Pulling a gun is a standard trained response to threats with severe bodily harm. Panic would be firing because of a percieved threat, see the acorn incident.

It seems dumb to look at that response from our perspective but a human being was burning to death before his eyes. Those are images, sounds, feeling (heat) and smells that will be with him for the rest of his life. The cop did nothing wrong because even in that moment there was so little to do.

He was trained to be a cop, not a firefighter so the training he fell back on was police training. People out here talking like most of them wouldn’t be a shocked bystander too.