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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 mo

by 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.
  - vezzy-fnord 11y ago
    I made no such claim. I was disputing the GP's assertion that police aren't broken.
    - AnimalMuppet 11y ago
      First: I agree that the police are, in too many ways, broken. But you said, "Why would I approve of, say, the LAPD any more than I would approve of the MVSN?" My reply is that you would approve of the LAPD and not the MVSN, because despite the brokenness, the LAPD is still a net positive, and the MVSN were not.
      - vezzy-fnord 11y ago
        Actually your comment didn't state they were a net positive, but merely that their absence wouldn't translate to a decrease in crime rates. It may well be that some paramilitaries are more efficient than others, but their incentives are by definition always stacked against community building, and in favor of adversarial enforcement.
denom 11y ago
I know it's a little esoteric to ask, but where does violence begin and where does it end? If no one in our society is willing to step forward and give a helping hand, the cycle of poverty and violence will continue, always. It takes very little creative energy to imagine reasons why the police should shoot first and ask questions later. It is much harder to tackle problems like early childhood education, access to jobs and healthy food, and at a moment of explosive confrontation, for the police to show mercy.
- saulrh 11y ago
  I know that reducing violence is a big, complicated problem. Not increasing violence is also hard. I'm just annoyed by this particular conversational gambit: I suspect that, when you say things like "the police are going to kill you", a lot of people read that as "kill them first", and the result is increased violence in both directions for no real purpose. I would be much, much happier if this conversation moved more in the direction of fixing the war on drugs, the prison complex, and in particular the political attraction to being "hard on crime".
- realquick81 11y ago
  > where does violence begin With parents hitting their kids (mostly moms, according to the statistics).
- anon4 11y ago
  Why should I give a helping hand? My hand is my own. What have they done to deserve it? etc. etc. ad nauseam
  - Frondo 11y ago
    Because we are all a part of society, and as such we all have some small responsibility to one another (e.g. paying taxes, obeying laws even when there's no risk of being caught, etc).
    - nickff 11y ago
      What you are asserting is that governments have 'political authority'; the only problem with that is that very few philosophers actually agree with that (despite a great deal of work attempting to justify political authority).[1][2][3] [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Problem_of_Political_Authority https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Problem_of_Political_Autho... [2] http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/authority/#ReaConConLegPolAut http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/authority/#ReaConConLegPol... [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philosophical_anarchism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philosophical_anarchism
Retric 11y ago
If a suspect draws a gun, the officer has already failed. Now, I don't expect cops to just stand there and die at that point. But, few cops are going to admit they fucked up, and many have planted a gun after the fact.
- saulrh 11y ago
  If a suspect had a gun drawn before officers were even involved, then society has failed. I don't expect us to suddenly not have violence at all. Few people are going to admit that they're part of the problem. But it's clearly possible for civilizations to have socioeconomics and underlying political systems that can raise populations that don't resort to violence.
  - merpnderp 11y ago
    It seems like the US did have "socioeconomics and underlying political systems that can raise populations that don't resort to violence" or at least was moving that way until 1 to 2 years ago when the decades long decline in violent crime came to an abrupt halt.
- deleted 11y ago
  [deleted]
dalke 11y ago
"Sweden's first-ever police killing" That's Iceland, not Sweden.
- saulrh 11y ago
  Thanks, my bad.
deleted 11y ago
[deleted]
15155 11y ago
> 'stand-your-ground' and 'fuck-tha-police' sentiments Ah, the narrative is showing. Let's compare protection for law-abiding citizens to a thug mentality in the exact same sentence.
- gknoy 11y ago
  While I first heard "fuck the police" in the context of rap, it certainly doesn't seem to be a non-mainstream concept anymore. All of the people I know that feel that way are, as far as I know, law-abiding citizens. They've seen first-hand the ways that our local police have treated them (or neighbors) poorly, and have nearly zero trust that they would be treated fairly in any encounter with the police. They've arrived at that philosophical stance after seeing misbehaving officers protected by their departments, or "on leave" instead of fired or prosecuted. After seeing and reading about various types of (local and national) police misconduct, not to mention the fact that police have asserted that it's __not__ their job to protect us, it's hard not to feel that their perspective is somewhat reasonable.
  - nickff 11y ago
    Governments and police (from all over the world) have repeatedly asserted that police owe no specific duty of protection to any individual.[1] What is truly remarkable is that so few people have realized this. Most governments assert that they only have a duty to provide security for themselves and/or 'society'; leaving aside the fact that collective rights have a horrific history, this is purely self-preserving.[2][3] [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Warren_v._District_of_Columbia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Warren_v._District_of_Columbia [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Individual_and_group_rights https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Individual_and_group_rights [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_rights_in_the_Soviet_Union#Soviet_concept_of_human_rights_and_legal_system https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_rights_in_the_Soviet_Uni...
vectorjohn 11y ago
We just need to ban guns. The second amendment isn't written in stone. Or it could get some extremely significant limitations added. People wouldn't like it of course, so it would never fly. But we need to get rid of this idiotic notion that you need a gun to protect yourself in a civil society. You don't. You're not going to rise up against the government, and you're not going to need it to protect your family. Are there exceptions? Sure. But when guns are so readily available, any criminal that wants one has one. The ridiculous line "if you outlaw guns only outlaws will have guns" or whatever, is nonsensical. If guns are outlawed, most criminals will have a hard time finding guns. But all law enforcement officers will still have them.
- bjt2n3904 11y ago
  Have you ever tried your argument with s/guns/encryption/? "We just need to ban encryption. The First Amendment isn't written in stone. Or it could get some extremely significant limitations added, like backdoors. People wouldn't like it of course, so it would never fly. But we need to get rid of this idiotic notion that you need encryption to protect yourself in a civil digital society. You don't. You're not going to rise up against the government, and you're not going to need it to protect your family. Are there exceptions? Sure. But when AES is so readily available, any criminal that wants one has one. The ridiculous line "if you outlaw encryption only outlaws will have encryption" or whatever, is nonsensical. If encryption is outlawed, most criminals will have a hard time finding algorithms. But all three letter agencies (ie: NSA) will still have them."
  - bdhe 11y ago
    > Have you ever tried your argument with s/guns/encryption/? This substitution is nonsensical. Fundamentally, encryption is a defensive tool. Where proponents of gun control (and I mean moderate folk, not just the let's ban the 2nd amendment folk) disagree with others is that guns aren't just a defensive tool. Given a sufficiently large population with poor safety nets and discrimination, adding encryption in everyone's hands will not change my day-to-day life significantly. Throw in guns and things change drastically. Now I have to be worried about a dark alley mugging at night at gunpoint.
hackuser 11y ago
I think you raise some good points. Another issue is the prevelance of guns. From a recent article (I don't know enough to vouch for these numbers in any way) [1] * "America has 4.4 percent of the world's population but almost half of its civilian-owned guns." * "In 2013, the US had 106.4 gun deaths per million people. In 2011, the last year for which we have numbers, the UK endured 146 gun deaths total - or 2.3 gun deaths per million people." * "Plenty of research has found a strong correlation between the amount of guns in an area and its gun homicide rate" ... "Perhaps the single most supported contention in all of gun research is that more guns mean more gun deaths." > let's not blame officers. They're probably doing the best they can with a bad situation. If by "blame officers" you mean assign group guilt to all individual police officers, I'd agree, but it's just as mistaken to say all police officers are doing the best they can. We have many examples of specific police officers harming civillians, including outright murder (something clearly not related to threats to police and not happening in Sweden). Whole classes of Americans see the police as a threat. As these problems occur in many places, I think we can say there is a systemic problem with policing in the U.S. [1] http://www.vox.com/2015/10/5/9454161/gun-violence-solution http://www.vox.com/2015/10/5/9454161/gun-violence-solution
- hga 11y ago
  Plenty of research has found a strong correlation between the amount of guns in an area and its gun homicide rate This is of course a tautology. If you were to magically remove that tool, do you really think Americans would become more peaceful??? As for your other numbers, no one denies we're the top in per-capita civilian gun ownership. Good laws + wealth lets us swamp Serbia and Yemen, after which comes ... Switzerland. Known extremely violent country (well, they were notorious so back in the days of pike bearing infantry). Not sure the U.K. is that useful, they've been suppressing civilian gun ownership for a century, and they're on a small island. "Perhaps the single most supported contention in all of gun research is that more guns mean more gun deaths." I'm sure there's a Clint Eastwood quote about it mattering who gets shot. More to the point, to the extent criminals are killed by civilians, what's the general problem?
  - lawpoop 11y ago
copsarebastards 11y ago
> So let's not blame officers. They're probably doing the best they can with a bad situation. I don't know how you come to this conclusion from the data you're citing. You seem to be claiming that LEOs kill more people because more people attack LEOs with guns; i.e. you're arguing that LEOs kill more people in self-defense. But you're far from proving that point. In fact, the easiest way to prove this point would be to have data on police shootings: if every officer had body-cam footage of every time they fired in self-defense, your argument would be proven. Yet the majority of police officers are resistant to wearing body cams. If LEOs are really firing in defense of self or others, why are they so opposed to proving it? One could make the opposite argument: that people who use guns against LEOs are doing so in self-defense. The fuck-the-police attitude is equally explained by this: if the police are murdering your fathers, brothers, and friends, of course you're going to thing "fuck the police". And this would explain why LEOs in the US are so resistant to body cams: if they are the aggressors in these situations, then they aren't going to want footage showing their crimes. I think that the evidence better supports the latter argument. But of course, we're short on evidence: we're a long way from proving either point. This is why we need more evidence. If, as you claim, LEOs are acting in self-defense, the evidence will only exonerate them.
- LordKano 11y ago
  None of my friends or relatives has been killed by a police officer and even at this stage of my life I still have that "fuck the police" mindset. I'll explain. Ever since I was about 15 years old, police have treated me like a suspect. I have been stopped, patted down, searched and generally harassed in the vast majority of my interactions with police. On one occasion, I was walking from a friend's house back to mine and I watched a cop do a u-turn in the middle of a highway to pull up and start questioning me. I have been pulled over because it "looked like the air in your rear passenger tire is low" and I had two units behind me with cops peeking into my car while they ran my information. Just about six months ago I was pulled over for "excessive lane changing". I asked the officer if he saw that I changed lanes to get around someone who was turning and that I had to return to that lane because approximately a quarter of a mile later, I was going to making my own turn. He responded that he had been following me for a few miles and I had made other lane changes. I was on my way home from work and I had things to do. I signaled before every lane change and I did nothing dangerous or reckless. It was a pretextual stop. About two years ago, I was stopped while riding my bicycle. The officer who stopped me is someone that I have known since elementary school. When he saw that it was me, his demeanor was nice and friendly. I can only imagine how he would have acted if I had been a stranger. In every one of those encounters, had I reached too quickly for my wallet, I would have likely ended up dead. My experiences are not unique and these are not the worst. A lot of the black, brown and increasingly poor white guys with whom I grew up have had similar things happen. The point that I'm trying to make here is that the antipathy that police officers experience is primarily of their own making.
mindcrime 11y ago
macho culture that drives gun nuttery I was with you until here. Sorry, but what you call "gun nuttery" is very likely what I call a simple, principled belief that private individuals have a right to be armed, and a recognition that there will be "gear heads" around any hobby. Guitar players tend to own lots of guitars, shooting enthusiasts own lots of guns. Owning lots of guns and defending the 2A doesn't make somebody a "nutter" nor does it make them any more prone to committing violent crime. 'stand-your-ground' What exactly is your problem with "stand your ground" laws? 'fuck-tha-police' sentiments Sorry, but as long as police are "men with guns" using violence to enforce unjust laws, and especially as long as many of their numbers act like schoolyard bullies who never grew up, I'm going to remain firmly in the "fuck the police" camp. for the most part, the police aren't broken. I'm calling bullshit on this. Haven't we seen enough videos of cops abusing / beating / killing people who were clearly not posing any aggressive threat (including people who were already handcuffed and pinned to the ground) to realize that this is not true? Obviously not all cops are "bad" but to ignore the systemic problems in policing in America today is like sticking your head in the sand and pretending there's no problem because you can't see it. Let's blame the politicians who criminalize everything Now this we can agree on.
- ccvannorman 11y ago
  >for the most part, the police aren't broken. >>I'm calling bullshit on this. I have to agree with "for the most part", if you're talking about 90% of the interactions with the general public, things are just fine and dandy. Unfortunately a measely 10% of interactions means way, way too many go wrong. "For the most part" isn't good enough for me, and it shouldn't be good enough for America.
celticninja 11y ago
You are treating this as cause and effect, i.e. cops kill people because people shoot at them. This is more of a case of the chicken and the egg, do civilians shoot police because police shoot civilians or do police shoot more civilians because civilians shoot police. Regardless of the answer, US police have a more violent response than other police. Anecdotally you just need to look at those situations where the police fire off 100's of rounds at a suspect, or where there is a chase and 50 cops leap from cars to jump on(and beat) as suspect. Body cameras for officers are the only way for the US to reverse the trend of a hyper violent Law Enforcement officers.

by saulrh 11y ago

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.
- vezzy-fnord 11y ago
  I made no such claim. I was disputing the GP's assertion that police aren't broken.
  - AnimalMuppet 11y ago
    First: I agree that the police are, in too many ways, broken. But you said, "Why would I approve of, say, the LAPD any more than I would approve of the MVSN?" My reply is that you would approve of the LAPD and not the MVSN, because despite the brokenness, the LAPD is still a net positive, and the MVSN were not.
    - vezzy-fnord 11y ago
      Actually your comment didn't state they were a net positive, but merely that their absence wouldn't translate to a decrease in crime rates. It may well be that some paramilitaries are more efficient than others, but their incentives are by definition always stacked against community building, and in favor of adversarial enforcement.

denom 11y ago

I know it's a little esoteric to ask, but where does violence begin and where does it end? If no one in our society is willing to step forward and give a helping hand, the cycle of poverty and violence will continue, always. It takes very little creative energy to imagine reasons why the police should shoot first and ask questions later. It is much harder to tackle problems like early childhood education, access to jobs and healthy food, and at a moment of explosive confrontation, for the police to show mercy.

saulrh 11y ago
I know that reducing violence is a big, complicated problem. Not increasing violence is also hard. I'm just annoyed by this particular conversational gambit: I suspect that, when you say things like "the police are going to kill you", a lot of people read that as "kill them first", and the result is increased violence in both directions for no real purpose. I would be much, much happier if this conversation moved more in the direction of fixing the war on drugs, the prison complex, and in particular the political attraction to being "hard on crime".
realquick81 11y ago
> where does violence begin With parents hitting their kids (mostly moms, according to the statistics).
anon4 11y ago
Why should I give a helping hand? My hand is my own. What have they done to deserve it? etc. etc. ad nauseam
- Frondo 11y ago
  Because we are all a part of society, and as such we all have some small responsibility to one another (e.g. paying taxes, obeying laws even when there's no risk of being caught, etc).
  - nickff 11y ago
    What you are asserting is that governments have 'political authority'; the only problem with that is that very few philosophers actually agree with that (despite a great deal of work attempting to justify political authority).[1][2][3] [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Problem_of_Political_Authority https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Problem_of_Political_Autho... [2] http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/authority/#ReaConConLegPolAut http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/authority/#ReaConConLegPol... [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philosophical_anarchism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philosophical_anarchism

Retric 11y ago

If a suspect draws a gun, the officer has already failed. Now, I don't expect cops to just stand there and die at that point. But, few cops are going to admit they fucked up, and many have planted a gun after the fact.

saulrh 11y ago
If a suspect had a gun drawn before officers were even involved, then society has failed. I don't expect us to suddenly not have violence at all. Few people are going to admit that they're part of the problem. But it's clearly possible for civilizations to have socioeconomics and underlying political systems that can raise populations that don't resort to violence.
- merpnderp 11y ago
  It seems like the US did have "socioeconomics and underlying political systems that can raise populations that don't resort to violence" or at least was moving that way until 1 to 2 years ago when the decades long decline in violent crime came to an abrupt halt.
deleted 11y ago
[deleted]

dalke 11y ago

"Sweden's first-ever police killing" That's Iceland, not Sweden.

saulrh 11y ago
Thanks, my bad.

deleted 11y ago

[deleted]

15155 11y ago

> 'stand-your-ground' and 'fuck-tha-police' sentiments Ah, the narrative is showing. Let's compare protection for law-abiding citizens to a thug mentality in the exact same sentence.

gknoy 11y ago
While I first heard "fuck the police" in the context of rap, it certainly doesn't seem to be a non-mainstream concept anymore. All of the people I know that feel that way are, as far as I know, law-abiding citizens. They've seen first-hand the ways that our local police have treated them (or neighbors) poorly, and have nearly zero trust that they would be treated fairly in any encounter with the police. They've arrived at that philosophical stance after seeing misbehaving officers protected by their departments, or "on leave" instead of fired or prosecuted. After seeing and reading about various types of (local and national) police misconduct, not to mention the fact that police have asserted that it's __not__ their job to protect us, it's hard not to feel that their perspective is somewhat reasonable.
- nickff 11y ago
  Governments and police (from all over the world) have repeatedly asserted that police owe no specific duty of protection to any individual.[1] What is truly remarkable is that so few people have realized this. Most governments assert that they only have a duty to provide security for themselves and/or 'society'; leaving aside the fact that collective rights have a horrific history, this is purely self-preserving.[2][3] [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Warren_v._District_of_Columbia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Warren_v._District_of_Columbia [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Individual_and_group_rights https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Individual_and_group_rights [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_rights_in_the_Soviet_Union#Soviet_concept_of_human_rights_and_legal_system https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_rights_in_the_Soviet_Uni...

vectorjohn 11y ago

We just need to ban guns. The second amendment isn't written in stone. Or it could get some extremely significant limitations added. People wouldn't like it of course, so it would never fly. But we need to get rid of this idiotic notion that you need a gun to protect yourself in a civil society. You don't. You're not going to rise up against the government, and you're not going to need it to protect your family. Are there exceptions? Sure. But when guns are so readily available, any criminal that wants one has one. The ridiculous line "if you outlaw guns only outlaws will have guns" or whatever, is nonsensical. If guns are outlawed, most criminals will have a hard time finding guns. But all law enforcement officers will still have them.

bjt2n3904 11y ago
Have you ever tried your argument with s/guns/encryption/? "We just need to ban encryption. The First Amendment isn't written in stone. Or it could get some extremely significant limitations added, like backdoors. People wouldn't like it of course, so it would never fly. But we need to get rid of this idiotic notion that you need encryption to protect yourself in a civil digital society. You don't. You're not going to rise up against the government, and you're not going to need it to protect your family. Are there exceptions? Sure. But when AES is so readily available, any criminal that wants one has one. The ridiculous line "if you outlaw encryption only outlaws will have encryption" or whatever, is nonsensical. If encryption is outlawed, most criminals will have a hard time finding algorithms. But all three letter agencies (ie: NSA) will still have them."
- bdhe 11y ago
  > Have you ever tried your argument with s/guns/encryption/? This substitution is nonsensical. Fundamentally, encryption is a defensive tool. Where proponents of gun control (and I mean moderate folk, not just the let's ban the 2nd amendment folk) disagree with others is that guns aren't just a defensive tool. Given a sufficiently large population with poor safety nets and discrimination, adding encryption in everyone's hands will not change my day-to-day life significantly. Throw in guns and things change drastically. Now I have to be worried about a dark alley mugging at night at gunpoint.

hackuser 11y ago

I think you raise some good points. Another issue is the prevelance of guns. From a recent article (I don't know enough to vouch for these numbers in any way) [1] * "America has 4.4 percent of the world's population but almost half of its civilian-owned guns." * "In 2013, the US had 106.4 gun deaths per million people. In 2011, the last year for which we have numbers, the UK endured 146 gun deaths total - or 2.3 gun deaths per million people." * "Plenty of research has found a strong correlation between the amount of guns in an area and its gun homicide rate" ... "Perhaps the single most supported contention in all of gun research is that more guns mean more gun deaths." > let's not blame officers. They're probably doing the best they can with a bad situation. If by "blame officers" you mean assign group guilt to all individual police officers, I'd agree, but it's just as mistaken to say all police officers are doing the best they can. We have many examples of specific police officers harming civillians, including outright murder (something clearly not related to threats to police and not happening in Sweden). Whole classes of Americans see the police as a threat. As these problems occur in many places, I think we can say there is a systemic problem with policing in the U.S. [1] http://www.vox.com/2015/10/5/9454161/gun-violence-solution http://www.vox.com/2015/10/5/9454161/gun-violence-solution

hga 11y ago
Plenty of research has found a strong correlation between the amount of guns in an area and its gun homicide rate This is of course a tautology. If you were to magically remove that tool, do you really think Americans would become more peaceful??? As for your other numbers, no one denies we're the top in per-capita civilian gun ownership. Good laws + wealth lets us swamp Serbia and Yemen, after which comes ... Switzerland. Known extremely violent country (well, they were notorious so back in the days of pike bearing infantry). Not sure the U.K. is that useful, they've been suppressing civilian gun ownership for a century, and they're on a small island. "Perhaps the single most supported contention in all of gun research is that more guns mean more gun deaths." I'm sure there's a Clint Eastwood quote about it mattering who gets shot. More to the point, to the extent criminals are killed by civilians, what's the general problem?
- lawpoop 11y ago

copsarebastards 11y ago

> So let's not blame officers. They're probably doing the best they can with a bad situation. I don't know how you come to this conclusion from the data you're citing. You seem to be claiming that LEOs kill more people because more people attack LEOs with guns; i.e. you're arguing that LEOs kill more people in self-defense. But you're far from proving that point. In fact, the easiest way to prove this point would be to have data on police shootings: if every officer had body-cam footage of every time they fired in self-defense, your argument would be proven. Yet the majority of police officers are resistant to wearing body cams. If LEOs are really firing in defense of self or others, why are they so opposed to proving it? One could make the opposite argument: that people who use guns against LEOs are doing so in self-defense. The fuck-the-police attitude is equally explained by this: if the police are murdering your fathers, brothers, and friends, of course you're going to thing "fuck the police". And this would explain why LEOs in the US are so resistant to body cams: if they are the aggressors in these situations, then they aren't going to want footage showing their crimes. I think that the evidence better supports the latter argument. But of course, we're short on evidence: we're a long way from proving either point. This is why we need more evidence. If, as you claim, LEOs are acting in self-defense, the evidence will only exonerate them.

LordKano 11y ago
None of my friends or relatives has been killed by a police officer and even at this stage of my life I still have that "fuck the police" mindset. I'll explain. Ever since I was about 15 years old, police have treated me like a suspect. I have been stopped, patted down, searched and generally harassed in the vast majority of my interactions with police. On one occasion, I was walking from a friend's house back to mine and I watched a cop do a u-turn in the middle of a highway to pull up and start questioning me. I have been pulled over because it "looked like the air in your rear passenger tire is low" and I had two units behind me with cops peeking into my car while they ran my information. Just about six months ago I was pulled over for "excessive lane changing". I asked the officer if he saw that I changed lanes to get around someone who was turning and that I had to return to that lane because approximately a quarter of a mile later, I was going to making my own turn. He responded that he had been following me for a few miles and I had made other lane changes. I was on my way home from work and I had things to do. I signaled before every lane change and I did nothing dangerous or reckless. It was a pretextual stop. About two years ago, I was stopped while riding my bicycle. The officer who stopped me is someone that I have known since elementary school. When he saw that it was me, his demeanor was nice and friendly. I can only imagine how he would have acted if I had been a stranger. In every one of those encounters, had I reached too quickly for my wallet, I would have likely ended up dead. My experiences are not unique and these are not the worst. A lot of the black, brown and increasingly poor white guys with whom I grew up have had similar things happen. The point that I'm trying to make here is that the antipathy that police officers experience is primarily of their own making.

mindcrime 11y ago

macho culture that drives gun nuttery I was with you until here. Sorry, but what you call "gun nuttery" is very likely what I call a simple, principled belief that private individuals have a right to be armed, and a recognition that there will be "gear heads" around any hobby. Guitar players tend to own lots of guitars, shooting enthusiasts own lots of guns. Owning lots of guns and defending the 2A doesn't make somebody a "nutter" nor does it make them any more prone to committing violent crime. 'stand-your-ground' What exactly is your problem with "stand your ground" laws? 'fuck-tha-police' sentiments Sorry, but as long as police are "men with guns" using violence to enforce unjust laws, and especially as long as many of their numbers act like schoolyard bullies who never grew up, I'm going to remain firmly in the "fuck the police" camp. for the most part, the police aren't broken. I'm calling bullshit on this. Haven't we seen enough videos of cops abusing / beating / killing people who were clearly not posing any aggressive threat (including people who were already handcuffed and pinned to the ground) to realize that this is not true? Obviously not all cops are "bad" but to ignore the systemic problems in policing in America today is like sticking your head in the sand and pretending there's no problem because you can't see it. Let's blame the politicians who criminalize everything Now this we can agree on.

ccvannorman 11y ago
>for the most part, the police aren't broken. >>I'm calling bullshit on this. I have to agree with "for the most part", if you're talking about 90% of the interactions with the general public, things are just fine and dandy. Unfortunately a measely 10% of interactions means way, way too many go wrong. "For the most part" isn't good enough for me, and it shouldn't be good enough for America.

celticninja 11y ago

You are treating this as cause and effect, i.e. cops kill people because people shoot at them. This is more of a case of the chicken and the egg, do civilians shoot police because police shoot civilians or do police shoot more civilians because civilians shoot police. Regardless of the answer, US police have a more violent response than other police. Anecdotally you just need to look at those situations where the police fire off 100's of rounds at a suspect, or where there is a chase and 50 cops leap from cars to jump on(and beat) as suspect. Body cameras for officers are the only way for the US to reverse the trend of a hyper violent Law Enforcement officers.