{"id":1676,"date":"2012-02-22T20:53:17","date_gmt":"2012-02-23T00:53:17","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/backwoodshome.com\/blogs\/MassadAyoob\/?p=1676"},"modified":"2012-02-22T20:53:17","modified_gmt":"2012-02-23T00:53:17","slug":"a-reality-check","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.backwoodshome.com\/blogs\/MassadAyoob\/a-reality-check\/","title":{"rendered":"A REALITY CHECK\u2026"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>You\u2019re a New York City cop, driving home with your spouse and kids from a pleasant family gathering watching a game on TV\u2026 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\u2026and you draw your off-duty 9mm and shoot him.\u00a0 He runs away, wounded.<\/p>\n<p>No, it\u2019s not a real case, though it certainly could have been. It\u2019s an episode from the highly regarded TV series <em>Blue Bloods. <\/em>You can stream it from CBS\u2019s website.<\/p>\n<p>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.\u00a0 But, for purposes of this blog entry, consider the following clip.\u00a0 The cop\u2019s son \u2013 present at the off-duty shooting, in the line of fire of a couple of bullets fired by the masked man \u2013 asks the police parent about guns.\u00a0 See it here<\/p>\n<p><object width=\"560\" height=\"315\" classid=\"clsid:d27cdb6e-ae6d-11cf-96b8-444553540000\" codebase=\"http:\/\/download.macromedia.com\/pub\/shockwave\/cabs\/flash\/swflash.cab#version=6,0,40,0\"><param name=\"allowFullScreen\" value=\"true\" \/><param name=\"allowscriptaccess\" value=\"always\" \/><param name=\"src\" value=\"http:\/\/www.youtube.com\/v\/L_CaerYv28Q?version=3&amp;hl=en_US&amp;rel=0\" \/><param name=\"allowfullscreen\" value=\"true\" \/><embed width=\"450\" height=\"253\" type=\"application\/x-shockwave-flash\" src=\"http:\/\/www.youtube.com\/v\/L_CaerYv28Q?version=3&amp;hl=en_US&amp;rel=0\" allowFullScreen=\"true\" allowscriptaccess=\"always\" allowfullscreen=\"true\" \/><\/object><\/p>\n<p>It\u2019s not about genders. It\u2019s 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\u2019ve been unable to get the reality across to the men in their lives.<\/p>\n<p>I wish the screenwriters had done a little bit better job of getting the basic safety rules in order, but on the whole, what\u2019s said by the cop in the above clip strikes me as pretty much gospel truth.<\/p>\n<p>What\u2019s y\u2019all\u2019s take on it?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>You\u2019re a New York City cop, driving home with your spouse and kids from a pleasant family gathering watching a game on TV\u2026 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 [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":9,"featured_media":6428,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[13],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-1676","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-safety"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.backwoodshome.com\/blogs\/MassadAyoob\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1676","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.backwoodshome.com\/blogs\/MassadAyoob\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.backwoodshome.com\/blogs\/MassadAyoob\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.backwoodshome.com\/blogs\/MassadAyoob\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/9"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.backwoodshome.com\/blogs\/MassadAyoob\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1676"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.backwoodshome.com\/blogs\/MassadAyoob\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1676\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.backwoodshome.com\/blogs\/MassadAyoob\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/6428"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.backwoodshome.com\/blogs\/MassadAyoob\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1676"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.backwoodshome.com\/blogs\/MassadAyoob\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1676"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.backwoodshome.com\/blogs\/MassadAyoob\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1676"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}