a lot of politics is local

In my town, rather than have a town meeting where all 33,000 of us try to cram into one room and argue about the budget, we have a representative town meeting. Each precinct (there are 9) has 20+ elected reps, who do cram into one big room (usually), in the evening, over a period of weeks. It didn't happen in March, but they finally started meeting virtually last week. One of the first priorities was to vote to spend $125,000 to get ready to spend millions to make a fancy police officer shooting range, not just for our force but to be loaned out to many out of town police officers for training. The warrant for the meeting has been sitting on my kitchen counter since February, but that doesn't mean that I read it, so I was surprised when I heard that the vote had taken place. The timing is interesting, to say the least. The town meeting member who was one of the organizers of Friday's BLM rally (as opposed to Wednesday's, which was more of a memorial), at which an invited police person spoke, has called for a re-vote, and many in the town are supporting her. I wrote to all of my reps, saying that I thought what should happen is making our police department firearm-free. One of them suggested that I submit a public comment. It should be succinct, obviously, so that they have time to read a multitude of comments. You may have noticed that that short and to the point may not be one of my writing strengths. The other responses I got said that our police need to have guns because there are criminals in Lexington. Well, yes, but I don't think having armed police has proved much of a deterrent, and I expect bystanders would be harmed in a shoot-out. I personally find seeing police officers wearing guns quite frightening, but I don't know if my feelings should be the focus of my comment.

Edit - Arthur thought I shouldn't talk about being scared of guns, so this is the comment I submitted:
"I hope that on reconsideration, the Town Meeting members will vote to reject 16a. Further, I propose that the Lexington police officers have no firearms at all. There is crime in Lexington, but I doubt there is evidence that armed officers have been a deterrent to additional crime. My feeling is that more firearms in Lexington, even those carried by expensively trained professionals, make us less safe."