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The one thing I'll say in defense of American cops is that they are police a population that's vastly more likely to have their own guns, too. Of course it's n
by BobaFloutist 7mo ago
The one thing I'll say in defense of American cops is that they are police a population that's vastly more likely to have their own guns, too.
Of course it's not like American cops have recognized the danger that poses and politically aligned themselves with reducing or restricting access to guns, so they lose a lot of credit there, but they are genuinely facing a better armed and therefore more dangerous population.
- atherton94027 7mo agoCanada has the same rates of gun ownership as America and you don't see cops come up with guns blazing like they do here
- dogemaster2025 7mo ago[flagged]
- Open-Sourcery 7mo ago"My source is that I made it the fuck up"
- dogemaster2025 7mo ago[flagged]
- ceejayoz 7mo ago> Let’s bring data: > Source: ChatGPT Please tell me this is a joke?
- dogemaster2025 7mo agoWhy? Do you have different data or you just don’t like the numbers? - https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2024/07/24/key-facts-about-americans-and-guns/ https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2024/07/24/key-facts... - https://www.pewresearch.org/social-trends/2017/06/22/guns-and-daily-life-identity-experiences-activities-and-involvement/ https://www.pewresearch.org/social-trends/2017/06/22/guns-an... - https://www150.statcan.gc.ca/n1/pub/75-006-x/2025001/article/00011-eng.htm https://www150.statcan.gc.ca/n1/pub/75-006-x/2025001/article...
- snakeboy 7mo agoI fail to understand why you cited ChatGPT in the first comment instead of just linking the sources in the first place. That was obviously the critique of your comment, and it seems bad-faith to claim it was because they "just don't like the numbers".
- dogemaster2025 7mo ago[flagged]
- lIl-IIIl 7mo agoI agree and have the same reaction, but I also wonder how long before we accept "ChatGPT" source like we do Wikipedia. For ChatGpt answers we reasonably expect to cite actual sources rather than "Source: ChatGPT". For Wikipedia, most of us just stop at "Source: Wikipedia".
- dghlsakjg 7mo agoWikipedia is easily viewed by anyone, and their sources are right there for further verification. “Source: ChatGPT” frequently doesn’t include the link to the original chat, so is hard to verify that is the actual output, and we all have experience with ChatGPT wholesale making up facts when it is led towards the conclusion, or just inventing facts and sources. I personally treat ChatGPT “facts” like “facts” from Reddit or Meta. There might be a grain of truth in it, but treating it like an actual source is a fool’s game.
- johnnyanmac 7mo agoI'm not most people. You spend enough time in the "talk" section and you realize that Wikipedia is every bit as vulnerable to propaganda as Facebook or Twitter. It's decent enough for high level technical explanation, but anything opinionistic needs to follow the source trails.
- deleted 7mo ago[deleted]
- EdwardDiego 7mo agoIf Canada is like New Zealand, which also has a similarly high rate of gun ownership - it's largely different types of guns - that is, guns for hunting, not for killing people - very hard to conceal a rifle or shotgun compared to a pistol.
- roryirvine 7mo agoTo be fair, guns aren't exactly unknown in NI, either! There are 153k people who have legal firearms (so about 10% of the adult population, vs about three times that in the US). That's largely farmers with shotgun licenses (NI is pretty rural by European standards) plus licensed "weapons for personal protection" for people exposed to threats for whatever reason as a legacy of the Troubles. And then there are some unknown number with illegally-held guns - the main armed groups put their weapons "beyond use" as part of the decommissioning process in the 2000s, but inevitably some will have been missed, and then there are the dissident groups who still hold significant amounts of weaponry. Hard to put an exact figure on it, but if you guesstimate it at a weapons ownership rate at about half that of the US you probably wouldn't be too far from the truth. So even after accounting for the differential in gun ownership, SFPD are still shooting people at ~25x the rate of the PSNI.
- Manuel_D 7mo agoIs it legal to carry firearms concealed in Northern Ireland? It's not the presence of guns in a guns safe that makes policing more dangerous, it's the fact the a sizeable chunk of the American public is actively carrying firearms.
- roryirvine 7mo agoYes, at least for personal protection weapons. And, obviously, the unlicensed users (ie. members of dissident gangs) won't care whether it's legal or not. PPW holders will be people who have had specific, verifiable threats made against their lives - so will often be people with links to violence, terrorism, or criminality. And, obviously, the unlicensed users are criminals by definition. So, on balance, the average weapons owner in NI is probably more dangerous than the equivalent in the US. I do agree that it's hard to make anything more than a very general comparison between the two very different situations, however.
- Manuel_D 7mo agoGoogle tells me 2,700 in Northern Ireland have authorization to carry firearms privately. By comparison in my county in Washington state, there are 114,000 active concealed firearm permit holders out of a population of 2.3 million. And this is a liberal, fairly urbanized region. We're talking ~50x the rate of people carrying firearms legally. Of course data on criminals carrying weapons is not so transparent, but it's suffice to say that American police are much more regularly encountering people with firearms.
- MrSkelter 7mo agoCouches aren’t known to have guns and the cops in Afromans house search the couch as if it’s about to bite them. It’s a very American mixture of fear and bravado in a feedback loop which means every piece of evidence of cowardice has to be compensated for with even more overt aggression. Hence cops in full body armor with guns drawn behaving like black and tans in Palestine.