From the Philadelphia Inquirer, December 19, 1986, “Bill Cosby is the number-one hero of American teenagers and President Reagan has dropped from second to fourth in their favor this year, a poll released yesterday showed. The survey of 5,000 high school students by the World Almanac placed just one woman - actress Molly Ringwald - on the top-10 heroes list.” The rest of the list were all actors - Sylvester Stallone, Eddie Murphy, Chuck Norris, Clint Eastwood, Rob Lowe, Arnold Schwarzenegger and Don Johnson. Really. By the way, just last year the Buzz Feed website published a feature called “11 Times Molly Ringwald Was Your Hero”. I beg to differ.

Fast forward to 2010 and the Stage of Life website held a writing contest asking teens to answer the question, “Who is your hero”? According to a PRNewswire story, “2,500+ high school and college students visited the writing contest page, and hundreds of students submitted essays describing their hero”. Reassuringly, the number one hero in that contest turned out to be Mom. Dad placed well, and there were essays naming a grandparent, sister, brother. Family. There were some dedicated to teachers, the armed forces, sports figures and entertainers, but none that named a police officer, fire fighter or other first responder. It’s a sign of the times.

When I was a teenager, the policeman was described as the person whose job it was “to run toward danger while everyone else was running the other way”. According to the National Law Enforcement Officers Memorial Fund, “There are more than 900,000 sworn law enforcement officers now serving in the United States, which is the highest figure ever. About 12 percent of those are female”. It also says that since 1791 there have been 20,789 officers killed in the line of duty. The most tragic decade was the 1920s, no doubt Prohibition had something to do with that.

Among a population of “more than 900,000 people” you are going to get a wide spectrum of skill and talent levels with regard to the demands of the job. Most police officers are quite good at making decisions under pressure - life threatening pressure - while some are not. How many are not is anyone’s guess, but would it be unreasonable to think that it might be in the tens of thousands? More? Less? Not something that is easily quantifiable. Not everyone has what it takes to be a bona fide hero. And yet that is what we expect of police officers.

In the aftermath of the tragedy in Dallas that claimed the lives of 5 officers, Police Chief David Brown said something quite profound. As quoted in the Washington Post, “We’re asking cops to do too much in this country. We are. Every societal failure, we put it off on the cops to solve. Not enough mental health funding, let the cops handle it. … Here in Dallas we got a loose dog problem; let’s have the cops chase loose dogs. Schools fail, let’s give it to the cops. … That’s too much to ask. Policing was never meant to solve all those problems.” He hit the nail on head.

To my mind, that might be the most compelling argument against gun control that I’ve ever heard. There is a limit to what the police can do. Therefore, it is incumbent upon all of us to be able to defend ourselves when the police are not available. The answer is not to take guns away from law abiding citizens and rely completely on the police, but to ensure that every home is equipped with what is needed for the defense of that home, as they do in Switzerland. When there’s a fire, we call the fire department and we grab the fire extinguisher.

In many gun shops there is a picture of President Obama with a caption that says “gun salesman of the year”. This is because every time the president goes on television promoting gun control, there is an immediate and decided spike in the sales of firearms. It happens time and time again. In fact, the buying of firearms after an incident like happened in Dallas is a rational response by the public. People see the need to have the means to defend themselves from violence. Knee jerk calls for gun control are, in fact, irrational and illogical.

The truth is, as gun sales have skyrocketed, gun violence in the US continues to decline. This also makes logical sense. From an article that appeared in the Washington Post last December, “Premeditated mass shootings in public places are happening more often, some researchers say, plunging towns and cities into grief and riveting the attention of a horrified nation. In general, though, fewer Americans are dying as a result of gun violence — a shift that began about two decades ago. In 1993, there were seven homicides by firearm for every 100,000 Americans, according to a Pew Research Center analysis of data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. By 2013, that figure had fallen by nearly half, to 3.6.”

By the way, there are more than 100 countries that have a higher rate than the US, and in every one of them gun ownership is illegal. Gun control is simply not the answer. Including so-called “assault rifles” that were banned in 1994 (though not really - but that’s another story for another day). Prior to the ban those rifles were involved in 1.4% of all gun violence. After the ban on “assault rifles” expired in 2004, over the next 7 years, murders declined by 43%, violent crime by 43%, rapes declined by 27% and robberies by 49% - according to FBI statistics.

However, while gun violence in the general public is on the decline, an article that appeared in the Washington Post in May of last year suggests that fatal shootings by the police are on the rise. From the article, “at least 385 people [were] shot and killed by police nationwide during the first five months of this year, more than two a day, according to a Washington Post analysis. That is more than twice the rate of fatal police shootings tallied by the federal government over the past decade, a count that officials concede is incomplete”. In fact, there are no readily available reliable statistics regarding this subject, something that I find a bit disconcerting in this day and age and frankly, incomprehensible.

So while gun violence on the part of the police is on the rise, at least according to the Washington Post, we don’t hear any calls from the gun control crowd for taking guns away from police officers. Nor should we. Nor should be hear calls to take guns from law abiding citizens.

But we need to heed the advice of Dallas Police Chief Brown. We need to take some of the burden off of the police and let them do their job as originally intended; and we need to take more responsibility for our own lives. Individually and socially.

A police officer shouldn’t have to be a hero. A police officer is a human being and a citizen just like us. In order to achieve the peaceful society we desire we need to solve our personal and social problems on a different level.