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> There's nothing wrong with walking around with a gun on your hip, whether you're a cop or not.

I happen to think that there is.

If you have a gun on your hip you probably won't shoot anyone with a gun. But the chances of shooting someone with a gun are non-zero. If you don't have a gun on your hip, the chances of shooting someone with that gun are zero. I like those chances better.

(The 2A was good for its time and make sense in the context in which it was written; it has no place in today's world.)

On-duty police fatally shoot about 1,000 people every year.[0] That's in the US. Guess how many on-duty police in the U.K. or Japan fatally shoot every year? [1][2]

[0] https://manhattan.institute/article/fatal-police-shootings-a... [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_killings_by_law_enforc... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_with_annual_...

I always have to think of this one episode of A Touch of Frost I believe where a murdering gunman was on the loose in the UK. And it triggered this big mobilisation where suddenly all the cops had to be equipped with pistols. Because the typical cop would just have a billystick to go on patrol with.

At some point in time this stopped being normal. AFAIK nowadays every cop in Europe has a pistol on themselves. Surely that's not actually necessary ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

> AFAIK nowadays every cop in Europe has a pistol on themselves. Surely that's not actually necessary ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Once even a small fraction of criminals starts to have guns and use those to kill cops to get away that becomes necessary, yes. Then once cops starts to have guns the criminals stops shooting them as much, the transition is very quick as once police has a gun the criminal risks his life by shooting, while before the police had guns the criminal was perfectly safe using his gun.

This transition happened in most European countries, but not all. And this costs basically nothing, the amount of deaths from police shootings in Europe is minimal even if you include warranted police shootings.

> Once even a small fraction of criminals starts to have guns and use those to kill cops to get away that becomes necessary, yes.

This is false. Police in the UK and Japan don't carry guns. And their violent crime rates are significantly lower than the US where police do carry guns.

Now granted, in the US everyone can carry a gun, so yeah, the police need them too. That's why the root of the problem is the fact that everyone, with minimal checks and balances, has the right to carry a gun and it's embedded into US culture as part of "being American".

Require insurance for gun owners, like we do for vehicles, and the problem largely goes away.

(Hardened criminals and gangs will always find access to guns, as they can in the UK or Japan. That's a separate issue that is conflated with but actually orthogonal to gun control and police carrying weapons.)

> Police in the UK and Japan don't carry guns

Police in Japan do carry guns.

Also police in Sweden and almost all other European countries carry guns, and they have much less levels of violence than USA as well, guns are illegal yet still a very small fraction of criminals have guns. A police doesn't get to decide when they meet a criminal with guns, when they do the police really really need a gun, and they need the protection of the criminal knowing that the police has a gun.

Only a handful of countries in the world has police patrol without guns, the majority of the most peaceful countries on earth still have policemen patrol with guns: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Police_firearm_use_by_country

In such situations it's possible to bring in special police units with guns; that doesn't mean you now have to equip every bobby with one. Thankfully in the UK regular police still don't carry a gun (except for NI, but that's historical), and, unsurprisingly, the number of people killed by police in orders of magnitude lower than the US. And the UK homicide rate is 4 times lower than the US, which proves that having more cops with guns does _not_ reduce violent crime.

Putting aside the politics of this…

If you want to point to a single factor as having / not having an effect between 2 groups you need to account for other factors. You could setup a statistical model.

So to be clear, the fact that policemen in the US/UK do/don’t carry guns and have higher/lower crime rate doesn’t prove anything on its own.

> friendly neighborhood cops

There's a reason that you think the cops are friendly and other people don't. But the reason is not distorted media consumption. It's because the cops actually treat different people very differently.

Many people who are routinely harassed and abused by police would be similarly surprised to learn that you find them to be so friendly. What seems to you to be an elaborate psyop conspiracy to demonize the police is actually just ordinary people in different social circumstances from you showing what reality looks like in their position.

>What seems to you to be an elaborate psyop conspiracy to demonize the police is actually just ordinary people in different social circumstances from you showing what reality looks like in their position.

No, what I'm talking about is a very well-funded campaign with support from the richest people. They have little interest in you having adequate police protection. They are sabotaging each other and the public at large by making people think the problems with police are far more severe and widespread than they are.

this reads like pure conjecture; more importantly, a motivation is lacking. I don't like wealthly billionaires, but I do know they aren't afraid of the police (which can be paid off), so there's not really a motivation to rally the public to reduce police power.

It's not conjecture, you can see the minions of certain rich people talking about it. Of course these people aren't afraid of police. They have top police protection as well as private armed security. There are many ways to make money from destabilization of cities or countries. For example, you could play real estate in "distressed" areas, bet against businesses that can't possibly stay open in the face of crime, and also fund politicians that claim to have a solution to the problem you are creating.

Have we outsourced parenting and discipline to police and teachers? We’re just burning them out instead of trying to properly raise a family?

It certainly feels that way with teachers but how do we get the data to know?

A few years ago, a friend of mine taught creative writing and literature at a state college. Her class was one of the requirements for the criminal justice program. Just by observing the students, she could tell which ones were in criminal justice. Her observation was that the criminal justice students were, at best, bullies and had no respect for fellow students or teachers.

You're right. We don't have to have cops go through the same rigorous training as surgeons, but at least we should make sure that they are not sociopaths and have empathy and compassion for other beings (the cops, not the surgeons).

There's another problem though: if you only allow compassionate, empathic people to be police, you won't have any police in America. Those kinds of people don't want to be police, especially in a country with so much gun violence and much of the population armed and apparently having sporadic mental problems and where violence is such a normal part of daily life. It takes a "special" kind of person to want to be a cop in that kind of environment.

It's very different in peaceful, gun-free countries.

>It's very different in peaceful, gun-free countries.

You think gun-free countries have no criminals or violence? They certainly do, and it is often far more brutal because individuals cannot defend themselves from groups and knives are everywhere.

Spoken like an American who's never left his country, or even flown on an airplane. I live in a gun-free country, and it's quite peaceful, completely unlike America with all its mass shootings.

You've probably never been to America or shot a gun. I have been abroad to some of the most gun-free places in the world and I'm quite pleased with how we live in the US. There aren't as many shootings as the media would have you believe. The people at the top who cry about guns really just want you to be a helpless sheep. They have an imperative which is to maintain power, even if it costs you your life.

> There aren't as many shootings as the media would have you believe

Regardless of the media (and I agree TV news amplify all this stuff which is why we don't even have TV in our house), the statistics (not generated by the media) show much, much higher rates of homocide, both by individuals and police officers, in the US than any other industrialized country.

Regardless of you how you personally feel, the US is inherently statistically unsafe compared to other industrialized nations, especially wealthier ones like Japan, Switzerland, the Nordic countries, etc.

>Regardless of you how you personally feel, the US is inherently statistically unsafe compared to other industrialized nations, especially wealthier ones like Japan, Switzerland, the Nordic countries, etc.

That may be but I don't think homicide is common in the US, even if it is more frequent than elsewhere. 5 in 100k is not common. I don't believe guns are to blame. I also think there are other cultural factors in play as the US is very culturally diverse compared to Nordic countries or Japan. I would be interested to know the number and severity of drug addictions per capita before considering that.

Even reducing my risk of homicide from 5 in 100k to zero would not change my mind about guns. We need them to defend against all aggressors, even government actors. The police do not have a duty to protect you in the US, and even if they did they cannot be everywhere. People are quick to ridicule the idea that guns can protect you against the government these days but the logic is totally sound and has been proven again and again throughout history.

> People are quick to ridicule the idea that guns can protect you against the government these days

I think what happened in Waco TX showed that having a bunch of guns to protect yourself from the government is 1) ineffective, and 2) a really bad idea.

It made sense in the 1700s but those were different times.

Obviously one family or small group camping on their property cannot stand up to a seige by the government. But has there ever been a revolution without guns since they became common? You can hardly dream of any kind of resistance against real tyranny without guns. It is foolish to think that tyranny is a thing of the past, and that guns might not defend you or at least aid your escape from such a government. People are fighting tyranny around the world right now with guns.

I agree the US is not immune to tyranny—one need look no further than Trump for that , though thankfully the checks and balances of democracy held. My point is that 200 years ago civilians with guns could stand up to a tyrannical government as there wasn’t much else more advanced weaponry that would give the gov an unassailable advantage. Civilians would have no hope of a chance today regardless of how many guns they had. So the main original purpose of the 2A, which was necessary at the time, is no longer feasible. All that remains are the downsides of the 2A.

> we should make sure that they are not sociopaths and have empathy and compassion for other beings (the cops, not the surgeons)

Exactly. And to be clear. I wasn't suggesting that cops go through the equivalent of 10 years of college + medical school. But now they get, what, 2-4 months training, in some cases just straight out of high school? But even more important is the screening -- and that's a lot of what those years of the medical school process does.

>When billionaires fund social media psyops to convince people that their friendly neighborhood cops are out to get them, and they'd be better off without police protection, that distorts public perception of police performance.

source?