5 ms·

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) [

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
  "...do you really think Americans would become more peaceful???" No, but they would probably become less deadly. (But, without a gun, people might not be so emboldened as to physically attack someone at close range. Violence might go down.) Around the time of one of the mass shootings in the past 5 years, my conservative relatives were posting on facebook a story about a mass-stabbing. They asked rhetorically, "Why aren't we calling for a ban on knives?" Well, the question sort of answered itself-- no one had died from the attacks.
  - hga 11y ago
    Less deadly, yes, but qualitatively so? Not from everything I've seen. We've got a lot of inherently violent populations, like the Scotts-Irish that settled the Appalachians. And the cost, a 2nd Civil War, would dwarf any putative improvements.
  - deleted 11y ago
    [deleted]
- drdeca 11y ago
  That is not a tautology. A tautology is "a statement that is true by necessity or by virtue of its logical form." That statement may be "obvious" but it is not a tautology. "More x are used when there are more x" is not a tautology. It is often true, but it is not a logical necessity.
- LordKano 11y ago
  It also completely disregards that after British and Australian buy-backs, even though the number of gun homicides decreased, the total number of homicides increased.
  - hackuser 11y ago
    The article I linked to has a section on Australia; here's an excerpt: Evaluations after the reforms suggest that they saved lives. A study by Andrew Leigh of Australian National University and Christine Neill of Wilfrid Laurier University estimated that buying back 3,500 guns per 100,000 people led to a statistically significant drop in firearm suicides — 74 percent, in fact, with no parallel increase in non-firearm suicides. ... The results on homicides were a little less clear. Leigh and Neill found that the buyback resulted in a 35 to 50 percent decline in the gun homicide rate, but because of the low number of homicides in Australia normally, this change wasn't statistically significant I don't have the numbers for Austrialia, but from the same article: Nearly two-thirds of gun deaths in the US are suicides If the proportion in Autralia are similar, reducing gun suicides, if not homicides, could save many lives.
gohrt 11y ago
Bullets fly in both directions, but I wouldn't acquit the police so easily: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adrian_Schoolcraft https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adrian_Schoolcraft https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frank_Serpico https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frank_Serpico

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
"...do you really think Americans would become more peaceful???" No, but they would probably become less deadly. (But, without a gun, people might not be so emboldened as to physically attack someone at close range. Violence might go down.) Around the time of one of the mass shootings in the past 5 years, my conservative relatives were posting on facebook a story about a mass-stabbing. They asked rhetorically, "Why aren't we calling for a ban on knives?" Well, the question sort of answered itself-- no one had died from the attacks.
- hga 11y ago
  Less deadly, yes, but qualitatively so? Not from everything I've seen. We've got a lot of inherently violent populations, like the Scotts-Irish that settled the Appalachians. And the cost, a 2nd Civil War, would dwarf any putative improvements.
- deleted 11y ago
  [deleted]
drdeca 11y ago
That is not a tautology. A tautology is "a statement that is true by necessity or by virtue of its logical form." That statement may be "obvious" but it is not a tautology. "More x are used when there are more x" is not a tautology. It is often true, but it is not a logical necessity.
LordKano 11y ago
It also completely disregards that after British and Australian buy-backs, even though the number of gun homicides decreased, the total number of homicides increased.
- hackuser 11y ago
  The article I linked to has a section on Australia; here's an excerpt: Evaluations after the reforms suggest that they saved lives. A study by Andrew Leigh of Australian National University and Christine Neill of Wilfrid Laurier University estimated that buying back 3,500 guns per 100,000 people led to a statistically significant drop in firearm suicides — 74 percent, in fact, with no parallel increase in non-firearm suicides. ... The results on homicides were a little less clear. Leigh and Neill found that the buyback resulted in a 35 to 50 percent decline in the gun homicide rate, but because of the low number of homicides in Australia normally, this change wasn't statistically significant I don't have the numbers for Austrialia, but from the same article: Nearly two-thirds of gun deaths in the US are suicides If the proportion in Autralia are similar, reducing gun suicides, if not homicides, could save many lives.

gohrt 11y ago

Bullets fly in both directions, but I wouldn't acquit the police so easily: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adrian_Schoolcraft https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adrian_Schoolcraft https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frank_Serpico https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frank_Serpico