The rage mob chose Triumph Systems as their latest cancel-culture target over this product, the Threat/No Threat double sided target for use with the company’s Pivotal Trainer. Triumph Systems is a business co-owned by a longtime family friend, retired Navy SEAL and recipient of the Bronze Star with V for valor, Jared Ogden. The company makes training products and targets and while they work with civilians, they work mostly with law enforcement and Ogden uses his products to train law enforcement on safer and more efficient engagement. (Full disclosure: I’m proud to work with them on the pro-staff and my husband is on the board of the company.) Kentucky professor Joe Dunman took issue with the product in this now-deleted Tweet, which spread across social media:

I asked Dunman why he deleted the Tweet and he quickly responded:

Dunman seems to have tried to prevent the ultimate viral result, but the Internet is fast. Twitchy has the reaction to Dunman’s Tweet, the screen grab of which soon spread throughout social media. It appeared on Reddit including this subreddit, the acronym for which apparently means “All Cops Are Bastards, and appeared on Instagram and Facebook, where it continues to be shared. Triumph Systems has been inundated with threatening emails and phone calls the past few days and say they saw over a 4000% increase in traffic to their site, the function of which was crippled all morning along with their ability to handle transactions online.

In a subsequent Tweet Dunman expressed that he still found the targets problematic, which I don’t understand — when police are training, do we want them to use the most realistic scenarios possible to prepare them for the, heaven forbid, real thing, or make their training as far removed from reality as possible negating any benefit of experience?

“It is a critical aspect of training and absolutely necessary so that our law-enforcement are more effective at using discretion while on the job,” says Ogden of the Threat/No Threat target.

With Ogden and the Threat/No Threat double sided target at the Triumph System booth at SHOT Show 2017.

Those training with the Threat/No Threat target are to not shoot the bystander with the camera, but rather the bad guy on the other side. The bystander with the camera is when you hold your fire. The point of the target is that the innocent is holding a harmless object that is the same color and in roughly the same position as the gun pointed at you and held by the bad guy on the other side. Your job is to quickly and consistently determine what is and is not a threat.

Some  have chosen to manufacture a narrative that this target, a concept created by veterans and security specialists, is a statement on recording police rather than a simple representation of the most common, harmless item that everyone has that could be mistaken for a weapon to the untrained and untested eye.

(I’ve trained with this target using multiple Pivotal Trainers and the point is to test both your reaction time and judgment when engaging potential threats. The entire purpose of the target is to reduce the potential to innocents by training both law enforcement and civilians to exercise better judgment under stress.)

Says Ogden: “It is this type of training that keeps our community safer. Either this law professor doesn’t place a value on that or doesn’t understand it. Either way, he did our nation and communities a disservice with his ignorance.”

I wish people would ask questions before rushing to judgment — the company is on social media and is happy to answer questions and discuss the training they do. This is the sort of life-saving training we should champion, not misrepresent due to ignorance or bias.