Time to tell a story…a true story. I’m going to leave out specifics regarding locations and names, but this really happened, and I was there.

I was a cop, and I participated in a gun confiscation.

About 20 years ago, I was on a municipal police department SWAT team serving a small city near Cincinnati. One afternoon the pager (yes, pager) went off, and we all reported to the city building to gear up and be briefed on the situation.

The situation was this: A resident of an apartment in a small, four-unit building had called the PD to report that she had heard a neighbor in his apartment ranting about wanting to “kill everybody.” The complainant went on to state that she knew that the man who lived in the apartment had several guns, and that she had driven him to a local store recently to purchase a home surveillance camera kit.

Based on this single complaint, we loaded the truck and rolled the team out to the address, setting up out of sight of the building. The Assistant Chief (who held a law degree) arrived on scene and assumed incident command. The landlord was contacted for floor plans, at which time we also learned that the resident had no phone. This meant that the only options for contacting the man were to “knock and talk” or to break a window and put in a throw phone (a portable, hard line phone which can be inserted into a target location).