This is a price the US pays for the right to keep and bear arms. US cops have to assume that everyone is armed. That leads to a paranoid style of policing. As gun laws have become less restrictive, cops have armed and armored up.
Also weapons are relatively cheaper today than decades ago.
But US Cops always escalate instead. They want the fight, they aren't looking for safety.
See also: Game wardens during hunting season vs game wardens during fishing season.
its also the effective range for most people snap drawing a pistol in a use of force situation.
Do you have a reliable citation for this claim? [0] I disbelieve that this has been happening in any substantial way in the US. I expect that at very best, they've stayed roughly as restrictive as they have been for quite a long time.
> US cops have to assume that everyone is armed.
Weird. In San Francisco, California (a city of roughly 800->900k), the regular CompStat reports [1] have this to say about the number of incidents of firearm violence (whether fatal or non-fatal) in the city:
* 2022 -> 185 incidents
* 2023 -> 162 incidents
* 2024 -> 132 incidents
* 2025 -> 101 incidents
For fun, you can slap this pretty fucking shitty Power BI dashboard [2] around to compare those numbers to the number of times cops have either threatened to shoot or have shot someone each year.
Weirdly, I'm having great difficulty finding the city's officer injury reports. In the absence of those reports, I'll assume that policing still doesn't crack the top ten most hazardous jobs in the US, and that it's still roughly as hazardous as being a groundskeeper or professional athlete.
[0] If your supporting evidence is "spooooky ghost guns", I'll laugh my way out the door.
[1] <https://www.sanfranciscopolice.org/stay-safe/crime-data/crim...>
[2] <https://www.sanfranciscopolice.org/your-sfpd/published-repor...>
Yes. For hundreds of years, open carry has been legal just about everywhere. More people choosing to do things that have been legal for ages doesn't mean that the relevant regs have been loosened.
I do note that over the past couple of decades it has become illegal to openly carry in many places, [0] so that's a substantial increase in the restrictiveness of firearms regulation.
> Tactical rifles (i.e. semi-automatic variants of military rifles like the AR)....
By this you mean to say "semi-automatic variants of rifles designed in the last sixty five-ish years". [1]
> ...are less restricted since the "assault weapons" bans expired or were overturned.
You should look into the status of state regs on firearms possession and notice how many of them have been enacted within the past decade. You should also look into the regs on ammunition production, sale, and possession. While the regulation of ammo possession, sale, and production is not literally the regulation of firearms, a firearm without its ammo is no fun to operate, unless you're really into swinging around a very expensive, poorly-balanced club.
[0] ...among them, schools, hospitals, wherever a private business owner places a legally-conformant notice...
[1] Seriously, go look at when the AR-15 was designed and first manufactured.
The bigger issue that comes to mind and that you can actually look in to is the practice of teaching police departments about “Killology”. This is (or was) a kind of seminar that taught departments this mindset of “everyone that an officer interacts with is a potential threat”. Add this to the “super criminal” bs that was popular in the 80s/90s, the constant right-wing fearmongering about dangerous criminals in blue cities, and the militarization of police, and it feels more like they’ve been primed for violence from the power structure more-so than any actual threat from the public.
- a land border with a large continent that has a lot of guns and violence and criminality
- millions and millions of existing guns, the criminal holdings of which would not decrease following a change in the law
- subcultures that glorify violence and teach it as a path in life, particularly how to be a man and what sort of man to be attracted to
That's a curious perception indeed, given that guns predominantly flow from the US to Mexico and not the other way around, and guns in Mexico are of mostly US origin.
assuming everyone has a gun and is willing to use it, raises the stakes of every encounter. so instead of a police encounter starting at a very low risk level (casual conversation), it starts a very close to deadly force risk.
This causes both sides to be a lot more tense, with a lot less room for mistakes. It also makes any encounter feel very risky.
I don't think people having a gun prevents police from starting an encounter at a casual level. But the assumption everyone is out to harm them, and has the means to do so, does.