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To 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 time

To 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 ago
Is 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 ago
  Yes, 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 ago
    Google 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.

Manuel_D 7mo ago

Is 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 ago
Yes, 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 ago
  Google 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.