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Let me just throw these tangentially relevant facts into this thread: Deaths by police in California: about 100 p.a. in Germany: 8 in 2014 Population: Cali

Let me just throw these tangentially relevant facts into this thread: Deaths by police in California: about 100 p.a. in Germany: 8 in 2014 Population: California: 39 Million Germany: 82 Million Source: http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2015/10/police-in-california-killed-more-than-610-people-over-6-years/407326/ http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2015/10/police-i...

hga 11y ago
Without, oh, comparing crime rates that's useless. E.g. just starting with murder, with less than half the people California had 1,697 in 2014 and Germany 662 in 2011 per Wikipedia. I fully believe there's a problem with US and most certainly California cops, but this is not the way to approach the problem. Heck, it doesn't even suggest anything actionable.
- jeremysmyth 11y ago
  Heck, it doesn't even suggest anything actionable. Gun control is the elephant in this particular room. A cop who isn't expecting his next public contact to shoot him is not going to pull a gun when he walks into the room, much less shoot first.
  - 15155 11y ago
    Within the confines of our Constitution, which has been well-interpreted by the fine, honorable justices of our Supreme Court, how would you stop the violent, law-breaking gang member from getting firearms?
    - task_queue 11y ago
      It's better to not make any laws because someone might break them.
      - k33n 11y ago
        It's better to not make any unenforceable laws because it's a delusional exercise in futility.
        Frondo 11y ago
        Gun control laws are absolutely enforceable--there's no question about that. Look to the other Western countries for examples.
        ryanlol 11y ago
        The enforcement in other western countries is limited to not selling them as easily, tons of people still have unregistered guns and illegally importing them isn't difficult.
        jon-wood 11y ago
        This makes no sense. I've lived in the UK my whole life, and when growing up spent some time around pretty unsavoury people. I've once seen a firearm, and that was at a clay pigeon range. I don't dispute that some people may own illegal firearms, but its by no means an endemic problem. Somebody getting shot in the UK is guaranteed to make the news. Just the presence of a criminal with a gun will interrupt live news channels, that's how rare it is.
        jameshart 11y ago
        Exactly. In the UK, 99% of the population wouldn't even know how to begin getting hold of a handgun. If they started making serious enquiries, chances are they'd run into an undercover cop before they found someone able to supply them something illegal. While I don't doubt that the knowledge of who to talk to and where to go to get a gun is present in certain UK communities, the basic fact that everybody involved in procuring, handling and importing guns is committing a criminal act certainly acts as a pretty solid prevention mechanism to stop, say, an angry 20-something man from acquiring sufficient guns and ammo to go on a shooting rampage at a college.
    - hga 11y ago
      Well, the Supremes don't actually support "bearing" arms, just "keeping" them, so there's room there, the plain language of the 2nd Amendment notwithstanding. Plus the law at all levels, as well as pretty much everyone but I suppose the criminal class, supports making it illegal for a "violent, law-breaking gang member" to possess a firearm if he's been convicted of a violent felony (well, any felony, but we all agree about the violent ones).
      - gknoy 11y ago
        You didn't address the question. Of course it's illegal -- how would you stop them from __getting__ them, though? We've seen that making it illegal won't be enough, as drugs and prohibition have shown: there would be a black market, just as there almost certainly already is.
        jeremysmyth 11y ago
        At the moment I can buy a beer in a corner store. During prohibition, it was much harder (and more expensive) to get beer (or liquor), and more liquor than beer was consumed at a considerably higher price. One outcome was significantly lower alcohol consumption and all that that means (lower deaths by cirrhosis, lower city drunkenness arrests). If we take prohibition as an analogy, then sure, a dedicated criminal will still be able to get guns. However, a casual street-level criminal is going to have to work harder to get them because they're no longer available in the mall or from the pawn shop, and he's going to have to pay ten times as much to get one from Benny in the pool hall. That'll significantly reduce the number of guns out there, and that is what creates the environment and the expectation that results in cops shooting civilians.
      - 15155 11y ago
        > Well, the Supremes don't actually support "bearing" arms Almost every appellate court below does in some capacity. As does the original text of the Second Amendment (as you said.) But again, how are you going to stop violent gang members from getting firearms without infringing on the law abiding? Why not focus on the problem: rehabilitating the violent individuals + improving mental health, instead of hoplophobic, knee-jerk legislation.
  - wallyhs 11y ago
    A person who pulls a gun on an officer has already decided not to obey the laws. How would adding more laws make officers safer from such a person?
    - task_queue 11y ago
      If the gun supply is strained, the chances of encountering such a person are lowered.
    - Retra 11y ago
      Because you need more people to violate those laws with greater regularity for such a situation to occur. It is easier to get one person to break ten laws than to get ten people to break one. Regulating the sale and distribution of firearms mitigates such risks.
  - hga 11y ago
    That's not actionable unless you're willing to suffer a 2nd civil war which your side would lose very badly, and all for the conceit that criminals would pay attention to such laws, especially when we already have well over 300 million guns in the country. A US police officer who doesn't assume a public contact might result in a lethal threat from a gun or edged weapon is an idiot.
    - Frondo 11y ago
      One thing that really irritates me about the anti-gun-control crowd is that idea, "if you ban guns, criminals will ignore the ban, because they are criminals and criminals ignore laws." People who break one law will still obey countless others. It's also totally reasonable to think that someone who engaged in some kind of petty larceny would readily obey gun-restriction laws--why wouldn't they? This whole "gun control won't work because criminals ignore laws" thing always struck me as a nasty piece of nonsequitor logic and identity politics, a way to "other" a group of people (i.e. more people who live in some counterculture way than people who have actually broken some law) as wild or deranged Hollywood-esque marauders, or a way to invent a bogeyman threat that only guns (in the hands of the so-called "good guys") can stop.
      - merpnderp 11y ago
        Someone only interested in petty larceny isn't carrying a gun right now for two reasons. They could pawn it for money and if they get caught it will add far more years to their sentence than petty larceny. Someone who uses a gun illegally today, will use one when they're illegal. At best making guns illegal would stop some domestic murders, but that would have to be weighed against a massive number of people going to jail for not obeying, country wide stop and frisk, and New Orleans style door to door SWAT raids to confiscate.
        dalke 11y ago
        "but that would have to be weighed against a massive number of people going to jail for not obeying" Did that happen to Australia? I see no evidence for it. If not, why don't we use the same mandatory buy-back approach that Australia did?
  - task_queue 11y ago
    If guns were illegal and cops still carried guns, they'd pull them when they walk into rooms. Why wouldn't they?
    - crimsoneer 11y ago
      They don't pretty much everywhere else in the developed world.
      - task_queue 11y ago
        This is the US, do you really think that if there wasn't a single gun in the hands of people in the country that cops wouldn't still carry guns?
  - rebootthesystem 11y ago
    The term "gun control" is thrown around without definition, which makes it difficult to have an intelligent discussion. Let's start with the assumption it is impossible to alter the constitution to remove or severely cripple the second amendment, which, I think, is a reasonable assumption. How, specifically, would you define "gun control"?
    - Frondo 11y ago
      The 2nd amendment can be clarified, and its meaning reinterpreted, as it was in 2008 (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/District_of_Columbia_v._Heller https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/District_of_Columbia_v._Heller).
      - hga 11y ago
        What reinterpretation occurred in Heller? It affirmed that we have the right to own firearms and keep them in usable condition for home defense, both of which D.C. had banned.
      - rebootthesystem 11y ago
        Sorry, that isn't what I asked. The OP didn't respond. Perhaps you can? How, specifically, would you define "gun control"? We throw this terms around but nobody bothers to define it. What exactly does "Gun control is the elephant in this particular room." mean? Again, I ask, how, specifically, would you define "gun control"? I am not refuting anything you are saying. I am simply asking a question.
        dalke 11y ago
        As a reminder, you recently said ' Every time I get sucked into a political discussion on HN I hate myself so I am as guilty as anyone else' at participating in the non-tech threads you think should be banned from HN. ;) Quoting from Wikipedia, "Gun control generally refers to laws or policies that regulate the manufacture, sale, transfer, possession, modification, or use of firearms." This is general agreement with how others use. For example, this more policy-oriented survey of small gun laws in different countries ( http://www.smallarmssurvey.org/fileadmin/docs/A-Yearbook/2011/en/Small-Arms-Survey-2011-Chapter-09-EN.pdf http://www.smallarmssurvey.org/fileadmin/docs/A-Yearbook/201... ) breaks the regulations down into: > "how states regulate the firearm ... what types of firearms civilians may be authorized to possess and which states keep centralized records of firearms in civilian hands", "how states regulate the civilian user, including the criteria used to determine eligibility to possess a firearm, how the licensing process works, and whether states permit private sales of firearms", and "how states regulate the use of civilian firearms, including the extent to which states require a reason to possess a firearm and the conditions that apply to firearm ownership." I see nothing particularly ambiguous in how the term is used for you to call for a need for the us, the hoi polloi, to help you understand it better. Gun control laws fall on a spectrum. Typically people say "we need more gun control" to mean that the laws should be more restrictive on what is allowed, while "we need less gun control" means the laws should less restrictive. Wikipedia explains the phrase "elephant in the room" well: > The term refers to a question, problem, solution, or controversial issue which is obvious to everyone who knows about the situation, but which is deliberately ignored because to do otherwise would cause great embarrassment, or trigger arguments or is simply taboo. The idiom can imply a value judgment that the issue ought to be discussed openly, or it can simply be an acknowledgment that the issue is there and not going to go away by itself. > The term is often used to describe an issue that involves a social taboo, such as race, religion, or even suicide. This idiomatic phrase is applicable when a subject is emotionally charged; and the people who might have spoken up decide that it is probably best avoided.[8] The phrase "Gun control is the elephant in this particular room" refers to the top-comment's list of "tangentially relevant facts". One inference is that the stricter gun control laws of Germany mean that fewer people have guns, so police are less likely to use methods which presume the civilians are both armed and likely to response with a gunfight. However, saying that directly brings in well-worn nearly deadlocked arguments about changes to gun control laws, Second Amendment, etc. Hence, the top-comment's indirect reference, which avoids discussing gun laws by talking about possible effects - hence, the topic of gun control is "the elephant in the room" that is being avoided, for reasons Wikipedia illuminated. Note that "I am simply asking a question." is often used by people who are derisively said to be "JAQing off". In order to avoid that accusation, I suggest you do some research first, rather than ask Wikipedia-level questions. You say that people do not define it; what is wrong with the definition from Wikipedia? Is it incompatible with how most people use the term?
- pjc50 11y ago
  The US crime rate is much higher because the priority is declaring people to be criminals and then punishing them, including immediate execution on the street, rather than reducing crime and promoting a harmonious society. There's also a large political faction who believe that a private right to kill people is important and inherent in gun ownership.
  - 15155 11y ago
    > There's also a large political faction who believe that a private right to kill people is important and inherent in gun ownership. "private right to kill people" - hah. I assume you value the lives of criminals more than the law-abiding. If you burglarize my home, attack me, or otherwise commit felonious acts on my property, my person, I have the right to stop that threat. You do not believe that people should have the right to protect themselves?
    - task_queue 11y ago
      Disarming/disabling != Shooting someone dead. Just because you have an easy button for homicide doesn't mean it's called for in every hostile situation. Courts agree. Try killing someone for robbing your house.
      - Nadya 11y ago
        Fantasy land != Reality There is no such thing as shooting to disable. You always aim for center of mass and if you do not feel threatened enough to shoot to kill then you shouldn't be shooting at all. Now the caveat to this is if you shot an intruder and they're still alive, but now injured to the degree where you can safely disarm them and keep a gun drawn on them; current U.S law makes this a problem. You can get in legal trouble/sued by someone who broke into your home with a weapon intent on killing you, but only if they live. This means not only are you shooting to kill - you're now dumping an entire magazine into the person to make sure they are dead. E: To the people who downvoted, how would you disarm an intruder with a gun? Ask them politely to put the weapon down? Run at them with a baseball bat (and risk getting shot)? Or maybe shoot them in the arm or leg? Where major arteries are and the shot is still likely to be fatal and also has a higher chance of missing entirely. Life isn't Call of Duty and shots to the legs/arm don't just "injure", they kill. So I'll repeat myself: there is no such thing as shooting to disarm or disable in real life. Only in fantasy first-person-shooter land.
- _wo6a 11y ago
  For the lazy, murders per death by cop, based on those numbers: Germany: 83 California: 17 Murders per capita: Germany: 1/124,000 California: 1/23,000 So California's murder rate is 5.4x Germany's, and its death by cop per murder rate is 4.9x Germany's. Is it just me, or wouldn't you expect the death by cop rate to be more than a linear function of the murder rate... perhaps even a polynomial function? A difference in murder rate of x does not necessarily mean a difference in levels of violence/danger of x.
debacle 11y ago
While I don't disagree that there's a problem, the social and cultural atmosphere of Western Europe is very different than California.
saulrh 11y ago
Let me plagiarize a reddit comment here: America's LEOs may kill way people per capita, but our LEOs also get killed by people way more per capita. Even the most unhelpful lists of killings by police officers have an overwhelmingly common trend: "Officers arrived. Suspect drew gun. Suspect didn't drop gun when ordered to. Suspect pointed gun at officers. Officers opened fire." There are dozens or hundreds of people that are on killed-by-LEO lists only because they shot second. Compare Canada to the US: http://canada.odmp.org/year.php?year=2014&Submit=Go http://canada.odmp.org/year.php?year=2014&Submit=Go https://www.odmp.org/search/year/2014 https://www.odmp.org/search/year/2014 Similarly, if you look at Sweden's first-ever police killing from a few years ago, the story isn't about police dying heroically because they're sacrificing themselves rather than killing criminals. It's that they don't have to kill anybody because nobody needs to be killed in order to defend others. "Violent crime is almost non-existent there." No violent crime, no violent police. No problem. So let's not blame officers. They're probably doing the best they can with a bad situation. Let's blame the politicians who criminalize everything, the socioeconomic system that screws with poor people's minds, the macho culture that drives gun nuttery and 'stand-your-ground' and 'fuck-tha-police' sentiments, and violence in general. Until we get rid of those we're not going to be able to fix the police because, for the most part, the police aren't broken.
- vezzy-fnord 11y ago
  Of course we should not, by and large, blame the individual officers, sans those who have clearly overstepped boundaries. This should not in any way distract from the point that police forces in the U.S. (and many other jurisdictions) serve as paramilitary organizations which, as set by common law precedent, have no obligation to protect anyone, but only enforce a legal framework on a macro scale, i.e. their only duty is to serve the state (see: Castle Rock v. Gonzales). It's interesting you mention "gun nuttery" as a problem. I take it you approve the citizenry be asymmetrical w.r.t being armed relative to the police? I do not. By all means, fuck the police. Why would I approve of, say, the LAPD any more than I would approve of the MVSN?
  - AnimalMuppet 11y ago
    > Why would I approve of, say, the LAPD any more than I would approve of the MVSN? I had to look up MVSN. They were the Italian Fascist Blackshirt thugs. If you think life in LA would be improved by the absence of the LAPD, I strongly question your grasp on reality. If you think the LAPD hassles people they shouldn't, beats them up, and sometimes kills them, you're almost certainly correct. But if you think that, in the absence of the LAPD, the total number of beatings and killings would go down, you're dreaming.
dustingetz 11y ago
cherry-picked statistics are not helpful, flamebait, and derail discussions
Anchor 11y ago
Here's another tangentially relevant data point http://yle.fi/uutiset/finnish_police_fired_guns_only_six_times_in_2013/7701005 http://yle.fi/uutiset/finnish_police_fired_guns_only_six_tim... Population: 5.5 Million
learning_still 11y ago
I just posted the exact same thing! I wish I read your comment first. What's more, is that the LA police department actually put more bullets in 1 man than Germany police shot during 2013.

hga 11y ago

Without, oh, comparing crime rates that's useless. E.g. just starting with murder, with less than half the people California had 1,697 in 2014 and Germany 662 in 2011 per Wikipedia. I fully believe there's a problem with US and most certainly California cops, but this is not the way to approach the problem. Heck, it doesn't even suggest anything actionable.

jeremysmyth 11y ago
Heck, it doesn't even suggest anything actionable. Gun control is the elephant in this particular room. A cop who isn't expecting his next public contact to shoot him is not going to pull a gun when he walks into the room, much less shoot first.
- 15155 11y ago
  Within the confines of our Constitution, which has been well-interpreted by the fine, honorable justices of our Supreme Court, how would you stop the violent, law-breaking gang member from getting firearms?
  - task_queue 11y ago
    It's better to not make any laws because someone might break them.
    - k33n 11y ago
      It's better to not make any unenforceable laws because it's a delusional exercise in futility.
      - Frondo 11y ago
        Gun control laws are absolutely enforceable--there's no question about that. Look to the other Western countries for examples.
        ryanlol 11y ago
        The enforcement in other western countries is limited to not selling them as easily, tons of people still have unregistered guns and illegally importing them isn't difficult.
        jon-wood 11y ago
        This makes no sense. I've lived in the UK my whole life, and when growing up spent some time around pretty unsavoury people. I've once seen a firearm, and that was at a clay pigeon range. I don't dispute that some people may own illegal firearms, but its by no means an endemic problem. Somebody getting shot in the UK is guaranteed to make the news. Just the presence of a criminal with a gun will interrupt live news channels, that's how rare it is.
        jameshart 11y ago
        Exactly. In the UK, 99% of the population wouldn't even know how to begin getting hold of a handgun. If they started making serious enquiries, chances are they'd run into an undercover cop before they found someone able to supply them something illegal. While I don't doubt that the knowledge of who to talk to and where to go to get a gun is present in certain UK communities, the basic fact that everybody involved in procuring, handling and importing guns is committing a criminal act certainly acts as a pretty solid prevention mechanism to stop, say, an angry 20-something man from acquiring sufficient guns and ammo to go on a shooting rampage at a college.
  - hga 11y ago
    Well, the Supremes don't actually support "bearing" arms, just "keeping" them, so there's room there, the plain language of the 2nd Amendment notwithstanding. Plus the law at all levels, as well as pretty much everyone but I suppose the criminal class, supports making it illegal for a "violent, law-breaking gang member" to possess a firearm if he's been convicted of a violent felony (well, any felony, but we all agree about the violent ones).
    - gknoy 11y ago
      You didn't address the question. Of course it's illegal -- how would you stop them from __getting__ them, though? We've seen that making it illegal won't be enough, as drugs and prohibition have shown: there would be a black market, just as there almost certainly already is.
      - jeremysmyth 11y ago
        At the moment I can buy a beer in a corner store. During prohibition, it was much harder (and more expensive) to get beer (or liquor), and more liquor than beer was consumed at a considerably higher price. One outcome was significantly lower alcohol consumption and all that that means (lower deaths by cirrhosis, lower city drunkenness arrests). If we take prohibition as an analogy, then sure, a dedicated criminal will still be able to get guns. However, a casual street-level criminal is going to have to work harder to get them because they're no longer available in the mall or from the pawn shop, and he's going to have to pay ten times as much to get one from Benny in the pool hall. That'll significantly reduce the number of guns out there, and that is what creates the environment and the expectation that results in cops shooting civilians.
    - 15155 11y ago
      > Well, the Supremes don't actually support "bearing" arms Almost every appellate court below does in some capacity. As does the original text of the Second Amendment (as you said.) But again, how are you going to stop violent gang members from getting firearms without infringing on the law abiding? Why not focus on the problem: rehabilitating the violent individuals + improving mental health, instead of hoplophobic, knee-jerk legislation.
- wallyhs 11y ago
  A person who pulls a gun on an officer has already decided not to obey the laws. How would adding more laws make officers safer from such a person?
  - task_queue 11y ago
    If the gun supply is strained, the chances of encountering such a person are lowered.
  - Retra 11y ago
    Because you need more people to violate those laws with greater regularity for such a situation to occur. It is easier to get one person to break ten laws than to get ten people to break one. Regulating the sale and distribution of firearms mitigates such risks.
- hga 11y ago
  That's not actionable unless you're willing to suffer a 2nd civil war which your side would lose very badly, and all for the conceit that criminals would pay attention to such laws, especially when we already have well over 300 million guns in the country. A US police officer who doesn't assume a public contact might result in a lethal threat from a gun or edged weapon is an idiot.
  - Frondo 11y ago
    One thing that really irritates me about the anti-gun-control crowd is that idea, "if you ban guns, criminals will ignore the ban, because they are criminals and criminals ignore laws." People who break one law will still obey countless others. It's also totally reasonable to think that someone who engaged in some kind of petty larceny would readily obey gun-restriction laws--why wouldn't they? This whole "gun control won't work because criminals ignore laws" thing always struck me as a nasty piece of nonsequitor logic and identity politics, a way to "other" a group of people (i.e. more people who live in some counterculture way than people who have actually broken some law) as wild or deranged Hollywood-esque marauders, or a way to invent a bogeyman threat that only guns (in the hands of the so-called "good guys") can stop.
    - merpnderp 11y ago
      Someone only interested in petty larceny isn't carrying a gun right now for two reasons. They could pawn it for money and if they get caught it will add far more years to their sentence than petty larceny. Someone who uses a gun illegally today, will use one when they're illegal. At best making guns illegal would stop some domestic murders, but that would have to be weighed against a massive number of people going to jail for not obeying, country wide stop and frisk, and New Orleans style door to door SWAT raids to confiscate.
      - dalke 11y ago
        "but that would have to be weighed against a massive number of people going to jail for not obeying" Did that happen to Australia? I see no evidence for it. If not, why don't we use the same mandatory buy-back approach that Australia did?
- task_queue 11y ago
  If guns were illegal and cops still carried guns, they'd pull them when they walk into rooms. Why wouldn't they?
  - crimsoneer 11y ago
    They don't pretty much everywhere else in the developed world.
    - task_queue 11y ago
      This is the US, do you really think that if there wasn't a single gun in the hands of people in the country that cops wouldn't still carry guns?
- rebootthesystem 11y ago
  The term "gun control" is thrown around without definition, which makes it difficult to have an intelligent discussion. Let's start with the assumption it is impossible to alter the constitution to remove or severely cripple the second amendment, which, I think, is a reasonable assumption. How, specifically, would you define "gun control"?
  - Frondo 11y ago
    The 2nd amendment can be clarified, and its meaning reinterpreted, as it was in 2008 (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/District_of_Columbia_v._Heller https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/District_of_Columbia_v._Heller).
    - hga 11y ago
      What reinterpretation occurred in Heller? It affirmed that we have the right to own firearms and keep them in usable condition for home defense, both of which D.C. had banned.
    - rebootthesystem 11y ago
      Sorry, that isn't what I asked. The OP didn't respond. Perhaps you can? How, specifically, would you define "gun control"? We throw this terms around but nobody bothers to define it. What exactly does "Gun control is the elephant in this particular room." mean? Again, I ask, how, specifically, would you define "gun control"? I am not refuting anything you are saying. I am simply asking a question.
      - dalke 11y ago
        As a reminder, you recently said ' Every time I get sucked into a political discussion on HN I hate myself so I am as guilty as anyone else' at participating in the non-tech threads you think should be banned from HN. ;) Quoting from Wikipedia, "Gun control generally refers to laws or policies that regulate the manufacture, sale, transfer, possession, modification, or use of firearms." This is general agreement with how others use. For example, this more policy-oriented survey of small gun laws in different countries ( http://www.smallarmssurvey.org/fileadmin/docs/A-Yearbook/2011/en/Small-Arms-Survey-2011-Chapter-09-EN.pdf http://www.smallarmssurvey.org/fileadmin/docs/A-Yearbook/201... ) breaks the regulations down into: > "how states regulate the firearm ... what types of firearms civilians may be authorized to possess and which states keep centralized records of firearms in civilian hands", "how states regulate the civilian user, including the criteria used to determine eligibility to possess a firearm, how the licensing process works, and whether states permit private sales of firearms", and "how states regulate the use of civilian firearms, including the extent to which states require a reason to possess a firearm and the conditions that apply to firearm ownership." I see nothing particularly ambiguous in how the term is used for you to call for a need for the us, the hoi polloi, to help you understand it better. Gun control laws fall on a spectrum. Typically people say "we need more gun control" to mean that the laws should be more restrictive on what is allowed, while "we need less gun control" means the laws should less restrictive. Wikipedia explains the phrase "elephant in the room" well: > The term refers to a question, problem, solution, or controversial issue which is obvious to everyone who knows about the situation, but which is deliberately ignored because to do otherwise would cause great embarrassment, or trigger arguments or is simply taboo. The idiom can imply a value judgment that the issue ought to be discussed openly, or it can simply be an acknowledgment that the issue is there and not going to go away by itself. > The term is often used to describe an issue that involves a social taboo, such as race, religion, or even suicide. This idiomatic phrase is applicable when a subject is emotionally charged; and the people who might have spoken up decide that it is probably best avoided.[8] The phrase "Gun control is the elephant in this particular room" refers to the top-comment's list of "tangentially relevant facts". One inference is that the stricter gun control laws of Germany mean that fewer people have guns, so police are less likely to use methods which presume the civilians are both armed and likely to response with a gunfight. However, saying that directly brings in well-worn nearly deadlocked arguments about changes to gun control laws, Second Amendment, etc. Hence, the top-comment's indirect reference, which avoids discussing gun laws by talking about possible effects - hence, the topic of gun control is "the elephant in the room" that is being avoided, for reasons Wikipedia illuminated. Note that "I am simply asking a question." is often used by people who are derisively said to be "JAQing off". In order to avoid that accusation, I suggest you do some research first, rather than ask Wikipedia-level questions. You say that people do not define it; what is wrong with the definition from Wikipedia? Is it incompatible with how most people use the term?
pjc50 11y ago
The US crime rate is much higher because the priority is declaring people to be criminals and then punishing them, including immediate execution on the street, rather than reducing crime and promoting a harmonious society. There's also a large political faction who believe that a private right to kill people is important and inherent in gun ownership.
- 15155 11y ago
  > There's also a large political faction who believe that a private right to kill people is important and inherent in gun ownership. "private right to kill people" - hah. I assume you value the lives of criminals more than the law-abiding. If you burglarize my home, attack me, or otherwise commit felonious acts on my property, my person, I have the right to stop that threat. You do not believe that people should have the right to protect themselves?
  - task_queue 11y ago
    Disarming/disabling != Shooting someone dead. Just because you have an easy button for homicide doesn't mean it's called for in every hostile situation. Courts agree. Try killing someone for robbing your house.
    - Nadya 11y ago
      Fantasy land != Reality There is no such thing as shooting to disable. You always aim for center of mass and if you do not feel threatened enough to shoot to kill then you shouldn't be shooting at all. Now the caveat to this is if you shot an intruder and they're still alive, but now injured to the degree where you can safely disarm them and keep a gun drawn on them; current U.S law makes this a problem. You can get in legal trouble/sued by someone who broke into your home with a weapon intent on killing you, but only if they live. This means not only are you shooting to kill - you're now dumping an entire magazine into the person to make sure they are dead. E: To the people who downvoted, how would you disarm an intruder with a gun? Ask them politely to put the weapon down? Run at them with a baseball bat (and risk getting shot)? Or maybe shoot them in the arm or leg? Where major arteries are and the shot is still likely to be fatal and also has a higher chance of missing entirely. Life isn't Call of Duty and shots to the legs/arm don't just "injure", they kill. So I'll repeat myself: there is no such thing as shooting to disarm or disable in real life. Only in fantasy first-person-shooter land.
_wo6a 11y ago
For the lazy, murders per death by cop, based on those numbers: Germany: 83 California: 17 Murders per capita: Germany: 1/124,000 California: 1/23,000 So California's murder rate is 5.4x Germany's, and its death by cop per murder rate is 4.9x Germany's. Is it just me, or wouldn't you expect the death by cop rate to be more than a linear function of the murder rate... perhaps even a polynomial function? A difference in murder rate of x does not necessarily mean a difference in levels of violence/danger of x.

debacle 11y ago

While I don't disagree that there's a problem, the social and cultural atmosphere of Western Europe is very different than California.

saulrh 11y ago

Let me plagiarize a reddit comment here: America's LEOs may kill way people per capita, but our LEOs also get killed by people way more per capita. Even the most unhelpful lists of killings by police officers have an overwhelmingly common trend: "Officers arrived. Suspect drew gun. Suspect didn't drop gun when ordered to. Suspect pointed gun at officers. Officers opened fire." There are dozens or hundreds of people that are on killed-by-LEO lists only because they shot second. Compare Canada to the US: http://canada.odmp.org/year.php?year=2014&Submit=Go http://canada.odmp.org/year.php?year=2014&Submit=Go https://www.odmp.org/search/year/2014 https://www.odmp.org/search/year/2014 Similarly, if you look at Sweden's first-ever police killing from a few years ago, the story isn't about police dying heroically because they're sacrificing themselves rather than killing criminals. It's that they don't have to kill anybody because nobody needs to be killed in order to defend others. "Violent crime is almost non-existent there." No violent crime, no violent police. No problem. So let's not blame officers. They're probably doing the best they can with a bad situation. Let's blame the politicians who criminalize everything, the socioeconomic system that screws with poor people's minds, the macho culture that drives gun nuttery and 'stand-your-ground' and 'fuck-tha-police' sentiments, and violence in general. Until we get rid of those we're not going to be able to fix the police because, for the most part, the police aren't broken.

vezzy-fnord 11y ago
Of course we should not, by and large, blame the individual officers, sans those who have clearly overstepped boundaries. This should not in any way distract from the point that police forces in the U.S. (and many other jurisdictions) serve as paramilitary organizations which, as set by common law precedent, have no obligation to protect anyone, but only enforce a legal framework on a macro scale, i.e. their only duty is to serve the state (see: Castle Rock v. Gonzales). It's interesting you mention "gun nuttery" as a problem. I take it you approve the citizenry be asymmetrical w.r.t being armed relative to the police? I do not. By all means, fuck the police. Why would I approve of, say, the LAPD any more than I would approve of the MVSN?
- AnimalMuppet 11y ago
  > Why would I approve of, say, the LAPD any more than I would approve of the MVSN? I had to look up MVSN. They were the Italian Fascist Blackshirt thugs. If you think life in LA would be improved by the absence of the LAPD, I strongly question your grasp on reality. If you think the LAPD hassles people they shouldn't, beats them up, and sometimes kills them, you're almost certainly correct. But if you think that, in the absence of the LAPD, the total number of beatings and killings would go down, you're dreaming.

dustingetz 11y ago

cherry-picked statistics are not helpful, flamebait, and derail discussions

Anchor 11y ago

Here's another tangentially relevant data point http://yle.fi/uutiset/finnish_police_fired_guns_only_six_times_in_2013/7701005 http://yle.fi/uutiset/finnish_police_fired_guns_only_six_tim... Population: 5.5 Million

learning_still 11y ago

I just posted the exact same thing! I wish I read your comment first. What's more, is that the LA police department actually put more bullets in 1 man than Germany police shot during 2013.