Delta Police officer removes disturbing tweet about rifle training for school liaison duties

Two days ago, on the weekend, we posted about a rather odd twitter exchange with a member of the Delta Police Department.

This past weekend was the one year anniversary of the mass shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Conn., a tragedy in which Adam Lanza, 20, shot his way into the school he had once attended and murdered 20 first-graders (all aged six and seven), and six adults.

On the very weekend a continent paused to remember this horrific event, Delta Police School Liaison Cst Mike Atkinson (@CstAtkinson) sent out this tweet:

Atkinson's tweet says, "In an effort to update my skills as a School Liaison Officer I have just completed a 5 day course improving my rifle skills."

Umm…. so just how are marksman 'rifle' skills relevant to being a school liaison? We sought clarification.

We asked if the Cst. was preparing for a Canadian Sandy Hook (in light of the timing of his tweet):

Cst. Atkinson's reply, "we update all of our skills whenever we can. Including ones to protect our schools.":

Now… we aren't anti-gun.  Far from it. Our police should be well trained and well prepared. And responsible citizens should be allowed to own firearms. But even from a pro-gun perspective, you have to raise an eyebrow at the suggestion the Delta Police are training their School Liaison officers with rifles to, in the words of Cst. Atkinson, "protect our schools."

The overwhelming impression was that Delta Police were arming their School Liaison officer's with rifles and promoting this fact on the one year anniversary of the Sandy Hook School massacre.

Since our post, the Delta Police media liaison has reached out to us via twitter and stated, "Understandably, our tweets have caused you concern" and the tweet from Cst. Atkinson has been deleted from his twitter feed.

Was this simply a careless, unthinking comment from a member of the DPD school liaison program?  Or does it belie something more?

Questions, perhaps, for another day.

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