A Good Man With a Gun

If a retired Buffalo police lieutenant and a city council member have their way, the retired policeman working as a security guard at Tops Friendly Market, Aaron Salter, will be reinstated as a member of the force and receive the ceremonial funeral accorded to those who die in the line of duty. “He should have all the honors,” Common Council Member David Rivera told the Buffalo News. All New Yorkers will second the motion.“He’s a true hero,” the city’s police commissioner, Joseph Gramaglia said in the aftermath of the reportedly racially motivated murders. “There could have been more victims if not for his actions,” Mr. Gramaglia said of Salter’s attempt to stop the assault by firing at the attacker, whose armored vest protected him. By confronting the shooter, Salter slowed the gunman’s progress. Mr. Gramaglia observes Salter “went down fighting.”Salter was one of 10 murdered in the attack at the city where he had served as a police officer starting in the 1980s, following his graduation from high school. Salter, according to the Buffalo News, appeared in numerous stories over the years, “beginning in 1992, when he and his partner put out a kitchen fire and nabbed the arsonist as he tried to escape.” He issued parking tickets, arrested beer thieves, and recovered illegal firearms.“Even though you leave the job, the job doesn’t leave you,” the retired lieutenant, Steven Malkowski, Salter’s supervisor at the Buffalo Police Department, told the Buffalo News. “People’s lives were in danger, and he was probably the only person who was in there that could help and save people.” Mr. Malkowski proposed reinstating Salter’s membership in the department, noting it was “not surprising to me, at all, that he did what he did yesterday.”After retiring from the force, according to People magazine, Salter set about a dream of building sustainable vehicles that could run on green energy. People reports that he’d started his own company: AWS Hydrogen Technologies. A friend, Roscoe Henderson, is quoted by People as reckoning that “Aaron is one of the most intelligent individuals that I’ve ever crossed paths with.”It quotes Salter himself as explaining, on LinkedIn, that he was “always working on my vehicles and or my project of running engines on water.” He sounds like one of the classic American types — a brilliant tinkerer, dreaming of great inventions. And, it sounds like, supporting himself with a day job. He was, the News reported, “the first to defend lives” when the killer entered Tops Saturday afternoon.One can only speculate how much worse things would have been had Salter not engaged the killer at Tops. The killer was wearing bullet-proof armor. Salter was able, though, to force the killer to turn and fire at himself. So it can be said that he gave his own life to save others. It’s not our purpose here to make a political statement. Only to suggest that Aaron Salter was a classic good man with a gun and deserves every honor New York can bestow.

A Good Man With a Gun

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