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Comment by insane_dreamer | Hacker News Reader

> 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_...

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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.

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