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It's crazy that as a citizenry we allow our police to operate in this manner. Kansas is a constitutional carry state, in which all adult citizens are legally allowed to carry a pistol on their person without a permit.

Why should the presence of a firearm, or the reach for a pocket or "long black stick", be a death sentence for a citizen? Why do we allow state actors to behave in this way at all?

I know this sounds weird, but it's almost as if there were some kind of correlation between a populace having a shitload of guns, and more gun deaths.

The top 3 safest states are all constitutional carry states.

https://www.usnews.com/news/best-states/slideshows/the-10-sa...

From what I can tell, looking at Wikipedia:

Five states with lowest rates of gun death: Hawaii, Massachusetts, New York, Connecticut, Rhode Island. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Firearm_death_rates_in_the_Uni...)

States with constitutional carry: Alaska, Arizona, Arkansas, Idaho (residents only), Kansas, Maine, Mississippi, Missouri, New Hampshire, North Dakota (residents only; concealed carry only), Vermont, West Virginia and Wyoming. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Constitutional_carry#U.S._juri...)

And more cars = more car accidents and more multi-story homes = more people falling down the stairs. As a society, we're concerned with overall safety and reducing overall violence and crime metrics.

While an interesting metric, a sample size of 3 (states) seems insanely low to draw cause between guns carry == safety. There has to be more meaningful ways to glean that data, no?

May as well tie it into most popular music if we're using sample sizes that small.

I wasn't making the argument that more people carrying == safety. I was countering the argument that more people carrying inherently means less safety.

Fair enough, apologies for my confusion :)

But the argument you responded to was that more guns were related to more gun deaths. You might as well have countered any tangential "argument".

https://i.imgur.com/aO6oWe7.png

Except if you use the metric of murder or violent crime instead of gun deaths you find that there its much more complicated

Vermont = lots of guns and safe

Louisiana = lots of guns and unsafe

Hawaii = not so many guns and safe

Illinois = not so many guns and unsafe...

This just isn't true. Canada and Switzerland, as examples, also have a high number of firearms and not nearly as many firearm-related deaths (at least from 2014 data I could find; I doubt it's changed).

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/11/07/world/americas/mass-shoot...

Looks like your numbers are badly off (those countries have less than half the guns the US does per capita, so not all that high), and in Switzerland there are a ton of restrictions on the guns (and on the ammunition!) compared to the US, to boot.

I'm talking about gun deaths in total, not mass shootings as in your link. Yes, the number of guns is far below the US (every country on Earth is) but looking at the number in isolation is disingenuous.

As to legal restrictions in Switzerland, that is absolutely true but orthogonal to the point I've made. The issue lies in the number of guns per person (and I'd personally argue the culture surrounding guns which spurs it), not the legal framework. South Africa has tighter gun laws than the US but still suffers from greater gun deaths (again, in total not mass shootings).

I believe that the post above is a reference to household ownership rather than per capita, there are a number of countries where the household ownership percentage is similar, but the number per household is much lower, that is true of many things, cars, TVs, guns, etc.

A long-gun stored in a locked cabinet in the attic with a trigger guard and ammo in a separate locked compartment is very different than carrying a loaded pistol on your hip in public. In Canada it is essentially impossible for normal citizens to carry a gun in public, let alone a loaded handgun. IIRC you need a separate license to transport your weapon (in a locked case, unloaded, and carried securely in your trunk). The idea of adult citizens carrying loaded pistols around in public is completely foreign in Canada.

What you describe is more what things were like in Italy - you can have a gun there, but you have to prove you are responsible, and it is a privilege, not a right. It seemed to work out ok in that people could still own them for self defense or hunting if they put in the effort to do so.

Oh of course, I agree with you. My point is purely statistical i.e. those are the numbers open for interpretation. The gun cultures in Canada and Switzerland are completely different to the US, but it's disingenuous to simply say more guns == more deaths.

Except that data is there to prove the point - more guns correlates with more deaths. Regardless how you compare - different states inside US or different countries.

https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2017/10/2/16399418/u...

What a load of rubbish.

1. The compare gun deaths. This includes suicides and excludes all other murders. So it is a totally biased metric.

They even admit most gun deaths are suicides.

2. Ignore by far the most salient variables for predicting murders.

This is typical "advocacy research". They don't care about science; they only care about getting funded. The general public knows this, so for the most part their research is completely ignored.

Don't even get me started on the "suicide is always terrible" bullshit. Many suicides are rational responses to untenable situations. I'm glad that my grandfather had a gun, when AEC and his physicians had both failed him completely.

Right, I see your point. Absolute gun ownership isn't the number we should be discussing-- it's the number of guns that can be easily carried and used in public. In Switzerland guns are everywhere, but the ammo is stored in sealed containers to prevent frivolous and unaccountable use of the guns. In Canada you can't ever carry your gun around on the street and handguns are almost completely illegal for all intents and purposes. In most of America you can carry a semiautomatic pistol in public with no consequences. Firearm incidents occur when you increase the availability for people to get and posses guns in public-- whether they buy them at Walmart or steal them from unlocked cop cars. That's indisputable.

Police everywhere have a shitload of guns.

Are you arguing that the police are more likely to kill people at random in areas with higher amounts of gun ownership?

I'm not sure I follow you.

> Are you arguing that the police are more likely to kill people at random in areas with higher amounts of gun ownership?

Cops have to make split second decisions with their own lives on the line. In a country where it's very likely that the person they're interacting with in a tense situation could be armed with a gun, it's going to make them more likely to shoot.

Perhaps not quite so relevant to this particular case, as the caller said the person was armed, but I think this would have played out differently in a lot of other countries.

> this would have played out differently in a lot of other countries.

This is precisely why the USA needs to reform its approach to police use of deadly force.

Sure, I think there's progress to be made, but the police - not wrongly - are more worried about getting shot at than in most other countries.

There are other countries with similarly high rates of gun ownership and divergently lower rates of police firearm deaths.

The problem is in the police culture towards discharging a firearm, not the greater ownership of guns. American society bears much of the blame for lionizing cops instead of scrutinizing them.

Many cases of police officers killing innocent civilians involved civilians who were either fleeing, submitting, or already subdued and pinned down. Cops in the US tend to be exonerated for using deadly force, even when the victim could not arguably have endangered others.

I would expect poorly trained police to end up faster on the trigger in environments where anybody else may have a gun.

> Police everywhere have a shitload of guns.

Wrong, police in e.g. UK or Japan do not customarily carry guns. And SHOCKER these countries have fewer police-related homicides.

Most UK police do not carry guns, yet those police forces still have firearms officers, and in a case like this where they would be responding to a suspected armed murderer and hostage taker, you can bet that firearms officers would be involved. Those police forces have substantial armories, they just don't issue a firearm to the majority of cops. Comparing UK firearms officers to US cops, I would contend that armed officers in the UK are less likely to kill because of the cultural and structural unacceptance of such killings in their country.

Actually it does sound weird to me, because in the vast majority of cases this is simply not true for the US.

"Gun deaths" always seems like a silly metric to me. Who cares if you're killed with a gun instead of a knife or baseball bat or whatever else? Why not just compare murder rates?

I think people care because when was the last time someone stabbed 546 people, killing 58 of them?

Guns are an efficient tool for killing people, much more so than knives or baseball bats.

This is, incidentally, the same reason other things that are efficient for killing people and not constitutionally proteced, like dynamite, are not something you can walk in and buy in Walmart.

While attacks like that are absolutely a massive and terrible problem, I think that problem is orthogonal to my original question. Those victims are also tallied under general violent crime and murder statistics. When trying to determine whether legal gun ownership is a net positive or negative to society by comparing stats across states, it makes more sense to compare general rates. Presumably gun deaths will be lower in states where it's very hard to legally get access to a gun. But does that matter if far more people are being murdered overall in those states even with mass shootings occurring in gun-friendly places like FL & NV? Chicago sees more people shot and more people murdered each month than any single mass shooting.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_intention...

It's a bit 'noisy' because there are a lot of 3rd world places that are simply quite violent. The US has a lot more than, say, a lot of Europe.

Also, don't discount suicide: guns make that easier too. Some will find a way without, but some would be prevented if it's 'too much effort'.

The liberal obsession with guns exists to avoid having to think about other factors involved in the US's high rates of crime and murder.

Do a graph of legal gun ownership versus murder rate (comparing US states, or countries). No relationship, in fact slightly negative.

Do a graph of other demographic factors against murder rates. Bingo!

Authority fetish engrained in society. Something bad happen during an interaction with law enforcement? It’s assumed to be the victim’s fault.

What was the "right" interaction from your point of view?

Please keep in mind... I used to live in an Atlanta neighborhood where a Sheriff and his deputy responded to a domestic violence dispute. Sheriff responded to a call and knocked on their door. The man inside the home opened the door, shot the deputy in the chest at point-blank, slammed the door shut, and then barricaded himself inside for a 6-hour standoff (ah, the memories of that neighborhood!). Thankfully the standoff ended peacefully thereafter.

Keep in mind the shit that SWAT deals with on a regular basis: they're putting their lives at risk for public safety. That doesn't give them carte blanch to go shooting people, but they deal with life & death situations regularly. It sucks.

I don't want to be the defense lawyer for the police but all the Silicon Valley and other office workers on good life always criticizing every move police makes should show an example and become a cop. And show how it's done. Make a sacrifice and show what's the right way.

I think we can all agree that swatting is an incredibly dangerous and should obviously be a criminal act. I haven't seen anyone defend it as anything other than that.

So let's talk about the part that isn't generally agreed upon…

> It is my belief that those officers did nothing wrong.

That may be your _assumption_, but going straight to "belief" is a HUGE step considering the lack of information. We don't know that the police identified themselves. We know that the police had an _entire block_ instead of an actual address. For all we know this was a random person stepping outside to see what was, to their mind, happening "across the street". We have near-zero information about how the shooting happened.

Why the strong desire to pick a side?

I'm not saying that I think you're wrong. I just think it's odd to form a strong opinion _right now_. We know so incredibly little, why bother forming and espousing an opinion at all? Why pick a side now? You don't have to be on a team. You can just… wait. It's possible to not have an opinion — at all. We can all move along with our day. Why the rush?

On ending lives.

Given that you've formed and shared an opinion despite a near-total lack of information, it seem to me that you're of the more general opinion that cops have the right to end lives with little information. At best, information that they know has a reasonable probability of being incorrect. Cops jobs center around dealing with false information.

My question given that world view: In the spectrum between "someone was shot at this address, your life is in danger while near that address" and "there are dangerous people roaming our streets, your life is in danger", where is the line? Should cops be allowed to end the life of any person who places their hands out of sight while in their presence? There are, after all, dangerous people roaming our streets.

I never said that the police were in the were not in the wrong. My point is that you can't put the blame on the officers that responded to the call. A suspect can pull out a weapon in the blink of an eye. For all they knew, it wasn't a swatting prank but suicide by police. As much as it sucks, SWAT isn't trained to ask questions first. Those officers acted as they were trained to and shouldn't be blamed for it. They should't be dealt with harshly but get therapy and counseling for it. Those individual know that they shot an innocent man.

That's not a response to any of the questions posed by my post.

With all the respect due a random person one corresponds with via the internet, the view you're espousing seems extraordinarily reductionist.

And that's okay in the end. We don't need everyone to be on board with concepts like asking questions first, compassion, mercy — with the idea that ending a life is a last resort.

Now that we have more information about the situation (police reports, call transcript, police debriefing) I still stand behind my first impression of: "those officers acted as they were trained to and shouldn't be blamed for it. They should't be dealt with harshly but get therapy and counseling for it. Those individual know that they shot an innocent man."

How someone can think that those officers are to blame is beyond me. To me, THAT is extraordinarily reductionist. It describes the situation as if we were living in a movie or a video game where people who do mistakes are "evil" and should be "punished".

(Am I wrong in using the word "belief" in the context of "the state of mind in which a person thinks something to be the case with or without there being empirical evidence to prove that something is the case with factual certainty."?

English is not my primary language and this might be the root of our incomprehension. You say that going from "assumption" to "belief" is a big jump, so perhaps you should reread my first message with the word "assumption" where I put in "belief".

I specifically added the word for people to avoid getting the false idea that I was attempting to convince anyone since there was no hard evidence at that point.

Isn't the difference between an assumption and a belief that beliefs are rooted in previous experiences and values?

I looked at this situation through the lens of Hanlon's razor "never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity" and through my own personal experience with police as human beings. This led me to believe that the truth of the situation was a systemic issue in how police are trained in the USA and not in those particular officers require to be punished.

It is my assumption that acting reckless in front of police during a raid will get you shot. It is my belief that the officers which shot the man are not in the wrong.)

“A male came to the front door,” Livingston said. “As he came to the front door, one of our officers discharged his weapon.”

Regardless of the information they had their actions seem way beyond reckless. The fact that some people think that nothing is wrong with how this scenario, and I'm sure lots others, played out is mindnumbing.

Perhaps police/swat should be able to step back and confirm information before engaging difficult situations.

Even if it wasn’t a prank, imagine them getting the wrong address. Or the caller being in good faith but mistaken.

People killed on false grounds shouldn’t be summarized in “those officers did nothing wrong”

> It is my belief that those officers did nothing wrong. It was not a trigger happy cop reacting badly to a traffic stop. It was officers that acted on information that were planted by a malicious individual. The prankster is the one that needs to go to jail for this.

[Bad] Information.

But if the 911 system is subject to malicious intent, no authentication, no verification, and incomplete signals then police need to act on that information accordingly.

If you place no blame on the police reading signals incorrectly, then there is no reason to waste money on hiring a killer to do the bloody work. There is a < 100% chance of going to prison either way and a greater chance of being successful with the police.

Note: I'm front Atlanta. Home of an informant giving bad information and a swat team tossing a flashbang in an airbnb traveling couple's baby's crib.

If the SWAT is the unthinking killing machine you're describing, then it can't be allowed to be deployed by an anonymous phone call, any more than the Army can leave armed RPGs on public sidewalks.

Information has to be verified before you can act on it with deadly consequences. Hell, I doubt if some prankster called your boss and said you were sleeping with his SO, and your boss fired you, you'd just say "no hard feeling, you are just acting on information planted by a malicious individual."

The police are, or absolutely should be, better trained to deal with a swatting situation than civilians. I refuse to absolve the police of all blame here.

>It is my belief that those officers did nothing wrong.

And yet I can’t possibly think of something more wrong than trigger happy cops shooting an unarmed person in their own doorway. Swatting isn’t a new thing. It’s one scenario that cops have to consider when they receive a call like this. Unless he had a weapon, the cop that shot him needs to be held accountable. Wearing a badge does not entitle you to execute someone for opening their own door.

> It is my belief that those officers did nothing wrong.

I'm sorry to be so direct, but your belief is based on zero facts. We should all withhold judgement until more facts come to light.

Your advice is probably right - I think what chafes us, myself included, is that it's even necessary for us to have to keep that sort of thing in mind; that SWAT teams can be weaponized for personal feuds in this manner.

Even better, SWAT teams can be weaponized by enemies of the US. North Korea, ISIS, whoever - just call up the US and cause havoc.

These calls require just a few words, it'd be trivial for a single determined individual to cause a mess across the country by simply making these calls in bulk in an automated manner.

What if the person exiting the house was a released/escaping hostage? Should the cops just shoot everyone they see in the house?

Depends on the country. Sadly.

I don't know if there is enough information to say that the cops did nothing wrong. An anonymous call shouldn't lead to an innocent man getting killed and cops need to investigate these situations more carefully.

I agree the prankster needs to go to jail but if the cop really did kill an unarmed innocent man there should be some type of punishment.

Think about it: if you absolve the police, you're permitting terrorists to lever the state's monopoly on force and do their dirty work for them. All ISIS et al need do is sit down with Google maps, a caller ID spoofing setup and an American accent and cause all the havoc in the world, and to your mind, that's fine.

Honestly, I doubt anything will improve until that sort of situation happens to catapult it into media attention.

You are conflating information and beliefs.

A single caller claiming shots have been fired really isn't the same thing as information that shots have been fired.

I mean, your reasoning process hands a pretty huge victory to malicious pranksters that want the cops to shoot at someone.

Even if shots were really fired, what kind of a strategy is to shoot anyone in sight? How do you know it's a perpetrator and not an escaped hostage?