Cop Busts into Hospital ICU Unit Pretending to be a Terrorist

This post originally appeared on Hullabaloo.

What is going on in this country? Do people think we are living in a
damned movie?

How's this for an ill-conceived emergency preparedness drill? An off-duty
cop pretending to be a terrorist stormed into a hospital intensive care
unit brandishing a handgun, which he pointed at nurses while herding them
down a corridor and into a room.

There, after harrowing moments, he explained that the whole caper was a
training exercise.

The staff at St. Rose Dominican Hospitals-Siena Campus, where the incident
took place Monday morning, found the exercise more traumatizing than
instructive.

Hospital employees would have been justified in fearing for their lives.

Just last year, Henderson police shot and killed an armed, hostile man in
the emergency room. So it would make sense that security and emergency
preparedness have been a focus at the hospital.

But in Monday's incident, which occurred in a unit that houses the
hospital's sickest patients, nurses, patients and their families did not
know it was a drill, said Renee Ruiz, organizer of the California Nurses
Association, which represents staff at the hospital.

I guess it's a good thing Glenn Reynolds and the boyz haven't had their
way or all the armed nurses and critically ill patients would have opened
fire on this off duty cop. Isn't that how it's supposed to work?

I just don't get this mentality. Yes, there are dangers in this world. And
we all need to be vigilant against crazy people armed with easy-to-obtain
guns. But somehow or another with this puerile Jack Bauer obsession,
common sense about violence has gone out the window and everybody's acting
like we're living in the wild west — except that even the wild west wasn't
this kind of stupid free-for-all. (Wyatt Earp was first made famous as a
lawman who confiscated cowboys' guns on their way into town.)

Sadly, I'm beginning to think all this craziness is the natural result of
emotionally stunted conservatives having a mid-life crisis. They pretended
to be adults their whole lives, but never actually grew up. So now we have
a whole bunch of frustrated, middle aged adolescents running things with
no sense of morality or limits.
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