 Neither the fire extinguisher will make you a firefighter nor the gun make you a police officer. But each of them lets you hold that line until the police can get there. Nationwide, they tell us the average response time for a Tier 1 emergency, fire, emergency medical service or police, is about 11 minutes. Now, you go back to when I was born. I'm a pretty old guy. I was born mid-20th century.