Think of an imaginary country named Utopia with a population of 100 in which there are 65 of them who either already have a job or are looking for a job. The other 35 consists of children, old people and women choosing to stay home and raise children. If 59 of the 65 already have a job and 6 people don’t have a job but are looking for one, the size of the labor force in Utopia is 65 souls [Utopian government officials and their Utopian economists call this the “labor participation rate”]. So, we now see that the unemployment rate in Utopia is 6 divided by 65 or 9.2%. Now imagine that Zork, 1 of the 6 Utopians looking for work, gets discouraged and gives up. Imagine also that the Utopian Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) does not count as unemployed anyone who gives up looking for work. Thus, Zork is no longer a part of the labor force. The labor force has been reduced from 65 to 64 with 5 people unemployed and looking for work. Now the unemployment rate is 5 divided by 64 or 7.8%. By the simple expedient of not counting Zork in the labor force, Utopia’s BLS has reduced the unemployment rate from 9.2% to 7.8%. No new jobs have been created, none of the unemployed have found work, but a dramatic drop in the unemployment rate has magically occurred in the magic Kingdom of Utopia.  Zork has suggested that the Utopian Bureau of Labor Statistics shorten its initials from BLS to just BS.

Imagine also that Utopia is a country that reelects its president every 4 years, and in the past no sitting president has ever been reelected with a Utopian unemployment rate above 8%.

With the next election on the horizon Utopians have reduced their unemployment rate below the critical 8% level and Utopia’s boy president, nicknamed Ocrama for the manner in which crammed a Utopian health care law down the throats of Utopians during his first term as president, seems to be on a glide path to reelection.

If you keep this fable in mind it might be easier to follow the rest of this post.

James Pethokoukis writing at The American:

Why the official 8.3 percent unemployment rate is a phony number. But does anyone believe an “official” unemployment rate of 8.3 percent really gives an accurate picture of the U.S. labor market? Even though the unemployment rate fell, so did the labor force participation rate (as more Americans became discouraged and gave up looking for work). Here’s what that means:

1. If the size of the U.S. labor force as a share of the total population was the same as it was when Barack Obama took office—65.7 percent then vs. 63.7 percent today—the U-3 unemployment rate would be 11.0 percent.

2. But let’s not go all the way back to January 2009. In January 2011, the unemployment rate was 9.1 percent with a participation rate of 64.2 percent. If that were the participation rate today, the unemployment rate would be 8.9 percent, instead of 8.3 percent. As an analysis from Hamilton Place Strategies concludes, “Most of the shift of the past year is due not to the improvement in the labor market, but the continued drop in participation in the labor force.”

3. Now, to be fair, some of the decline in the participation rate is aging Baby Boomers dropping out of the labor force. But taking that into account still doesn’t get us very far, as HPS notes:

Demographic projections expect that participation rate to be at 65.3 percent. If that full participation rate is the goal, our economy is “missing” 3.8 million workers, up from the 3.4 million we noted in the white paper. The unemployment rate in that context has not budged at 10.4 percent.

4. Then there’s the broader, U-6 measure of unemployment which includes the discouraged plus part-timers who wish they had full time work. That unemployment rate is still a sky-high 15.1 percent.

From the Economic Collapse Blog:

I Can’t Take It Anymore! When Will The Government Quit Putting Out Fraudulent Employment Statistics?

So does this mean that our economic problems are over? Of course not. A closer look at the numbers reveals just how fraudulent these employment statistics really are. Between December 2011 and January 2012, the number of Americans “not in the labor force” increased by a whopping 1.2 million. [i.e., the size of the labor force went down — TeeJaw] That was the largest increase [i.e., decrease — TeeJaw] ever in that category for a single month. That is how the federal government is getting the unemployment rate to go down. The government is simply pretending that huge numbers of unemployed Americans don’t want to be part of the labor force anymore. As you will see below, the employment situation in America is not improving. Yet everyone in the mainstream media is dancing around as if the economic crisis has been cancelled. I can’t take it anymore! It is beyond ridiculous that so many intelligent people continue to buy in to such fraudulent numbers.

Read more at the links to the the above excerpts.

Bill Whittle explains why it’s wrong:

See, this is the problem with this entire theory. This entire theory is, you say, let’s appeal to independents but what do independents believe? They don’t believe in anything. I’m not calling them stupid, I’m just saying the fact that they are in the middle means they have no strong political conviction liberal or conservative.

You do not win elections by taking the conservatives in the middle. You win elections by bringing the middle over to conservatives. And the way you do that is by explaining your theory and your philosophy in a lucid enough fashion so that people can see the common sense of it, and see their own self interest and their own common sense around their own life experience [that] will naturally bring them to these ideas.

This idea that we have to appeal to people who have no ideology by eliminating our own ideology is exactly backwards. We have an ideology that historically worked and provided levels of prosperity and freedom that have been unparalleled in the history of the world. And our GOP leadership is afraid of this. They’re terrified of it and the nominee will not stand up and defend it. And so we’re going to give up the winning story to go to some amorphous thing in the middle and I predict it’s not going to turn out well.

Bill Whittle, along with Scott Ott and Stephen Green, explain that and more in this video which is really, really good. I particularly like Whittle’s metaphor of Romney as the “last wig of the tail of the dying elephant.”

At the end of a DUI checkpoint about 1:00 AM in which the dead officer had been working, some detectives along with another uniformed officer went to arrest the officer charged with the illegal sex acts. He resisted, drew his weapon and fired it 4 times in directions away from the other officers. Then he pointed his gun at the uniformed officer who shot him. He died at the scene.

The officer who fired the fatal shot was the dead officer’s best friend and had been the best man in his wedding just three weeks before.

It’s not clear that the best friend/best man was part of the arrest team or just happened to be there working on the DUI checkpoint. One of the arresting detectives was the dead officer’s cousin. I guess it’s a small town. It’s also not clear why they decided to arrest a fellow officer in a confrontation on the street. Police officers are normally arrested, even for more serious crimes, either at their home or in the police station without guns drawn, usually after first asking the officer for his gun.

This is a pretty big load of misery and sorrow to come as a result of a man doing too much of his thinking with the wrong organ.

Full story at Fox News.

You heard him say it: “I’m not concerned about the very poor. We have a safety net there. If it needs a repair, I’ll fix it. I’m not concerned about the very rich…. I’m concerned about the very heart of America, the 90-95 percent of Americans who right now are struggling.”

We can be sure the Obama team has already chopped that out of the video for insertion into a future TV ad that will feature Romney saying “I’m not concerned about the very poor.” They might even be able to delete the word “very” from it to make it better fit the Obama mantra that Romney doesn’t care about the poor on any level, and for that matter Republicans in general don’t care about the poor. Obama has already signaled that class warfare will be the theme of his campaign. Of course it will. He has no record to run on. At this point we can also know for sure that the Obama team desperately wants Romney to be the Republican nominee. Class warfare doesn’t have a very good record of working in American politics, but with Romney as their opponent the Left has a better chance of pulling it off. The left is already attacking Romney for his “I’m not concerned about the poor,” statement.

He’s also getting it from the right. Jonah Goldberg, What’s Wrong With This Guy?

…great politicians on the morning after a big win, don’t force their supporters to go around defending the candidate from the charge that he doesn’t care about the poor. They just don’t.

Mark Steyn responding in agreement with Jonah Goldberg:

After half-a-century of evidence, what sort of “conservative” offers the poor the Even Greater Society? I don’t know how “electable” Mitt is, but, even if he is, the greater danger, given the emptiness of his campaign to date, is that he’ll be elected with no real mandate for the course correction the Brokest Nation in History urgently needs. In last Monday’s debate, Newt said he wasn’t interested in going to Washington to “manage the decline”. Mitt’s just told us that he’s happy to “manage the decline” for the poor – but who knows who else?

The weekly Standard,

Romney’s remark isn’t merely tone-deaf, it’s also un-conservative. The standard conservative argument is that a conservative economic agenda will help everyone. For the poor, that means getting as many as possible back on their feet and working rather than languishing as wards of the welfare state.

Mitt Romney, the successful business man, showed this morning that he lacks a basic understanding of the principles of economics. He seems to think like Obama, that taxing the rich somehow helps the middle class and the poor. He misses the point that taking money out of the private sector by increasing taxes on anyone, especially the so-called rich, reduces private sector spending and investment and thereby impairs private sector job creation.  Romney says it is the struggling middle class that needs a tax cut, and his tax plan does not offer tax relief for anyone making more than $200,00 a year.  In fact he wants to increase taxes on those making more than $200,000 a year.  Does he not know that almost 50% of Americans currently do not pay any income tax?  What good will a tax cut do for them?  Does he not know that a tax cut for someone who is unemployed does nothing to help that person get a job?  Does he not know that the luxury tax to punish the rich for being rich instead punished workers in the luxury yacht manufacturing industry while bringing near zero revenue to the government?  And that the luxury tax was repealed when those unemployed workers protested?

It used to be understood that no welfare program helps the poor like a vigorous growing economy creating plentiful jobs. Nothing elevates the dignity of the poor like working and getting paid for it. If this is lost on Mitt Romney and he becomes the Republican nominee, the Republican party is lost as well.

In case you don’t remember what was in the Contract With America, or were too young to have been paying much attention at the time, here it is in it’s simple, short, easy to read entirety:

REPUBLICAN CONTRACT WITH AMERICA

As Republican Members of the House of Representatives and as citizens seeking to join that body we propose not just to change its policies, but even more important, to restore the bonds of trust between the people and their elected representatives.

That is why, in this era of official evasion and posturing, we offer instead a detailed agenda for national renewal, a written commitment with no fine print.

This year’s election offers the chance, after four decades of one-party control, to bring to the House a new majority that will transform the way Congress works. That historic change would be the end of government that is too big, too intrusive, and too easy with the public’s money. It can be the beginning of a Congress that respects the values and shares the faith of the American family.

Like Lincoln, our first Republican president, we intend to act “with firmness in the right, as God gives us to see the right.” To restore accountability to Congress. To end its cycle of scandal and disgrace. To make us all proud again of the way free people govern themselves.

On the first day of the 104th Congress, the new Republican majority will immediately pass the following major reforms, aimed at restoring the faith and trust of the American people in their government:

FIRST, require all laws that apply to the rest of the country also apply equally to the Congress;
SECOND, select a major, independent auditing firm to conduct a comprehensive audit of Congress for waste, fraud or abuse;
THIRD, cut the number of House committees, and cut committee staff by one-third;
FOURTH, limit the terms of all committee chairs;
FIFTH, ban the casting of proxy votes in committee;
SIXTH, require committee meetings to be open to the public;
SEVENTH, require a three-fifths majority vote to pass a tax increase;
EIGHTH, guarantee an honest accounting of our Federal Budget by implementing zero base-line budgeting.
Thereafter, within the first 100 days of the 104th Congress, we shall bring to the House Floor the following bills, each to be given full and open debate, each to be given a clear and fair vote and each to be immediately available this day for public inspection and scrutiny.

1. THE FISCAL RESPONSIBILITY ACT: A balanced budget/tax limitation amendment and a legislative line-item veto to restore fiscal responsibility to an out- of-control Congress, requiring them to live under the same budget constraints as families and businesses. (Bill Text) (Description)

2. THE TAKING BACK OUR STREETS ACT: An anti-crime package including stronger truth-in- sentencing, “good faith” exclusionary rule exemptions, effective death penalty provisions, and cuts in social spending from this summer’s “crime” bill to fund prison construction and additional law enforcement to keep people secure in their neighborhoods and kids safe in their schools. (Bill Text) (Description)

3. THE PERSONAL RESPONSIBILITY ACT: Discourage illegitimacy and teen pregnancy by prohibiting welfare to minor mothers and denying increased AFDC for additional children while on welfare, cut spending for welfare programs, and enact a tough two-years-and-out provision with work requirements to promote individual responsibility. (Bill Text) (Description)

4. THE FAMILY REINFORCEMENT ACT: Child support enforcement, tax incentives for adoption, strengthening rights of parents in their children’s education, stronger child pornography laws, and an elderly dependent care tax credit to reinforce the central role of families in American society. (Bill Text) (Description)

5. THE AMERICAN DREAM RESTORATION ACT: A S500 per child tax credit, begin repeal of the marriage tax penalty, and creation of American Dream Savings Accounts to provide middle class tax relief. (Bill Text) (Description)

6. THE NATIONAL SECURITY RESTORATION ACT: No U.S. troops under U.N. command and restoration of the essential parts of our national security funding to strengthen our national defense and maintain our credibility around the world. (Bill Text) (Description)

7. THE SENIOR CITIZENS FAIRNESS ACT: Raise the Social Security earnings limit which currently forces seniors out of the work force, repeal the 1993 tax hikes on Social Security benefits and provide tax incentives for private long-term care insurance to let Older Americans keep more of what they have earned over the years. (Bill Text) (Description)

8. THE JOB CREATION AND WAGE ENHANCEMENT ACT: Small business incentives, capital gains cut and indexation, neutral cost recovery, risk assessment/cost-benefit analysis, strengthening the Regulatory Flexibility Act and unfunded mandate reform to create jobs and raise worker wages. (Bill Text) (Description)

9. THE COMMON SENSE LEGAL REFORM ACT: “Loser pays” laws, reasonable limits on punitive damages and reform of product liability laws to stem the endless tide of litigation. (Bill Text) (Description)

10. THE CITIZEN LEGISLATURE ACT: A first-ever vote on term limits to replace career politicians with citizen legislators. (Description)

Further, we will instruct the House Budget Committee to report to the floor and we will work to enact additional budget savings, beyond the budget cuts specifically included in the legislation described above, to ensure that the Federal budget deficit will be less than it would have been without the enactment of these bills.

Respecting the judgment of our fellow citizens as we seek their mandate for reform, we hereby pledge our names to this Contract with America.

Gingrich and his followers bought an ad in TV Guide, perhaps the most widely read weekly magazine in American at the time, that set forth the key provisions and said, “These are the things we will do if you elect us.”  Mr. and Mrs. America ate it up.  Down to the wire the polls failed to predict what happened on election night.  From the first returns Republicans owned the show on every television network.  The leading news anchors were caught flat footed.  Peter Jennings looked at the returns coming in and said, “The voters are throwing a tantrum out there.”

When all the returns were in the Democrats had lost 54 seats, and Republicans had gained that many.  Democrats had controlled the U.S. House of Representatives for all but 4 of the previous 62 years.  Now the Republicans had a majority of 230-204.  Newt Gingrich, more than any one other person, was the leader that made it possible.

Democrats howled.  They called the Contract With America the “Contract ON America.”  All of that fell flat with the American people.  Here was a group of politicians who made promises in an election campaign, and they set about keeping those promises.  Not all of the measures were enacted into law.  Republicans also gained a 53-47 majority in the Senate but that’s not enough to be filibuster proof.  William Jefferson Clinton was president.  All the Republicans had promised was to propose specific legislation and to work to have it enacted into law.  They did just that.  Republicans did what people always say they want politicians to do, to keep their word after an election is over, and which most seldom ever do.

But then something happened to Newt Gingrich.  For all his brilliance and effectiveness before the election, Newt stopped telling the American people that he was doing just what they elected all those new Republicans to do.  Instead he seemed to become a bumbling and nearly incoherent figure in his public statements and dealings with President Clinton.  Soon Clinton snookered Gingrich into a government shutdown and successfully persuaded the public that the new Republican Congress  was to blame.  Previously, only presidents had taken the heat for government shutdowns.   Soon Gingrich began having nasty disagreements and quarrels with members of his own party in the House.  In essence, the mighty Gingrich became pitifully ineffective as Speaker of the House.   The reason, I thought at the time, was that he stopped doing the things that had worked for him in the past and started doing things that hurt him and the Republican cause.  As someone who saw it all happen, it was stunning to see the unraveling of what had rightly been called the “Gingrich Revolution.”  I saw him as having a outsized ego and a strange self-destructive streak.

Something similar has happened since the big win Newt Gingrich had in South Carolina.  He allowed Mitt Romney to get under his skin.  The Romney attack ads against Newt have been as dirty and dishonest as any in the history of politics.  Should Romney be the eventual nominee it’s unlikely he will go after Obama with anywhere near the vitriol he has shown in his campaign against Newt.  In response, Newt has stumbled over his ego once again and allowed Romney’s criticism, most of it just the worst sort of bald-faced lies, to throw him off his game.  Instead of contrasting himself with Obama and portraying Romney as the Massachusetts liberal that he certainly is, both of which connected with voters in South Carolina, he has gone on the defensive over Romney telling lies about him.  It’s not as if the other candidate lying about you is anything new.  It’s called free speech.  The candidate that lets it bother him to the point of going on the defensive loses.  Knowing that Newt get defensive is probably why Romney’s advisors told him to do it.

While George W. Bush proved that just ignoring the lies people tell about you allows those lies to become the truth, answering the lies is essential but must be done without making yourself look weak.  In politics, there are only two positions: offense and losing.  Defense is just another word for losing.  Nobody ever won anything in politics by defending it.

Roger Simon gets it:

For a supposedly smart guy, Newt Gingrich made a bonehead error in Florida that not only cost him that state but almost certainly any serious chance of the Republican nomination. And in so doing, he, almost idiotically, undercut the very thing that had made his candidacy successful in the first place.

After his solid victory in South Carolina, Gingrich did not continue the obvious strategy that got him there – running against Barack Obama by presenting himself to Republican voters as the great orator and thinker who could bring down the noxious incumbent, the man who rose above internecine intra-party squabbles for the greater good of his country.

Instead, he did the exact opposite. He spent the balance of his time in Florida running against Romney when he had already beaten the former governor in South Carolina. Talk about dumb. Newt let his personal antipathy overwhelm his good sense. He played defense about the picayune and the irrelevant when he should have played offense on the philosophical and substantial.

Read it all.

I for one, don’t think it’s too late for Newt to make a comeback.  It isn’t over yet.  He gave a good speech last night, the kind that might have made a difference if more of that sort had come last week.

TARP and Stimulus, or porkulus as it might be called, were both unnecessary massive spending programs that did little or nothing for the economy. We were promised lower unemployment and economic growth but we got neither. The politicians are the only ones who got what they wanted: massive amounts of money for them to spend.

The Tea Party has always been opposed by major Democrats, but now the Republican establishment has the Tea Party in its crosshairs as well. The Republican legislature in Florida has redistricted away Congressman Allen West’s district, making it harder for him to get re-elected this November. West was one of the many new Republican congressman to be elected largely by the Tea Party in 2010. You’d think that Republicans would be happy with the Tea Party for giving them such a victory in 2010, but they hate conservatives more than they love their new majority in the House of Representatives.

They need to be whipped at the ballot box by more Tea Party candidates who want to restore the American Republic and put it back in the hands of a self-governing people.

It’s time to rage against the machine and annoy the establishment Republicans, vote for Newt!

The story comes from National Public Radio, of all places. It’s positive! It’s even fair! Hell must have frozen over.

In Mexico, where criminals are armed to the teeth with high-powered weapons smuggled from the United States, it may come as a surprise that the country has some of the most restrictive gun laws in the world.

Law-abiding Mexicans who want a gun to defend themselves have no good options. Either they fight government red tape to get a legal permit, or they buy one on the black market.

After an outbreak of violence, one embattled community in northern Mexico called Colonia LeBaron has begun to ask if it’s time for the country to address its gun laws.

Residents of the LeBaron community have been murdered by gangsters attempting to intimidate them against future opposition to the criminal predation on them. Now, if the gangsters return the residents are armed and will have the ability to resist. As it should be. They sure can’t get any assistance from their government.

Read the whole thing, highly recommended.

Say Uncle:

In Mexico where criminals are armed with all kinds of weaponry, some of it provided by the US government, the otherwise law-abiding citizens are taking up arms for self-defense. A good read. They advocate the Mexican government have another look at its archaic and restrictive gun laws.

Maybe ATF could walk some guns to the good guys?

A female Denver Police Sergeant went into a Walgreens store to pick up a prescription.  Two masked men run into the pharmacy shouting “this is a stick up.”  Three women behind the counter are scared out of their wits and begin crying.  Although she never saw a weapon, and no news story I have found indicates these robbers brandished any weapon, the female off-duty cop in street clothes drew her gun from her purse, jumped between the bad guys and the store clerks and, in her own words, ”I tried to use verbal judo, I wanted them to think this crazy woman might shoot their —.”

She identified herself as a police officer and ordered the men to go to their knees and put their hands in the air.  They complied.  She asked the three women behind her to call the police.  Then she noticed one of the bad guys “sizing her up.”  He suddenly lunged at her; she fired but missed. He began beating her, using a milk crate for a weapon.  She tried to fire a second shot but her gun had jammed.   The bad guys wrestled it away from her and…[it’s not clear whether they tried to shoot her with her own gun] they ran out of the store, taking the cop’s gun with them.

Outside the store one of the robbers carjacked a vehicle and the other sped away in another car, possibly the same one the two of them had previously arrived in.  Two suspects, one 56 and the other 25, were later arrested and charged with aggravated robbery and assaulting a police officer. Disarming a police officer is a felony everywhere, and I’d expect them to be charged with that also.

In the Denver Post story the officer sums up her experience this way:  ”There might be people who question what I did. I did the best that I could do. The tactics I used were sound. The outcome to me was ideal. The women are OK.”  Yeah.  But if the bad guys had known how to clear the malfunction, the outcome might have been horribly different.

None of the stories I read indicated whether the bad guys tried to shoot the officer with her own gun, but her own words suggest that might be the case:  ”He was able to wrestle the gun from me, but like I stated, the gun had malfunctioned, it was inoperable. There was an angel on my shoulder.”

The reference to an angel on her shoulder could mean that one of the robbers did try to shoot her. However, they were not charged with attempted murder, at least not yet, as they might have been if they had tried to fire her gun at her and failed.  Perhaps a later news story will answer that question.

Lessons to be Learned

It’s always easy to criticize and Monday-morning quarterback someone’s performance under stress and so it should only be done with care, recognizing that none of us will likely perform at peak level in the same situation.  Nevertheless, there are some glaring mistakes made by the officer in this incident that deserve comment.

The first thing anyone whether police officer or lawfully armed citizen should do in this situation is decide whether to get involved or to simply be a good witness.  This is a critical decision point that should be made with intelligence guided by experience.  The experience part need not necessarily be one’s own experience.  We can learn from the experience of others, if we know what that experience happens to be.  One thing that can be known by anyone who pays attention, and should be known to every police officer, is that in most robberies it’s just about the money or the drugs or whatever they are trying to get.  Most of the time they don’t want to get into a fight with anyone, they don’t want to hurt anyone, they just want to get the money and run.  These are the “resource” criminals, they want to turn your resources into theirs, and get away fast and clean.

These are cases where a legally armed citizen or even a police officer, especially an off-duty police officer without back up, will wisely decide to be a good witness instead of a hero.  That appears to be  the case here.  Had this officer simply kept her distance, remained ready to draw her weapon if necessary to save a life or prevent injury, these bad guys would likely have been quickly apprehended without placing her’s or the other women’s lives in danger.  As it was, she needed that angel on her shoulder.  If her gun had not malfunctioned she might have been shot.

The resource criminals are the majority.  But there is another kind, the “process” criminal.  These are the truly twisted sisters who are not satisfied with the loot alone.  They do want to hurt people.  For them, it’s part of the process.  Learning to recognize them is how an armed citizen or an off-duty police officer can know when getting involved is no longer an option but a necessity to your own or someone else’s survival.

If you are facing a criminal that has gone over the threshold of robbery to aggravated assault or attempted murder, there is still another hurdle that must be jumped before deciding to engage with your weapon.  This is called “know thyself.”  Know whether you have the proper training and experience to handle what can happen next.  In this case, the officer’s gun malfunctioned.  There are three basic types of handgun malfunctions, and three types of ammunition malfunctions.  The ammo malfunctions can be ignored for most purposes because modern factory ammo of the type used by most police departments is simply so good as to make ammo malfunctions a thing of the past, except perhaps for those using their own reloaded ammunition.  The handgun malfunctions are reduced to only two because the third one, a broken firing pin spring, is rare in any gun kept in good repair.  So it comes down to the failure to eject a spent case, called a stove pipe malfunction, or a failure to feed a new cartridge, called a type III malfunction.

A police officer or an armed citizen with proper training and practice should know how to clear either of these malfunctions in about 2 seconds in order to put the gun back into battery.  This is a skill that must be learned and perfected on the firing range so that it can be done automatically, without thinking, at the critical moment. [Cops who merely stand in the shooters’ box at an indoor range and punch holes in paper to meet their periodic qualifications never get this sort of training]

I’d be hesitant to fault this officer for missing the first shot at close range since this seems to be fairly common under stress.  But if she had been able to get her gun running again she might have made her attacker have a very bad day.

The worst part of this incident is that she took a risk that was unwarranted by the circumstances.  These guys didn’t appear to have a weapon.  Unless the news stories I have read are sorely lacking, nobody ever saw a weapon.  She should have kept her distance from these guys, hit the speed dial for 911 on her cell phone, been a good witness, and waited to see what else would develop.  Beyond that, she might think about getting to the range for some practice in clearing malfunctions and getting back into the fight.

Finally, this officer should think hard about the bad guy who was sizing her up.  Was he crazy, charging into a gun pointed in his face?   Or did he see something in her that made him think his chances would be good?  Always think about that before you draw a weapon on a dangerous criminal.  By all means draw your weapon when your life is threatened, but only as a last resort when all else has failed.  From that moment on, anything can happen.  You can’t always count on having an angel on your shoulder.