> They have to treat every situation as violent. On average, every American owns a gun. There is no encounter with the police that doesn't run a genuine risk of

> They have to treat every situation as violent. On average, every American owns a gun. There is no encounter with the police that doesn't run a genuine risk of becoming deadly in seconds. No they don’t, the vast majority (99%?) of police interactions with the public are non-violent. I spoke with a cop in my city who told me that was at a new officer training where 13 out of 15 training scenarios were ‘violent encounters’. The man was a career officer with 25+ years and he said almost every interaction he has with the public is non-violent, and that training cops to expect every encounter to go sideways is creating expectations that don’t match reality. Violent encounters happen, but cops are trained like every interaction is going to turn violent. Re: on average every American owns a gun Something like 50% of the guns are owned by 3% of Americans or some ridiculous number. Roughly 1 in 3 adult Americans own guns. Personally I agree with you that we would be better off without having more guns than people in this country, but reality is reality.