I don’t know about you, but when I took my first firearms class focused on defensive use of handguns, the instructor — Randy Cain — made sure everyone memorized Jeff Cooper’s four rules of gun safety:
1.) All guns are always loaded.
2.) Never let the muzzle cover anything you are not prepared to destroy.
3.) Keep your finger off the trigger until the sights are on target.
4.) Be sure of your target and what’s behind it.
Alas, not everyone was fortunate enough to have a teacher sensible enough pass on Cooper’s wisdom . . .
It seems that in Oz, not all of the police have learned these simple, yet effective rules. 9news.com.au reports that now former Detective Mark Garner could be sentenced to as much as twenty months in prison for allowing his GLOCK duty weapon to be used in manner for which it wasn’t designed:
A former decorated detective who let a woman use his Glock pistol as a sex toy during a steamy encounter at a [New South Wales] police station will learn if he’ll spend the next 20 months in prison.
Mark Garner began a relationship with the woman, who cannot be named, after she came into the Tweed Heads police station in June 2011 to say she had been sexually assaulted.
On one night in September 2011, while Garner was supposed to be a general duty supervisor at Tweed Heads, he and the woman snuck into the closed Kingscliff police station and had sex in various locations.
During the encounter, the woman used Garner’s police-issued Glock as a sex toy.
Not exactly perfection. And the imaginative use of the pistol wasn’t Garner’s only misdeed. As reported last month in the Sydney Daily Telegraph it turns out that the detective’s relationship with this unnamed woman led to a few other transgressions:
He also admitted to inappropriately accessing police files to gain details of the address of a person who might have taken a laptop owned by the woman.
Garner said the laptop contained photos of the pair in an “intimate session”, which would have been embarrassing and possibly career-destroying if they got out.
He admitted to the court he had tried to assist in her plan to break into the person’s home and retrieve the computer.
The court heard he had been diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder in 2012, after years of investigating serious crimes.
The so-called “New South Wales sex pistol cop” is waiting to hear his fate, although the court is apparently evaluating whether or not he could serve the time in the community under strict supervision. Is this the right time for a .40 Short & Weak joke? Probably not. The former detective will be receiving some commemorative hardware that, other than a few sharp edges, shouldn’t present any problems no matter how he and his unnamed friend may decide to use it.