Law abiding citizens with firearms for protection, hunters/sportsmen and gun nuts/collectors alike fear potential government tyranny at the mere mention of gun control and stake out self-righteous defense of gun ownership on a constitutional basis. Furthermore, they commonly argue that regulating guns would only mean criminals have guns, presumably via a black market, and law abiding citizens would not.
Well meaning and concerrned gun control advocates and/or victims of gun violence argue the "well regulated militia" verbiage never intended that 'anybody' could obtain a gun or, at the very least, the founders never dreamed gun ownership would include access to highly efficient killing weapons such as semi-automatics with high capacity magazines.
What if we could have it both ways?
The Army and I'm sure other services have what we call a "Quick Reaction Force" aka QRF for a rapid response to high risk events both in a garrison and deployment setting. This QRF may go by different names for different purposes and may not even necessarily require an armed response.
For example, though everybody is armed and MPs are attached too, there is often a QRF assigned to respond to rare or unlikely events that threaten a military outpost, in addition to 24/7 gate guards and perimeter security.
Such an event might be like when I was deployed and we had a vehicle borne IED attack on a diplomatic convoy on a road next to our perimeter wall in the Green Zone circa May 2007.
This actually made the headlines and I'll never forget it because we were having a brigade formation (incoming anybody?) and our Colonel was in the process of giving us "attaboys" about how great we were doing on our mission yadi, yadi, yadi when BOOM, BOOM, BOOM!
Everybody just froze with saucer eyes and big "WTF" expressions on our faces. Then, me and the other medical providers started running towards the sound thinking "oh shit, they actually broke through our wall, right next to our aid station"....then as we get closer and I see black smoke rising I think to myself "oh shit...I'm running towards this with a 9mm and a fat PA at my side"...it was actually comical in a 'we're so fucked' kind of irony at the time.
Fortunately, the guards in the guard tower there were just badly shaken, there was no perimeter breach and the worst thing that happened was it blew out all the windows in our aid station. I don't think the attack even killed the diplomatic target, but I never saw how bad the carnage was outside our walls. Anyway, I digress...
We had a QRF respond to that, but we were also the QRF in the same way that we implement it in garrison. We have a rapid response team, it's called the "Rapid Response Team" (brilliant no?) in the hospital in case somebody passes out or something, then it turns into a code blue team if it is determined someone is having a heart attack.
You might think that's confusing but actually it's warranted considering you don't want to call a code blue unless you really have somebody who had a heart attack. We had someone who was light headed after a neck traction treatment once so we called the rapid response team for that until we sorted out their confused behavior...you know, made sure they weren't having a stroke or something.
Anyway, all this made me think, you know, maybe we could get some buy-in on gun regulation with a similar, civilian organized, QRF for gun violence, particularly in areas in need, considering the police can't be everywhere at once. I'd call it C.O.C.K.E.D.
C for Civilian: This will ensure it is a democratically elected and controlled.
O for Organized: Again, by civilians, with various experts to advise etc.
C for Counter: Counter the threat...to schools, small communities or other areas in need.
K for Killing: Signifying the threat we are trying to prevent/mitigate
E for Enforcement: The actions we're taking to counter the killing, such as having trained people on the lookout where police can't be. Not necessarily like putting guns in the hands of teachers, but people experienced or trained in the use of firearms that are readily available in the event of something like Sandy Hook.
D for Division: Like a "Division" of Soldiers, but comprised of civilians. A unit of citizen soldiers if you will, ever alert.
C.O.C.K.E.D.
Civilian sentinels comprising a well regulated militia.