You’re a New York City cop, driving home with your spouse and kids from a pleasant family gathering watching a game on TV… a pedestrian runs into your car, you stop to help, and discover the pedestrian was being chased by a guy in a mask with a gun. That guy points the gun at you…and you draw your off-duty 9mm and shoot him.  He runs away, wounded.

No, it’s not a real case, though it certainly could have been. It’s an episode from the highly regarded TV series Blue Bloods. You can stream it from CBS’s website.

The whole show, well worth watching, is considerably more complicated than that. Ongoing story lines deeply touch what happened on 9/11/2001, and the survivor guilt of those who lived when their brothers next to them died.  But, for purposes of this blog entry, consider the following clip.  The cop’s son – present at the off-duty shooting, in the line of fire of a couple of bullets fired by the masked man – asks the police parent about guns.  See it here

It’s not about genders. It’s a little bit about cops and their loved ones: in the whole show, Tom Selleck classically says that the only thing tougher than being a cop is being married to one. I know female officers, and female armed citizens, who’ve been unable to get the reality across to the men in their lives.

I wish the screenwriters had done a little bit better job of getting the basic safety rules in order, but on the whole, what’s said by the cop in the above clip strikes me as pretty much gospel truth.

What’s y’all’s take on it?

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