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Comment by insin | Hacker News Reader

Police Service of Northern Ireland [1] officers routinely carry guns, but I don't understand the culture where a sidearm is drawn and pointed at a driver from the start in a routine broken tail light/uninsured driver type stop. That would probably make the news in NI.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Police_Service_of_Northern_Ire...

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They usually do not draw a weapon on a routine stop. The stops with weapons drawn are usually when they have some reason to suspect that they are dealing with an actual criminal.

As for why they might pull their sidearm in such a case, just ponder the following statistics.

United States: 112 guns per 100 residents.

United Kingdom: 6.6 guns per 100 residents.

The United States has around 5% of the world's population, but 30-50% of the world's civilian owned guns. The gun homicide rate in the US is about 60 times that of the UK.

Other countries have high percentages of guns in their populace but without the homicide rates. The USA has a homicide issue and a large chunk of it is done with guns, but its not a universal trait that countries with guns have lots of homicide. Its not unique to the USA but its not correlated on a world level.

I've been seeing this logic quite a bit this week and I don't agree with it.

For one, the numbers I've seen for per-capita are around 88% (2014, I think), not 112%.

However, the number of gun owners is estimated from anywhere between 12-33%. So no, number of guns in the country can't be used as a rationale for the probability that an officer will encounter a gun in a stop. Gun owners are a minority.

And the other NI constabulary that has every officer armed is... Belfast Airport Police!

it wasn't a broken tail light stop, they were stopped because they matched the description of suspects in an earlier armed robbery

What was the description?

From all accounts so far the officer radioed he had a broad nose.

This is simply not true and the only place reporting this is a far-right blog. You are not entitled to your own facts.

Edit - Here's a Snopes link describing the particulars of the falsehood: http://www.snopes.com/philando-castile-was-not-wanted-for-ar...

Do you realize your link literally repeats what I said:

"Police who pulled over and killed Philando Castile reported they thought he might have resembled a suspect in an armed robbery case."

He was not stopped over a broken light, police _thought_ he could be armed and dangerous. (I can not judge the validity of their suspicions)

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