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> You haven't armed the populace, you haven't set up civilian watches, you haven't done any of the things that would happen in a society actually set up to be sustainably police-free

It's amazing how a population that suffers heavily from wide firearm availability (the only civilized country where you semi-regularly have school massacres) thinks that the solution to anything can be "more guns for everyone".

People are often irresponsible, irrational, intoxicated, etc. Making lethal force easily available to everyone won't solve your safety issues - will only make them worse. I think a big reason why cops are so violent in the US is that they need to be - any bum can have a gun and might kill them; that's not a concern for people in Europe, so police can be slightly more relaxed when dealing with a minority that is known to have above-average stats for criminals & general violence (e.g. gypsy here; yes, they may face many discrimination issues that black people face in US, but nobody shoots them just because they have the wrong skin color)

>>>It's amazing how a population that suffers heavily from wide firearm availability (the only civilized country where you semi-regularly have school massacres) thinks that the solution to anything can be "more guns for everyone".

We've had by far the greatest firearms proliferation in the Western world for centuries. In the 1920's you could buy fully automatic Thompson sub-machineguns from a mail-in catalog. ( http://www.nfatoys.com/tsmg/web/coltguns.htm ) Yet school shootings are a relatively recent (~30 years) phenomenon. Over that same 30-year period we've also had an increase in single-parent households as well as an increase in SSRI drug prescriptions. There doesn't seem to be anywhere near the willingness to attack those social issues or investigate their impacts on murderous outbursts.

Firearms proliferation seems to work well for Kennesaw, Georgia. https://edition.cnn.com/2018/03/06/us/kennesaw-georgia-gun-o...

But the data for everywhere else is a mixed bag: https://www.rand.org/research/gun-policy/analysis/concealed-...

There's also the fact that school proliferation itself is a relatively recent (~80-100 years) phenomenon; and after that there was a world war, and after said war maybe not everybody could afford to/ had a priority to buy guns ("greatest proliferation in the Western world" does not necessarily equal "proliferation at the same levels as today"). Last by not least, maybe the other factors you mentioned would still result in less shootings if there weren't guns widely available everywhere?

But time and again we've seen violent crimes rise after enacting gun control, most recently in New Zealand[0] (this particular report focuses on gun crimes, which are on the rise after gun control has been enacted, but it's by no means a problem isolated to gun crime).

It all indicates the problem isn't the gun, it's the person. And taking their gun away doesn't take away their problems. I find it odd that the current climate of acceptance and a desire to help others can so staunchly ignore mental health issues.

[0] https://www.rnz.co.nz/news/national/416881/rates-of-gun-crim...

> It all indicates the problem isn't the gun, it's the person.

Really? How did the persons become worse because of the gun control laws? Because that's what your message implies, that said rise in violent crimes is related to enacting gun control.

> How did the persons become worse because of the gun control laws? Because that's what your message implies

No, it doesn't.

> that said rise in violent crimes is related to enacting gun control

The person did not become worse but rather found the chance to attack someone who could not defend themselves because they did not have a gun.

It's quite an extraordinary claim - among others, it implies these are all premeditated crimes (shot other person knowing that it would not have a gun - without that knowledge, crime wouldn't happen)

> you're in a situation where the only people with serious weapons are criminals and police

Isn't this what the administration of virtually every major city have been working for decades to create? So this is an experiment that matches current conditions. Somehow I don't see most folks arguing that we don't really need police also being for unrestricted firearms ownership and repeal of the myriad of barriers that exist between the law abiding citizen and gun ownership right now. So maybe start with that if you want less police?

> Somehow I don't see most folks arguing that we don't really need police also being for unrestricted firearms ownership and repeal of the myriad of barriers that exist between the law abiding citizen and gun ownership right now.

Obtaining arms should be, for every single adult, as quick, easy, convenient, and cheap as obtaining a blog.

Many, many of us have been saying that for hundreds of years.

blogs haven't really existed for hundreds of years my dude.

People have been printing blogs for hundreds of years. See "Common Sense".

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

Getting a blog such as "Common Sense" printed in those days was much harder then getting a firearm.

I'm not so sure about that. Firearms in those days were custom made by hand one by one by specialized and highly skilled (i.e. expensive) craftsmen. A firearm was a prized possession, and often a work of art.

A pamphlet might be typeset in an hour by the unskilled printer's apprentice.

Not in 18th century. You could get a gun then for about month's wage of a skilled worker. Not exactly cheap, and significantly more expensive than now, but not exactly impossible to have even for a skilled worker or a middle-class person. And there are now firearms in that price range, though many common ones are significantly cheaper. Something like a cheap car - not pocket change, and you won't get one unless you need one, and if you aren't rich you probably won't get more than one - but for most people, not out of reach entirely.

> Many, many of us have been saying that for hundreds of years.

Not many enough, apparently. There are many cities where it's literally impossible to own a handgun legally unless you are connected to either law enforcement or one of the political mafias. There are even more places where it's possible but has so many idiotic limitations that the intent is clearly to discourage all but the most determined and evade lawsuits by pointing "yes, you need a form that can be only found in a disused closet behind the door saying 'Beware of the leopard!' - but the form is there, your honor, so no undue burden for firearm ownership!"

And the funniest thing that all these things happen in exactly the same places where they talk about not needing the police anymore.

> You haven't armed the populace, you haven't set up civilian watches

Isn't that reinventing the police, just with a different name?

To some extent, But, for instance, while private citizens may have guns for self-defense, they're unlikely to have tear gas, rubber bullets, armored vehicles, Stingrays, etc. And community watches that are run by actual community members are likely to have a very different set of priorities from a professional police force.

I'm not at all saying that this by itself would eliminate racially-disproportionate violence done by the police (and you could argue that it'd risk increasing it, in fact - George Zimmerman was a neighborhood watch leader, not a cop). But it would straightforwardly eliminate a host of excesses from militarized equipment and training to asset forfeiture to the blue wall to qualified immunity to even (relatively) minor things like quotas.

(And to be clear, I'm not saying that "arm the populace and set up civilian watches" is a complete or good replacement for the police - I'm just saying it seems like the minimal possible step to take if you're carving the police out of a society that evolved around having police. If you don't even take that step, the results of a "natural experiment" of a day without police aren't meaningful. But it's not an actual policy proposal; a serious attempt at getting rid of the police would in fact want to be careful about making an even less-accountable shadow police.)

> But, for instance, while private citizens may have guns for self-defense, they're unlikely to have tear gas, rubber bullets, armored vehicles, Stingrays, etc.

So the civilian watch would effectively only have lethal force to stop a threat then? All of those things have a purpose. Armored vehicles for example are most often used to approach armed suspects who have holed themselves up in a defensive position without risking seat or police lives. Stingrays are used to track gang, cartel, weapons dealing, and terrorist activities.

You could argue that only federal entities should have that power, but then the FBI/DEA/ATF would inevitably fill the power vacuum and take over a lot of roles that would otherwise be done by police. The alternative of course if that we simply don't use Stingrays, armored vehicles, riot shields and rubber bullets, but then a lot of crime would go unpunished either from lack of information gathering or simply from fear of death (for example, a civilian with just a gun would have a much higher chance of death trying to free a child from an armed abductor that a swat team with armored vehicles, bulletproof shields, etc.)

> And community watches that are run by actual community members are likely to have a very different set of priorities from a professional police force.

Imagine an armed and dangerous HOA, functioning as its own "community policy force."

What fresh hell is this?

Sure, but imagine a situation where this is a huge step up in fairness and justice from what you currently experience everyday! Many people currently live under tyranny and terror worse than an HOA police force.

https://www.cnn.com/2013/06/05/us/trayvon-martin-shooting-fa...

This is the kind of behavior that I expect to see widely across America if we rely on random citizens to patrol instead of police. He was told by 911 to stay in his car, but instead he got out and shot Treyvon in supposed "self defense".

Agreed that it won't help there. But communities are different; the ones that are proposing community policing are ones where they know that they will get better treatment from their own community members than they will from outsiders.

The same solutions will not be applied universally across the US because the challenges are very different for different communities. Many Black communities that are asking for community policing will benefit; doing community policing in white spaces is not guaranteed to make them any safer for Black people, but I don't know if that's being called for. And honesty I'm not sure it makes them less safe, either, when you look at what happened to Treyvom Martin and Ahmed Aubrey's cases (and all the others that do not get media attention).

> but instead he got out and shot Treyvon in supposed "self defense".

The wikipedia article says that he was injured and that he got into a conflict with him before shooting. He claims that this was while he was returning to his car and he was attacked by him. If this is true I see no misconduct by him.

HOA Karens are not my idea of a better police force. The response to insufficient oversight shouldn't be tossing out the baby with the bathwater, but better policies. We might start for example, with the top of the funnel.

Police in the US are professionally credentialed faster than a master plumber. After less training, less testing, and less oversight, they're handed lethal discretion and informal qualified immunity latitude, in less time than it takes for someone to hang a shingle out as a one-man plumbing business.

Have you ever lived in a country that has a well functioning, nonviolent Police? E.g. somewhere in Europe?

Have you ever lived in a country where people don’t have weapons? It is like night and day really - I never heard of a shooting in my neighborhood, and when Police shoots someone unarmed by accident, it is nationwide news (in a nation of 40M, I remember one situation happening a few years back).

edit: I found some stats for my country. Every year, for 40M population Poland: 125 uses of guns by Police (warning shots etc), around 25 times shot towards a person, 1-2 people killed.

> Have you ever lived in a country that has a well functioning, nonviolent Police? E.g. somewhere in Europe?

I know for a fact that the police in Germany, Italy, Spain, and the Balkan countries is extremely shitty. You do not need an armed police in order for them to be violent.

No, it's a different institution based on different ways of organising power. For another example of this see Civil Defense Forces in Rojava[0] which are organized democratically.

http://hawzhin.press/2020/06/01/how-to-abolish-the-police-le...

Why don’t we look at societies without police and contrast them to societies with police and tease out which have better outcomes?

In some rural communities the police can be hours away, if there's even an officer on shift right now. Virtually everyone in those communities has guns and it works out pretty well.

Yes and many small message boards on the internet don’t require folks to hold a moderator role.

It doesn’t scale.

There's a reason "roof Koreans" are a meme. They were successful in keeping their businesses safe while the rest of the city was looted.

so Pro 2A?

Not at all.

Rural communities where there is basically no crime is no comparison to cities with an abundance of crime targets. Also they still have police, it just takes the police a while to get there. A entity with authority to carry out laws; a person who determines what is and isn't a crime, what acts are self defense and which are assault or murder, and tracks down criminals. If a farmer has a tractor stolen from him it is not acceptable to track the criminal down and use force to take it back, that is the job of the police.

>If a farmer has a tractor stolen from him it is not acceptable to track the criminal down and use force to take it back, that is the job of the police.

That's just hiring someone else to use force to take it back. So we at least agree that taking it back by force is the right thing to do. I'll even go so far as agreeing with you that it's morally justified to hire someone else to do it for you. I suspect our area of disagreement is really narrow on this issue.

I would rather have a group of people trained on how to apprehend criminals with the minimum force necessary and with rules and regulations to follow than have untrained, armed citizens going to retrieve their goods. Would the farmer have the freedom to search any property they please? A criminal would not let the farmer search his property, and if the farmer insisted with force he could be threatening an innocent person. Criminals would almost always be better armed and trained than their victims, and if a "mercenary" service existed which could be hired by victims, that mercenary service is essentially just privatized police.

Yes, there are often police who do not follow the regulations on how to interact with suspects, but I believe it is better to have guidelines which are sometimes broken than none at all.

First of all, I want to say that I don't support roving gangs of mercenaries. But just as a thought experiment... which do you think is likely to kill more innocent people: roving gangs of mercenaries in a stateless community where most are armed or the US government?

edit: changed vigilantes to mercenaries for consistency

We have numerous examples in US history of that. What do you think they did in the Old West? The sheriff was often outmanned and undergunned, so nobody wanted the position. The bandits were so powerful that ordinary citizens had to be called upon to catch criminals. Not to mention, there were hostile Native American tribes that wanted to scalp you.

Well, we are now talking about the entire US government instead of just US police. Certainly a state has a greater pool of resources to draw upon for war if it chooses to do so, but comparing a state with groups of mercenaries or vigilantes is impossible because of the myriad of different forms they could take. One would be comparing a single large casualty number vs. many much smaller numbers. The Iraq war is estimated to have had 150,000 to over 600,000 civilian casualties in the first three to four years of conflict, although I believe that is total, not just casualties attributed to the US. The US had a population of just under 300,000,000 at the time. Revolutionary Catalonia is the best large example of a large-scale anarchical society I can find, and in 1936 is estimated to have had 8,350 killings for a population of under 3,000,000 [0]. Of course those two examples are more on the extreme side, and there are infinite nuances, such as the fact that not all civilians in the civil war were innocent, the same with Revolutionary Catalonia. They both were extremely different times as well.

I'd say it's a toss-up if I absolutely had to guess.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Revolutionary_Catalonia

You don’t “hire” the police, and that’s critical. If you did, they would be accountable to you and not the rest of society. Police are agents of the government which is accountable (to some degree) to the people. This is a tremendous distinction.

Police and government have something very important in common with you. They are all just people. Regular people without superior morals, intellectual capability, resolve, etc. In this case a government is just a group of people getting together and saying, "Okay Bob, a few of us in the community have pooled our money together to hire some mercenaries and we'd like you to do the hiring." And then Bob just does it.

No one said anything about superior morals, capability, resolve, etc. The important part is that the state has a monopoly on violence and in a democracy, the state is accountable to the people. This doesn't require agents of the state to be superior in any specific way, only that We The People authorize state agents to enforce and uphold law and order.

We literally cannot remove the police without a collapse of the state and consequently the rest of our civilization, and if you think for even one moment about how that would play out it would be apparent: everything fractures into private armies with no incentive to uphold democratic rule of law; the most powerful private armies become de facto states and their ruler a law unto himself--effectively a king. Obviously modern society can't survive under these conditions--no one can trust rule of law which absolutely underpins our economy. So congratulations, you've rediscovered the dark ages and doomed hundreds of millions to deaths from violence, illness, and starvation. :)

Rural areas are far from not having crime, it is just much of it ends up not getting reported because by time the cops come, it is over, the people at fault are gone, and the cops got nothing to do other than harass the non-criminal people that are dumb enough to still be around. Rural police are 90% a money-making racket and the people know it. Threatening to call the police on someone in a rural area is considered a worse threat by most than directly threatening someone with a beating or deadly weapons. If your tractor gets stolen, the only reason to call the police is for insurance purposes. Otherwise the only way you are likely to ever see that tractor again is to ask around and look for it yourself. Plus you gotta be pretty dumb to steal a farmer's tractor. Not only is it noisy as fuck, extremely obvious, and will take forever to actually get anywhere, but the person stealing it is at the mercy of the farmer that has all the time in the world to come out and either force you out by gunpoint or blast you from a half mile away.

> If a society wants to get rid of the police, it needs to designate some other group to handle this use case. It can't simply get rid of the police.

> A "natural experiment" of a world without police is quite unnatural: it's a world built up around the police with a sudden police-shaped gap in the middle.

The hole can also get filled in unexpected ways. This past weekend during the riots and looting, when the police in Chicago were stretched too thin, some people were happy the local gangs were protecting them from the looters.

Arming the populace? Having a bunch of untrained people police their own neighborhoods sounds like a recipe for disaster. Trump supporters and racists would be watching neighborhoods with lethal weapons.

I'm not saying that Trump supporters should not be able to, but the anti-police crowd seem to not think far enough ahead to realize that taking power away from police and giving it to the people means giving it to people that they see as political and ideological enemies as well.

Edit: would someone like to dispute this instead of just downvoting? I'm trying to discuss in good faith; this seems to be a real problem with the idea of arming the populace: inevitably there will be citizens who have different ideas on self-policing their community. Would we only allow people with socially acceptable ideologies to have arms?

> Trump supporters and racists would be watching neighborhoods with lethal weapons.

You just described the situation today, both inside, and outside, of the police.

Many (naturally, well-armed) police are both Trump supporters, and racists.

Many Trump supporters, and racists, are extremely well-armed in the USA.

>Many Trump supporters, and racists, are extremely well-armed in the USA.

Yet they are not bestowed with the power of self-policing, and are still subject to a higher authority which regulates what is and isn't acceptable defense of self or property. Who would regulate their behavior? Instead of a small subset of racists having power, you would have ALL racists having power. I think they would love to have the ability to police their own communities without having to go through the trouble of becoming a police officer. There would be George Zimmerman to type situations happening every other day since they know police are not coming. Last year 9 black and 19 white unarmed people were shot by police out of a population of 328 million people. Any number may be unacceptable, but that number would certainly be orders of magnitude higher if untrained citizens who do not have the protocols that police must follow are given the power to self-police.

In rural areas the population is already armed, even for the purpose of hunting and protecting the farms from animals damaging crops and livestock. If I read the numbers correctly the state with the least regulated gun policies is the second most safe in USA.

Also Trump supporters don't equal Pro 2A. Most of my USA based colleagues are Pro 2A, including the Biden supporters, and most are not Trump fans.

Also most people that I know with gun permits in my country (extremely rare) are more knowledgeable on laws than most policemen; same for gun training, we do train policemen in the range and we see that.

In a neighborhood where people are armed there is no need to patrol on the streets. Guess what is the place around the gun range that is never robbed? The gun range. People don't take risks, they pick the easy targets, gun-free zones are perfect targets for people that ignore the laws.

I have firearms, and I would use them to kill credible threats to myself and my family. You seem to be saying that makes me a "Trump supporter and racist". I am neither of those things. Several of my neighbors might fit that description, but all of my neighbors are armed.