{"id":8423,"date":"2024-07-14T09:00:00","date_gmt":"2024-07-14T13:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.backwoodshome.com\/blogs\/MassadAyoob\/?p=8423"},"modified":"2024-07-01T13:34:06","modified_gmt":"2024-07-01T17:34:06","slug":"arc-road","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.backwoodshome.com\/blogs\/MassadAyoob\/arc-road\/","title":{"rendered":"ARC ROAD"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Most cops, and many armed citizens, remember the 1963 incident in Los Angeles involving Officers Campbell and Hettinger. Two scumbags got the drop on one of these plainclothesmen, and ordered the other to surrender his weapon or they\u2019d kill his partner. The second officer complied. The two were kidnapped and driven to a rural area.\u00a0\u00a0Campbell was murdered there; Hettinger managed to run away and escape, but suffered the psychological tortures of the damned over the incident. It was memorialized in Joseph Wambaugh\u2019s best non-fiction book, \u201cThe Onion Field<\/a>,\u201d named for the spot where the killing took place.\u00a0\u00a0The incident inspired a widespread rule in law enforcement: never give up your gun.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

A similar incident occurred the following year in Gwinnett County, Georgia that resulted in three times the death toll but apparently never became national news. On a back road called Arc Road a gang of chop-shopping car thieves collided with three local lawmen. One of the thugs was an ex-cop turned bad. The chain of events went like dominoes, with each officer in turn giving up his service revolver at gunpoint to prevent the others from being murdered. It was to no avail: the cops were manacled with their own handcuffs and cold-bloodedly executed.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Read \u201cArc Road\u201d by Tony Tiffin, who meticulously researched the triple cop-killing for years. One of the lessons that came out of the Onion Field and was reinforced by the atrocity in Gwinnett County was the value of a hidden backup weapon. Most officer survival experts agree that in the California case, there would have been ample opportunity to turn the tables on the two kidnappers if either officer had been armed with a second weapon; sadly, neither were. In the Georgia case, only one of the three murder victims had a backup gun, but it was a single-shot .22 derringer he had unloaded earlier in the evening to show a brother officer and he had neglected to reload it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Today, a majority of police departments allow and encourage their field personnel to carry a second weapon securely concealed on their person, and some even issue the backup gun and require its wear on duty. Order \u201cArc Road<\/a>\u201d \u2013 and for that matter, \u201cThe Onion Field<\/a>\u201d \u2013 from Amazon.\u00a0\u00a0Back in the Seventies when I was feature editor for\u00a0Indiana Trooper\u00a0<\/em>magazine I interviewed the state policemen who had survived a similar incident. The perp snatched the .357 from the holster of one trooper, held him hostage, and convinced the second to give up his gun or he\u2019d murder the first. The second trooper acquiesced. A third trooper arrived, and had a Smith & Wesson Model 60 .38 snubnose in his hip pocket. In the shooting that followed, one of the hostage troopers was wounded in the arm but the third trooper shot down the would-be cop-killer with the backup gun.\u00a0\u00a0Altogether, a much better outcome.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Ralph Davis, Jerry Everett, and Jesse Gravitt were the men who died helpless and handcuffed in the dirt of Arc Road. Let their sacrifice be a lesson to all who go in harm\u2019s way.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Most cops, and many armed citizens, remember the 1963 incident in Los Angeles involving Officers Campbell and Hettinger. Two scumbags got the drop on one of these plainclothesmen, and ordered the other to surrender his weapon or they\u2019d kill his partner. The second officer complied. The two were kidnapped and driven to a rural area.\u00a0\u00a0Campbell […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":8424,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-8423","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-uncategorized"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.backwoodshome.com\/blogs\/MassadAyoob\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8423","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\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.backwoodshome.com\/blogs\/MassadAyoob\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=8423"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.backwoodshome.com\/blogs\/MassadAyoob\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8423\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":8425,"href":"https:\/\/www.backwoodshome.com\/blogs\/MassadAyoob\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8423\/revisions\/8425"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.backwoodshome.com\/blogs\/MassadAyoob\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/8424"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.backwoodshome.com\/blogs\/MassadAyoob\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=8423"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.backwoodshome.com\/blogs\/MassadAyoob\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=8423"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.backwoodshome.com\/blogs\/MassadAyoob\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=8423"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}