About a week ago I was standing in line to get lunch while I was at work and on the TV was a replay of President Obama speaking about gun control. His backdrop was a conveniently placed group of police officers. I was more interested in what I wanted on my sub than what was being said on TV until the man behind me asked me what I thought about the gun control measures. I wish I had a picture of the manâ€™s face when he heard my response because his jaw literally dropped when I told him I was completely against them and thought further gun control would do nothing but disarm the law-abiding citizens.

His next question was â€œWhat if they used one of those semi-automatic killing machines to shoot at you? Isn’t that enough for you to want them banned?â€ I politely told him no, that wasn’t enough because the one thing I know about criminals is they donâ€™t obey laws. That is in fact why we call them criminals. I also told him that I am responsible for my own safety, and that I fully support a citizen’s SecondÂ Amendment protected right to own standard and high capacity magazines and semiautomatic weapons that could potentially save their life one day. I left that man standing somewhat dumbfounded in the middle of Subway not knowing what to ask next.

On the short drive back to my office to eat my lunch I got to thinking about President Obama using the police officers as a backdrop to further his gun control agenda and how it portrays to the uneducated public that most police officers are for gun control.Â It obviously works or the guy behind me would probably have never brought up the topic had he not seen all those officers standing behind the president. I figure he is using the officers much in the way he (and Hitler) used children to further an agenda.Â It paints a picture that not only do we have to pass these gun control measures to save kids we also have to pass them to save cops as well.

The democrats and gun control supporters are quick to throw out statistics about how many people are killed each year by gun violence and within that number there are numerous police officers represented. But the one thing nobody seems to study is out of those deaths from firearms (both civilian and police) how many were committed by legally obtained firearms? My educated guess is almost none and in my almost 10 years of law enforcement experience,Â 0% were legally owned or possessed.

An example of this 0% happened in 2008 when a trooper I worked with was shot and killed. He wasn’t killed by an AR-15 or an AK-47. He was shot at close range by a small caliber handgun and the round missed the side panel in his vest and made its way to his heart. The gun didn’t kill Shawn that night, the convicted felon that pulled the trigger did. He had even been convicted of weapons offenses and trying to kill an officer in Florida 10 years earlier and somehow they let him out of prison and the second time he was successful.

So if President Obama and Senator Feinstein want to be seen pushing their gun control agenda by using cops for the backdrop and grouping us in as the guys that want to take your guns away, they need to show how many innocent people are killed each year by legally possessed weapons compared to how many are killed by recidivist criminals.

The truth is we need less gun control and a lot more criminal control.