Our US society is sick beyond belief.
Name one more western first world country besides the US, where cops shooting someone is hardly news. And no, the problem probably isn't guns.
In the US there's about 1 gun per resident, Germany 0.3, UK 0.06, and Canada 0.3. Meanwhile there were about 987 fatal shootings by cops in the US in 2016, compared to 13 in Germany, 4 in the UK, and 9 in Canada. Even adjusting these numbers for population and number of guns per resident, you will still be off by an order of magnitude.
The biggest factors do revolve around guns though. Not just numbers, but the culture which feeds into itself and the perception that guns are not a problem, but a solution ("The only way to stop a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun"). Of course, this then provokes a "Have-a-go-Harry" take on confrontation where people who are woefully ill-equipped to deal with a situation attempt to do so. The lack of training, the fetishisation of guns, and the sheer number of guns are all extremely significant factors in gun crime. Take away any one of these and the rate of gun crime would drop significantly. Unfortunately, any solution has to work within the framework of "no further regulation" to even get close to implementation which rules out swathes of methods
I was reading a reddit discussion some time ago, where most commenters concluded that it's fine to shoot a burglar entering your house at night, which feels very alien to me. Sure, it's a frightening situation, but in my mind a burglary clearly doesn't justify the, potentially deadly, use of a gun. Those are not equal actions and measures.
burglary clearly doesn't justify the, potentially deadly, use of a gun
2. My claim was that there are not many cities with a trend of cops murdering unarmed black men, so your comment isn't a valid rebuttal, however true it may otherwise be.
There's actually considerable evidence that adverse interactions with law enforcement of all kinds (and not just LE murder) are not evenly distributed by race.
Whether that is a result of deliberate LE racism vs. other factors which contribute to such encounters being distributed disproportionately by race has more mixed evidence.
This is like the game where you can say a sentence where emphasis on different words changes the meaning, i.e. "I don't agree that cops murder black people" versus "I don't agree that cops murder black people." In text you can be ambiguous, and if anyone disagrees with your defense of cops, you just back off into the weird statistical claim about race that isn't that important.
So I ask you: are you defending cops murdering people and getting away with it? If not, why are you posting? I suppose it's academically interesting if cops murder all the races evenly, but it sure comes across as if you're defending cops murdering people and getting away with it.
It's not a red herring. The implication that "police murder blacks" is that there is a racist component in police murder, but the data show that this isn't the case, at least not in the last decade. I'll leave it to the reader to decide whether or not this is better or worse.
> So I ask you: are you defending cops murdering people and getting away with it? If not, why are you posting? I suppose it's academically interesting if cops murder all the races evenly, but it sure comes across as if you're defending cops murdering people and getting away with it.
No, of course I'm not defending murder. I'm posting because fixing problems requires properly understanding them. I understand that many people have no qualm with worsening the problems they purportedly care about so long as it lets them get a punch in against some group of people they dislike; however, that's not really my style.