controlled, hands secured, not buried at the bottom of a pile while an agent blindly reaches in. It means no one is shouting “gun” into a chaotic tangle of officers with weapons already half-drawn, because the entire tangle that created that chaos never fully forms. It means the officer who ultimately fired — the one CNN’s own review shows was turned away, distracted, and spun around into an already-escalated scene — never gets handed a scene that’s already spiraled past the point of controlled decision-making.
Could cold weather have made the device less reliable? Sure — that’s a legitimate, honest limitation, and I’m not going to pretend it isn’t, because I don’t sell used cars. Minnesota in late January means coats, gloves, thick fabric, all of which degrade this device’s effectiveness through clothing. But the officers were ALREADY making contact with exposed skin — that’s how the pepper spray worked, that’s how a cuffing attempt works, hands and wrists are typically the first point of contact in exactly this kind of restraint attempt, and that’s precisely where this device is designed to be applied.
Put all of that together — the documented single-officer starting point, the documented golden-window doctrine that every academy already teaches, the manufacturer’s documented sub-three-second compliance data, and the specific, verified sequence of THIS encounter — and I think the honest, evidence-based conclusion is that it’s more likely than not that early, single-officer use of a contact compliance tool would have shortened or ended the physical struggle before the multi-agent pileup ever formed, which is the single condition every other bad thing in that sequence depended on. That’s not a guarantee. Nobody gets to promise you a guarantee about a hypothetical. But “more likely than not” happens to be the exact legal standard — preponderance of the evidence — that a civil court will eventually apply to this very case. I’m allowed to apply the same standard to the policy question sitting right next to it.
So when the same politicians who are demanding accountability over exactly this kind of escalation are, in the same week, fighting to make sure agents never have that early, single-officer, non-lethal option again, I’m allowed to ask the obvious question. I’m not accusing anyone of wanting a specific outcome. I’m asking why the response to “an encounter spiraled out of control before anyone could stop it” is apparently “make sure the tool built to stop it early never gets issued.” That’s not protecting anybody. That’s narrowing the menu down to bare hands and a Glock, and then acting shocked when a Glock is what eventually gets used.
Wait — they already tried this play once, didn’t they? Defund the police, eliminate cash bail, and act SHOCKED — SHOCKED — when crime goes up and cities beg for federal help. What’s next, ban body cameras because they might catch something inconvenient… oh wait, ICE just got ordered to wear those too, and somehow that ALSO wasn’t good enough for the people currently demanding “accountability.”
QUINN’S LAW, RIGHT ON SCHEDULE
Jim Quinn’s First Law of Liberalism: liberalism always generates the exact opposite of its stated intent. You cannot possibly claim your priority is fewer people getting shot while simultaneously campaigning to remove the one piece of equipment engineered to reduce exactly that. Those two positions cannot both be true at once. One of them is theater.
And Quinn’s Fourth Law explains WHY the theater works: liberalism only succeeds when the public is scared into believing it will not survive without it. You don’t build a durable protest movement around “this specific device has a good safety record and gives smaller officers a fighting chance against bigger suspects.” You build it around “shock gloves,” “torture,” “electrocution” — words chosen for how they FEEL, not what the device actually does under its own published specs. Fear is the product. The glove is just this week’s shelf display.
And don’t sleep on Quinn’s Ninth Law either: to liberals, intentions are more significant than the outcomes they achieve. It genuinely does not matter to this crowd whether opposing the glove leads to MORE gunfire down the road, not less. What matters is that they were photographed being outraged about it today. The outcome is somebody else’s problem for a future news cycle. The intention — “I fought the shock glove” — is the whole transaction.
THIS SAME WEEK, IN CALIFORNIA — A DIFFERENT KIND OF “SAFETY” ARGUMENT
While this glove fight was playing out, a 68-year-old retiree named Todd Stewart was stabbed to death outside his own home in Martinez, California. Prosecutors say the man charged, Marcos Iriarte-Valdez, an illegal alien from Venezuela who also holds Spanish citizenship, had been arrested in April for residential burglary, arrested AGAIN on August 4th for violating the terms of his home-detention monitoring, and released on his own recognizance by Contra Costa Superior Court Judge Nichelle Holmes — a Newsom appointee — on August 5th. Stewart was dead the next afternoon. ICE had an active detainer on Iriarte-Valdez sitting there since September of last year. California’s sanctuary framework meant that detainer never got honored, because the state has built noncooperation into law.
I want you to sit with the timing of that, because it’s the whole article in miniature. In the SAME general window that Letitia James is threatening “criminal and civil consequences” against ICE agents who might use a non-lethal glove, a judge in a different sanctuary state released a twice-arrested man on his own recognizance, and a father of a family was murdered less than twenty-four hours later. One of those decisions gets a press conference about accountability. Guess which one.
This is straight out of the same playbook I laid out in “The Democrat Protection Racket.” A protection racket works by creating — or tolerating — a problem, then positioning yourself as the only solution, all while making sure the problem never fully goes away, because the moment it does, you’re irrelevant. Sanctuary policy is the criminal-justice version of a gun-free zone sign: it doesn’t stop the dangerous person, it just guarantees the people trying to STOP the dangerous person have fewer tools to do it with. Judge Holmes’ own described judicial philosophy — that “justice” can mean “a treatment program, or intensive counseling, and sometimes it means a dismissal” rather than incarceration — is a fine sentiment for a first-time shoplifter. It is not a fine sentiment for a man already facing burglary charges and a home-detention violation. Todd Stewart’s family didn’t get counseling. They got a funeral.
AND WHILE THEY’RE FIGHTING THE GLOVE, THEY’RE ALSO FIGHTING EVERYTHING ELSE
Let’s be honest about the full scope of what’s happening in Sacramento right now, because the glove is not an isolated fight — it’s one front in a coordinated campaign. This year alone, California lawmakers have moved bills to slap a 50 percent tax on for-profit immigration detention centers, ban local law enforcement officers from moonlighting as federal immigration agents, restrict ICE’s ability to make arrests at courthouses, and make it easier to sue federal officers over alleged civil-rights violations — on top of an already-signed law banning ICE agents from wearing masks that conceal their identity, even though DHS says agents and their families have faced doxxing and death threats specifically because their faces are exposed. Every single one of these gets marketed as a “safety” measure. Not one of them makes it easier for a federal officer to safely take a resisting suspect into custody without pulling a trigger. You can tax detention centers, sue individual agents, and ban masks all you want — none of that puts a single additional non-lethal option into an officer’s hands in the three seconds that actually matter. If anything, it does the opposite: officers operating unmasked, facing more legal exposure, with fewer tools, in a state actively working to slow federal enforcement down. That’s not a safety agenda. That’s a liability generator with a press release attached.
WHAT NOBODY MENTIONS
Per-unit cost on this device runs around $2,500. The entire national contract, outfitting thousands of agents across two full ICE divisions, tops out around $20 million — that’s the same rough dollar amount some cities have blown on a single failed light-rail extension study. For that price, you get a tool that manufacturer data and several hundred adopting agencies say resolves physical resistance in under three seconds with functionally zero documented injury from proper use. Compare that to the cost — in dollars, in lawsuits, in lives, in political fallout, in agents placed on administrative leave for the rest of their careers — of a SINGLE incident like Minneapolis. Letitia James wants to talk about “criminal and civil consequences” for agents who use the glove. Where was that fire in her belly for the actual gunfire?
THIS ISN’T EVEN THE FIRST TIME THEY’VE RUN THIS PLAY
Pepper spray was “torture” when it was first adopted. TASERs were “torture” when THEY were first adopted, and now you’ll find plenty of the same advocacy groups arguing a TASER should have been used INSTEAD of a firearm in some other encounter, because the goalposts move depending on which tool is currently on the table. Body-worn cameras were fought too, right up until they became useful for catching officers behaving badly — at which point they suddenly became mandatory, non-negotiable, can’t-live-without-them. Notice the pattern? Whatever tool is currently proposed is “dangerous” and “barbaric.” The tool that was fought LAST time quietly becomes the baseline “why didn’t they just use THAT” standard for the NEXT controversy. It’s not principle. It’s a moving target with a permanent home in the “no” column, no matter which specific piece of equipment is on the table that week.
I’ll do something the outrage brigade won’t: I’ll give you the honest downside, because I’m not selling you a used car. There IS a real lawsuit out of Kentucky — the Mansfield case — where a man in custody died after officers combined dozens of TASER and glove applications, wildly exceeding the manufacturer’s own 15-second guidance, on someone already in methamphetamine-induced crisis (excited delirium, which requires medics to give enough Ketamine to shut down a horse). That’s a legitimate cautionary tale about training, supervision, and discipline. It is an argument for strict policy and accountability on HOW the tool gets used. It is not an argument for pretending the tool itself is the villain, any more than a scalpel misused by an untrained hand is an argument against surgery.
That’s the difference between me and the people quoted above. I can hold two facts in my head at once: this needs guardrails, AND agents having options besides a firearm is a good thing. Apparently that’s advanced math for some of our elected officials.
THE GOAL THAT’S BEEN SITTING IN THE CONGRESSIONAL RECORD SINCE 1963
On January 10, 1963, Congressman Albert Herlong read 45 Communist Goals for America into the Congressional Record. Goal 38: transfer police power to social agencies — strip enforcement of its tools and its teeth, then act baffled when enforcement fails. I’m not telling you there’s a secret memo. I’m telling you the OUTCOME matches the goal whether or not anyone in that press conference has ever heard of Herlong. Defund the department, ban the de-escalation tool, then hold a vigil when the only remaining option gets used. That’s not a conspiracy. That’s a pattern, and patterns don’t require a conspiracy to repeat themselves.
THE SAVIOR RACKET — WHO ACTUALLY NEEDS A MARTYR MORE THAN A MIRACLE
Every human being is built with a savior-shaped hole. That’s not a talking point, that’s just theology and psychology agreeing with each other for once. Take God out of that hole and something else rushes in to fill it — always has, always will. The only real question is who answers the vacancy.
Christianity’s answer is uncomfortable, because it asks something OF you. Jesus didn’t hand the man at the pool of Bethesda a permanent disability check and a pamphlet on his rights — He told him to get up and walk, then later found him and said “sin no more.” He didn’t feed the five thousand as a monthly benefit program; He did it once, as a sign, and when the crowd came back the next day expecting round two, He rebuked them for chasing the bread instead of the meaning behind it. Salvation, in the actual text, is a call to REPENT — to change, to turn, to stop being the thing that was killing you. It costs you your old self. That’s the deal, and it’s always been the deal.
Here’s the version being sold instead, and I want you to notice it never gets said out loud in exactly these words, because it doesn’t need to be — the policy design says it for them: You don’t have to change. Stay exactly as you are. Fat, lazy, lustful, cheating, confused, abusive, addicted, entitled, whatever your particular chain happens to be — keep it. We will handle it. We’ll subsidize it, we’ll excuse it, we’ll find you a licensed professional to explain that none of it is really your fault, and if anyone suggests otherwise we’ll call THEM the hateful one. All we ask in return is your vote. Every cycle. Forever. That’s not salvation. That’s a subscription service with a campaign logo on it, and the introductory rate never actually ends.
And a savior built on “stay as you are, I’ll cover it” has one structural requirement that a savior built on “rise and change” does not: it needs you to keep believing you can’t survive without it. Quinn’s Fourth Law again — liberalism only succeeds when the public is scared into believing it will not survive without it — except now apply it person to person, not just policy to policy. A movement that runs on permanent victimhood cannot afford a fixed problem. Fixed problems graduate. Fixed problems stop showing up to the rally. So the incentive, structurally, mechanically, whether or not a single person involved consciously intends it, is to keep the wound open rather than close it.
I want to be precise here, because precision is the whole point of being a science teacher instead of a shock jock: I am not accusing anyone of wanting Alex Pretti or Renee Good to die. I don’t believe that, and saying it would make me exactly the kind of dishonest actor I’ve spent this entire article arguing against. What I am saying is colder and, I think, more damning: when a tragedy happens inside a system built on permanent grievance, that tragedy doesn’t get treated as a problem to be SOLVED — it gets absorbed as a sermon illustration and the machine moves straight to the next one, without ever circling back to ask the boring, practical, unglamorous question of “how do we make sure this specific chain of events can’t happen again.” That’s why the press conference was about suing agents who use a de-escalation glove instead of about why the first officer on scene didn’t have one. A miracle ends the story. A martyr keeps it running. And a savior who needs the story to keep running has no real incentive to ever deliver the miracle.
Jesus healed people and told them to go live differently. This crowd needs you sick, scared, and showing up to vote for the cure they’ll never actually let you have.
LET ME BE FAIR, BECAUSE MY STUDENTS ARE WATCHING
I’ll say this plainly, because intellectual honesty matters more to me than winning a Twitter fight: Alex Pretti’s family deserves real answers, and if the eventual investigation shows the shooting officers made a bad tactical call under pressure, that needs to be handled through the same accountability process any officer would face — no different standard up, no different standard down. Marc Brown was right to flag “unanswered questions.” Mike German was right to flag the backstop problem. None of that is in dispute, and none of it requires me to pretend the shooting was justified to also believe that better equipment earlier in the encounter would have made it less likely to happen at all. Both things can be true. Demanding accountability for what went wrong AND fighting to give agents better tools to prevent it from going wrong next time are not opposite positions — they are the SAME position, if you actually care about outcomes instead of headlines.
That’s the whole difference between what I’m arguing and what Letitia James, Kathy Hochul, Pramila Jayapal, Maxwell Frost, Delia Ramirez, and the ACLU are arguing. They want you to believe you have to choose: accountability OR better equipment. I’m telling you, as someone who has actually had to make split-second calls about which tool saves a life and which one doesn’t, that you can want BOTH, and the only reason to pretend you can’t is that “both” doesn’t generate the same viral outrage clip.
WHAT I’D ACTUALLY LIKE TO SEE
Rigorous training standards. Mandatory activation logging — which, by the way, the newer generation of this device already has built in, unlike a fist or a trigger, neither of which come with a black box. Clear rules on vulnerable populations. Real discipline for misuse, the same way I’d want it for any use-of-force tool. What I will not do is pretend that fighting to take a de-escalation option OFF the table, in the same news cycle as a funeral, is somehow the safety-minded position. It is the opposite of that. It is Quinn’s First Law wearing a press badge.
SO LET’S GO BACK TO THE TITLE
“The protests were never about keeping citizens safe.” I don’t say that lightly, and I’ve tried to show my work on every claim in this article instead of just asserting it and walking away — which, notably, is more than the Homeland Security Secretary did in the first twenty-four hours after the Minneapolis shooting, before her own agency’s report quietly walked her claims back. But look at the actual pattern laid out above: a documented encounter that spiraled from one officer to a multi-agent pileup in seconds, a preventable weapon discovery under chaos, and a policy response from the loudest voices in the room that focuses ENTIRELY on removing the one tool built to stop that spiral from happening in the first place. If safety were actually the goal, the press conference would have been about WHY that first officer didn’t have a better option — not about suing anyone who tries to give him one next time.
IF THIS ARTICLE MADE YOU THINK: LIKE this article so the algorithm shows it to people who need to read it. SHARE this — every share really helps get the word out. Use it. COMMENT below with your take. If you were the officer with your hands already on a resisting subject, would you rather have a glove or nothing but a holster? Tell me.
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But what do I know. I am only a medically retired combat medic who has packed more real gunshot wounds than most of these politicians have read pages of the procurement notices they’re holding press conferences about.
Mike Borowski is a medically retired Army combat medic with 23 years of service, including a combat deployment to Iraq, and a high school Anatomy and Physics teacher at a high-need Career Technical district in Northeast Ohio — where he also wrote and published the textbooks for both courses. He runs “Bski’s Classroom,” a platform dedicated to cutting through political noise with data, history, and the kind of blunt honesty that comes from someone who has seen both war and the American classroom up close.
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