BPD Bans Pellet Guns - Finally

We just critiqued the Boston police in the last post, but we will offer praise when it is due. The BPD has banned the use of pellet guns in crowd control following the 2004 death of Victoria Snelgrove, which happened after the Red Sox American League Championship Series victory over the Yankees.

Commish Ed Davis himself said the guns will be melted and used for sewer caps. (That's probably where all guns should wind up - melted down and in - or above - the sewers.) It took a while for the ban to happen, but Davis said, "We have other crowd-dispersion devices."

That statement in its own right sounds a little creepy. To which "devices" does Commish Davis refer? But we're glad the pellet guns are going to go. They were a tremendous problem for many reasons, not the least of which, as Bostonist pointed out a while back, "No one bothered to train the cops on how or when to use the gun."

True. Getting rid of the pellet guns doesn't solve the errors in judgment to which the BPD admitted following Snelgrove's death. But the main lesson of all this is that if the BPD gets its collective hands on a "less-lethal crowd-dispersion device," then a) the weapons should be tested for all possible scenarios and b) the BPD should be trained on how to use those weapons.

Image of a sewer cap from Flickr user Ksionic.