I doubt it is. Either the FBI is just joining the ranks of groups asking for more Police transparency or the FBI director is trying not to look like a complete idiot by latching on to a cause no one can have an issue with to divert attention from the fact he keeps asking for encryption backdoors.
Let me see if I can channel the mindset. The basic premise is that the better nature of humanity is expressed when everyone works together through grand institutions rather than when they succumb to their tribal, factional, or selfish individualism.
If you believe that premise--and it's a very common mindset among do-gooder government types like FBI or U.S. Attorneys, then encryption is bad because it facilitates subversive tribes or factions pursuing their own ends independent of the mainstream of society. But lack of police transparency is also bad because it undermines the public's faith in their institutions, which cripples the effectiveness of those institutions.
haha, no doubt. "It's outrageous that we don't have some kind of investigative government agency that collects this sort of intelligence for the public good" -FBI Director.
If it turns out that there is a definite trend of increasing force used by law enforcement, I certainly don't expect them to release that data voluntarily. If it's not in their favor, they'll attempt to bury it.
"It is unacceptable that The Washington Post and the Guardian newspaper from the U.K. are becoming the lead source of information about violent encounters between police and civilians. That is not good for anybody."
I'd say that's a pretty good example of the freedom of the press doing work that's in the interest of the public. Just because it makes the FBI look bad doesn't mean it lacks merit. Maybe his quote is taken out of context though, in that it's "unacceptable" the FBI can't fiddle with the data for its own ends.
He clearly isn't saying that, he is not attacking the journalistic efforts, he isn't being disingenuous (at least not in the sense you imply, but he could be grandstanding for political gain rather than saying what he really thinks).
He's using a figure of speech, the meaning is that the current situation where the best effort is coming from the journalists should not be allowed to continue, but there isn't any implication that they should stop what they are doing, it is an acknowledgement that the FBI or whoever should be leading the way.
I'm not going to say the subtext I pointed out in an "other side of the coin" tongue in cheek manner went over your head, but I'm also not not going to say it.
I measure public statements by persons in similar positions to him by how they could be cast as self-serving.
That you were being sarcastic seemed pretty likely, I continue not to be able to make much sense of it (if the comment is self serving, it is as political grandstanding, it is clearly not critical of the journalism).
Without any context at all, I don't take that as a attack on the freedom of the press. The only way to take it, without mental gymnastics, is that it's bad the FBI isn't collecting and providing that information and that we have to rely on a UK newspaper.
Without, oh, comparing crime rates that's useless. E.g. just starting with murder, with less than half the people California had 1,697 in 2014 and Germany 662 in 2011 per Wikipedia.
I fully believe there's a problem with US and most certainly California cops, but this is not the way to approach the problem. Heck, it doesn't even suggest anything actionable.
Heck, it doesn't even suggest anything actionable.
Gun control is the elephant in this particular room. A cop who isn't expecting his next public contact to shoot him is not going to pull a gun when he walks into the room, much less shoot first.
Within the confines of our Constitution, which has been well-interpreted by the fine, honorable justices of our Supreme Court, how would you stop the violent, law-breaking gang member from getting firearms?
Well, the Supremes don't actually support "bearing" arms, just "keeping" them, so there's room there, the plain language of the 2nd Amendment notwithstanding.
Plus the law at all levels, as well as pretty much everyone but I suppose the criminal class, supports making it illegal for a "violent, law-breaking gang member" to possess a firearm if he's been convicted of a violent felony (well, any felony, but we all agree about the violent ones).
You didn't address the question. Of course it's illegal -- how would you stop them from __getting__ them, though? We've seen that making it illegal won't be enough, as drugs and prohibition have shown: there would be a black market, just as there almost certainly already is.
During prohibition, it was much harder (and more expensive) to get beer (or liquor), and more liquor than beer was consumed at a considerably higher price. One outcome was significantly lower alcohol consumption and all that that means (lower deaths by cirrhosis, lower city drunkenness arrests).
If we take prohibition as an analogy, then sure, a dedicated criminal will still be able to get guns. However, a casual street-level criminal is going to have to work harder to get them because they're no longer available in the mall or from the pawn shop, and he's going to have to pay ten times as much to get one from Benny in the pool hall. That'll significantly reduce the number of guns out there, and that is what creates the environment and the expectation that results in cops shooting civilians.
When it's come to the Federal appellate courts and concealed carry, only the 7th (Illinois) has (ordering shall issue, which Illinois acquiesced to without drama (!)), with the 9th looking to reverse the positive Peruta v. San Diego County district court decision (which would also hit Hawaii). It's still in progress for D.C., and the 1st-4th did not, and the Supremes denied cert.
Hasn't and won't in the foreseeable future come up for 5-6th, 8th, and 10-11th circuits. So with the score currently 1-4 at the appellate level and 0-4 with the Supremes, I don't find the Federal legal situation at all encouraging, since there's no state that forbids all unloaded movements of guns, I don't see much wiggle room for your "in some capacity".
The enforcement in other western countries is limited to not selling them as easily, tons of people still have unregistered guns and illegally importing them isn't difficult.
This makes no sense. I've lived in the UK my whole life, and when growing up spent some time around pretty unsavoury people. I've once seen a firearm, and that was at a clay pigeon range.
I don't dispute that some people may own illegal firearms, but its by no means an endemic problem. Somebody getting shot in the UK is guaranteed to make the news. Just the presence of a criminal with a gun will interrupt live news channels, that's how rare it is.
Exactly. In the UK, 99% of the population wouldn't even know how to begin getting hold of a handgun. If they started making serious enquiries, chances are they'd run into an undercover cop before they found someone able to supply them something illegal.
While I don't doubt that the knowledge of who to talk to and where to go to get a gun is present in certain UK communities, the basic fact that everybody involved in procuring, handling and importing guns is committing a criminal act certainly acts as a pretty solid prevention mechanism to stop, say, an angry 20-something man from acquiring sufficient guns and ammo to go on a shooting rampage at a college.
Do you lock the doors of your house when you leave? Those locks are useless to a thief with a crowbar.
So if you do lock your house doors when you go out, you're implicitly agreeing that you do this to make it more difficult for someone to get inside your house, reducing the likelihood of theft.
You reduce opportunity which gets rid of opportunistic criminals. Ones who might rob your house because it is unlocked and they are less likely to get caught (compared to the shattering of glass or breaking down a door).
I'm going to go out on a limb and claim murders are not an opportunistic crime. People are not killing because they can and can get away with it. The comparison you are trying to make dies there because the type of crime is not comparable.
It's the acquisition of the gun that's comparable, not the crime committed with it.
Since someone can physically go and mill a gun, should that be the reason not to enact gun control? Seems like a ridiculous reason to me, but apparently is a core bit of logic for the gun crowd.
It's better not to make laws that are ineffective at stopping criminals, but completely effective at hindering law-abiding citizens from exercising their rights.
Because you need more people to violate those laws with greater regularity for such a situation to occur. It is easier to get one person to break ten laws than to get ten people to break one. Regulating the sale and distribution of firearms mitigates such risks.
That's not actionable unless you're willing to suffer a 2nd civil war which your side would lose very badly, and all for the conceit that criminals would pay attention to such laws, especially when we already have well over 300 million guns in the country.
A US police officer who doesn't assume a public contact might result in a lethal threat from a gun or edged weapon is an idiot.
One thing that really irritates me about the anti-gun-control crowd is that idea, "if you ban guns, criminals will ignore the ban, because they are criminals and criminals ignore laws."
People who break one law will still obey countless others. It's also totally reasonable to think that someone who engaged in some kind of petty larceny would readily obey gun-restriction laws--why wouldn't they?
This whole "gun control won't work because criminals ignore laws" thing always struck me as a nasty piece of nonsequitor logic and identity politics, a way to "other" a group of people (i.e. more people who live in some counterculture way than people who have actually broken some law) as wild or deranged Hollywood-esque marauders, or a way to invent a bogeyman threat that only guns (in the hands of the so-called "good guys") can stop.
Someone only interested in petty larceny isn't carrying a gun right now for two reasons. They could pawn it for money and if they get caught it will add far more years to their sentence than petty larceny.
Someone who uses a gun illegally today, will use one when they're illegal. At best making guns illegal would stop some domestic murders, but that would have to be weighed against a massive number of people going to jail for not obeying, country wide stop and frisk, and New Orleans style door to door SWAT raids to confiscate.
I am making no claim about the benefits, only the claimed negative consequences.
merpnderp made the claim that making guns illegal would end up with a "massive number of people going to jail for not obeying, country wide stop and frisk, and New Orleans style door to door SWAT raids to confiscate."
Guns are illegal in Australia, though certainly many guns remain. (Hunting and other guns remain.)
Australia did not end up with a "massive number of people going to jail for not obeying", etc.
Therefore, it's possible to make guns be illegal, in the way Australia has, and not end up with the consequences that merpnderp predicts must necessarily be the case.
Australia pulled about 200K guns out of circulation. I live in a small county in a small state and there are likely that many guns just in my county. There are an estimated 300,000,000 guns in the US. And there are already and estimated 200,000 people in NY living in felony violation of the new gun laws against rifle magazines.
Also if you look at the gun murder trend line in Australia it doesn't appear to change after the gun confiscation. Gun murders were on the decline and continued on the same pace.
I am not addressing the possible benefits of stricter gun control laws in the US. I am saying that your claim that Australia-style gun control laws will lead to 'New Orleans style door to door SWAT raids to confiscate' is hyperbolic, such that people may immediately discard your viewpoints as being unrealistic.
> In two nationwide, federally funded gun buybacks, plus large-scale voluntary surrenders and state gun amnesties both before and after Port Arthur, Australia collected and destroyed more than a million firearms, perhaps one-third of the national stock. No other nation had attempted anything on this scale.
I confirmed this at http://loc.gov/law/help/firearms-control/australia.php , which says the 1996 buyback collected "More than 640,000 prohibited firearms", and "there were about 3.25 million guns in Australia prior to the 1996–1997 buyback program". The 2003 buyback "resulted in about 70,000 handguns" being collected. I don't know where the CNN' "more than a million firearms" comes from, but the numbers I found are still 3x what you give.
It's also mostly meaningless to compare Australia's "200K guns out of circulation" to a total US ownership of 300M guns. Those are two different statistics. It's more appropriate to compare the 3 million guns from a then-population of 18 million, to the US ownership; Australia had about 1/6th the per capita gun numbers than the US currently has.
Looks like the 200K number is from just part of the buyback. That was from memory in an article I read. But either way, 650k to 1 million doesn't change the point much.
As for door to door raids and stop and frisk, that's the only way to get guns out of american hands. How do we know this? Because many cities and states have had draconian gun laws in the past. There have been buy back programs by the dozens. None of them worked. Just life France and much of Europe, guns are easy to get in restricted jurisdictions.
And why would you think telling people they have to turn in their guns will work? They won't even register them when required by law.
I did not say that a buyback program was the solution. (Nor did Australia limit themselves to a buyback program; it was part of a national effort.)
I asked why Australia didn't have the horrors that you predict would happen should Australian-like gun control laws be put into place in the US.
Your only answer seems to be that the US has too many guns, so therefore can't change. (Which sounds like a bank which is "too big to fail", so we have to keep feeding it taxpayer money.)
> that's the only way to get guns out of american hands
That's irrelevant. As I demonstrated, only about 1/3 of the guns got out of Australian hands. Why would anyone think those same laws would get 100% of the gun out of American hands?
The term "gun control" is thrown around without definition, which makes it difficult to have an intelligent discussion.
Let's start with the assumption it is impossible to alter the constitution to remove or severely cripple the second amendment, which, I think, is a reasonable assumption.
How, specifically, would you define "gun control"?
What reinterpretation occurred in Heller? It affirmed that we have the right to own firearms and keep them in usable condition for home defense, both of which D.C. had banned.
As a reminder, you recently said ' Every time I get sucked into a political discussion on HN I hate myself so I am as guilty as anyone else' at participating in the non-tech threads you think should be banned from HN. ;)
Quoting from Wikipedia, "Gun control generally refers to laws or policies that regulate the manufacture, sale, transfer, possession, modification, or use of firearms." This is general agreement with how others use.
> "how states regulate the firearm ... what types of firearms civilians may be authorized to possess and which states keep centralized records of firearms in civilian hands", "how states regulate the civilian user, including the criteria used to determine eligibility to possess a firearm, how the licensing process works, and whether states permit private sales of firearms", and "how states regulate the
use of civilian firearms, including the extent to which states require a reason to possess a firearm and the conditions that apply to firearm ownership."
I see nothing particularly ambiguous in how the term is used for you to call for a need for the us, the hoi polloi, to help you understand it better.
Gun control laws fall on a spectrum. Typically people say "we need more gun control" to mean that the laws should be more restrictive on what is allowed, while "we need less gun control" means the laws should less restrictive.
Wikipedia explains the phrase "elephant in the room" well:
> The term refers to a question, problem, solution, or controversial issue which is obvious to everyone who knows about the situation, but which is deliberately ignored because to do otherwise would cause great embarrassment, or trigger arguments or is simply taboo. The idiom can imply a value judgment that the issue ought to be discussed openly, or it can simply be an acknowledgment that the issue is there and not going to go away by itself.
> The term is often used to describe an issue that involves a social taboo, such as race, religion, or even suicide. This idiomatic phrase is applicable when a subject is emotionally charged; and the people who might have spoken up decide that it is probably best avoided.[8]
The phrase "Gun control is the elephant in this particular room" refers to the top-comment's list of "tangentially relevant facts". One inference is that the stricter gun control laws of Germany mean that fewer people have guns, so police are less likely to use methods which presume the civilians are both armed and likely to response with a gunfight.
However, saying that directly brings in well-worn nearly deadlocked arguments about changes to gun control laws, Second Amendment, etc. Hence, the top-comment's indirect reference, which avoids discussing gun laws by talking about possible effects - hence, the topic of gun control is "the elephant in the room" that is being avoided, for reasons Wikipedia illuminated.
Note that "I am simply asking a question." is often used by people who are derisively said to be "JAQing off". In order to avoid that accusation, I suggest you do some research first, rather than ask Wikipedia-level questions. You say that people do not define it; what is wrong with the definition from Wikipedia? Is it incompatible with how most people use the term?
> As a reminder, you recently said <snip> "so I am as guilty as anyone else' at participating in the non-tech threads"
Well, I am flattered to have a loyal follower! :)
I've already admitted guilt. Note that my comment about political discussion not belonging on HN got down-voted with some passion. The conclusion being: I am wrong. People want these discussions on HN. And so, here we are. Who am I to argue with that?
By "sucked into a political discussion" I think I mostly mean getting sucked into the kind of pointless back and forth that can happen when one (me included) resorts to attacking an idea rather than discussing it. When I do that I find I am never happy with the results. It has nothing to do with the childish idea of winning an argument but rather the concept of going about exploring something using exactly the wrong approach. I am personally going to try to change my approach when participating in these kinds discussions on HN.
Going back to the question I asked. No, this isn't about JAQ-ing off. This is about asking someone what they mean when they use the term.
And no, this isn't about a Wikipedia or dictionary definition either. And it certainly isn't about what the definition of the term might be in Germany or anywhere else.
Unless that is what the person using the term meant.
I feel that lots of people use the term "gun control" out of frustration. Why? Because when asked what exactly they --that person, not Wikipedia-- means by "gun control" they have a hard time answering the question.
And the context has to be right. If I am working with a friend in the garage and, in the course of our banter, I say something like "hey, asshole, hand me a 1/2 inch socket", what did I mean? Am I insulting him or is it actually a friendly jab? Should someone ask, giving them a link to the Wikipedia definition of "asshole" would not answer the question.
I am not attacking you or putting down your answer. I am simply pointing out that I was not looking for a universal definition of the terms but rather for what someone means when they use it.
Do they mean "disarm the entire population", "disarm all criminals", "disarm the mentally unstable", "institute severe penalties for doing X, Y or Z with guns", or something else?
So, again, I don't know what this person meant with "Gun control is the elephant in this particular room". In the next sentence they are talking about cops not having to worry about people shooting them. He says: "A cop who isn't expecting his next public contact to shoot him".
That, to me, implies that, to this person, "gun control" might mean something approaching total disarmament of the population, criminals included.
What else could it mean to the person using the term? How does the elephant in the room, gun control, if addressed, create a situation where a cop will never be worried about someone shooting them? What form would addressing the elephant in the room take? Again, to the person using the term. I don't want to make any assumptions or use the dictionary because that is not likely what they meant.
That's why I asked for a clarification of "gun control". Another way to put it might be:
In your opinion, what form would gun control have to take in order to provide cops with the assurance that they will not be shot the next time they have contact with civilians?
I hope that clarifies what I am asking. I am not challenging anyone, I simply want to understand how this person (or anyone else for that matter) thinks of gun control in the context of the problem he posed.
I think the question is simple. The answer, likely not.
EDIT: To clarify further. "What do you mean by gun control?" means "How would you propose to implement gun control in order for the scenario you are painting to become reality (cops not afraid of getting ...
> Do they mean "disarm the entire population", "disarm all criminals", "disarm the mentally unstable", "institute severe penalties for doing X, Y or Z with guns", or something else?
"Gun control", in a policy sense that you want, where people define their terms, does not mean that. I gave you two sources with similar definitions. It means simply the laws related to the the production, sale, ownership, use, etc. of a gun and its ancillary components.
If your example regulations were in place, they would be considered part of gun control. Even if they are not in place, there can still be gun control.
The question I think you want to ask is "what gun controls do you want"? Not "what is gun control."
For purposes of this discussion, define "gun control" as having policies which are essentially identical to those of (your preference) Australia, or Sweden, or Japan.
I think that's as simple and unambiguous as you are going to get, and will satisfy most people interested in stricter laws.
> In the next sentence they are talking about cops not having to worry about people shooting them
That comment is a continuation of the thread, which started with statistics of the number of civilians killed by police officers.
> That, to me, implies that, to this person, "gun control" might mean something approaching total disarmament of the population, criminals included.
Again, "gun control" here is a synecdoche to mean "stricter gun control." Countries with strict gun controls, like Australia and Sweden, have a lot of private gun ownership, for hunting and target shooting. So no, it doesn't necessarily mean 'total disarmament of the population'.
Here's a hypothetical that might help understand the difference. Suppose hunting rifles are allowed, but hand guns are not. It's pretty hard to conceal a rifle as you go around town, especially since the law requires that it be locked up in a case when in transit, or stored in the house.
This means it's less likely that a petty thief will be carrying a gun to commit a crime. This means it's less likely that a drug dealer will be carrying a gun as protection against potential thieves.
In general, many police reports which involve the forceful police attack on what turns out to be the wrong person are justified because of the likelihood that the actual criminal is likely to have a gun, and may respond with a gunfight. For example, SWAT teams are often called out for low-level drug dealers. The assumption is that a dealer is likely to be armed. The team is figuratively armed for bear; expecting the worst possible case. Sometimes they end up killing or seriously injuring innocent people, including by forceful entry of the wrong house.
If years of SWAT team calls were go out, where no one ever has a gun, then it will be increasingly hard to justify the expense of a SWAT team and the deaths that sometimes occur when in a hair-trigger mode.
That was the statistics that the OP was referring to. That was the gun control style that the earlier poster was referring to. Very few seriously propose a 'total disarmament of the population', and if you had researched the topic you would have quickly learned that.
> The question I think you want to ask is "what gun controls do you want"? Not "what is gun control."
No, that IS the question I, in fact, asked. I did not ask "what is gun control?". Actually, what I asked is a bit more subtle than "what gun controls do you want?". This is what I asked, quoting:
"How, specifically, would you define "gun control"?"
Here, "would you define" is a very precise modifier. And the context, perhaps lost, was that the OP implied "gun control" was the "elephant in the room" when it came to police interacting with civilians.
That's a bit different from "what gun controls do you want?" but definitely NOT "what is gun control". If you think that's what I asked you misread my question.
Please don't try to push me into a corner with "if you had researched the topic". I actually know the topic very well. Here I am trying to understand what someone else thinks gun control has to be, their opinion or ideas, not the "book" definition. I know that latter very well, I care to learn the former.
Not sure how else to ask this. I thought I was clear. So, I'll try again, for the last time and then I'll unilaterally drop my attempt to understand.
What would you --not wikipedia, the dictionary or politicians-- you (or the person I originally asked) suggest would be the approach to gun control legislation that would allow police officers to not worry about whether or not civilians are armed when approaching them?
I will repeat, because this medium sucks at conveying emotion, I am not critical of anything you have said nor am I challenging anything anyone has said.
I am simply looking for someone to perhaps put up a five to ten bullet-point list delineating what form of "gun control" they think would provide a solution for the stated scenario, one where a cop is concerned about a citizen being armed when approaching them. What set of rules would constitute this version of "gun control" that would produce that reality?
BTW, I don't have an answer for that. Then again, I did not propose "gun control" was the elephant in that room.
To clarify further, I am not for or against guns. I am completely neutral about them. I am simply trying to learn because, frankly, I don't know what the solution might be or if we actually need one.
> What would you --not wikipedia, the dictionary or politicians-- you (or the person I originally asked) suggest would be the approach to gun control legislation that would allow police officers to not worry about whether or not civilians are armed when approaching them?
I gave one: implement national laws and policies equivalent to what's in Australia, Sweden, or Japan; wait the few years for use/presence of guns to go down; observe that the justifications for the stark use of police force have gone down; no longer permit those justifications.
Thanks, that's useful. Now I understand where you are coming from on this.
To be clear, this is what I think of when I say "Australian-style gun control":
- Same laws across all states
- Photo permit required
- Must justify need and "self defense" isn't a valid reason
- Denial due to mental conditions (and more)
- Must apply for permit to buy each weapon; 30 day wait to get it
- Ban on most long firearms, semi-auto's included
- Buy back program
- Ban on import and manufacture of banned weapons and accessories
- There's more but I think that's the basics
Now, in Australia there was no constitutional guarantee of gun ownership. How plausible do you think it would be, given that it is nearly impossible to get rid of the second amendment, to pass Australian-style legislation in the US?
Their buyback program took out about 20% of civilian firearms (law-abiding citizens, I presume). In the case of the US, if we could pass such laws and achieve equivalent results, this would mean we'd have about 240 million guns in the hands of civilians rather than 300 million. Again, I presume this will exclude criminals, I think it is fair to say they, by definition, do not abide by our laws.
Let me propose we do a much better job than Australia and eliminate about 33% of guns. Guns in the hands of law-abiding citizens, then would go down from 300 million to 200 million.
How much of an effect would you say this would have on gun violence in the US?
Would people, cops included, be able to feel safer anywhere they go kn the knowledge that there are only 200 million guns out there?
Do you think the mentally unstable will participate in the voluntary buy back program? If so, to what degree?
None of this addressed guns in the hands of criminals, gangs or those who own guns legitimately yet might be on the "edge", psychologically speaking. How will we deal with that problem?
When it comes to these issues it is all too easy to find data on pro and anti-gun sites to support any conclusion. I opted to go to the source and grab Australian government data here:
It's a neat little tool. You can click on the various categories to enable/disable their display. This is what I conclude from quickly looking at this:
- Homicide (all types) has remained pretty much flat before
and after the gun ban
- I'll call it 300 victims per year
- Armed robberies rose (doubled!) after the gun ban and, over
about 15 years, came down to slightly above pre-ban levels
- I'll call it at, say, 6,000 incidents per year
It's also interesting to see the trends in firearm and knife homicides, again, from Australian sources:
"There has been a pronounced change in the type of weapons used in homicide since monitoring began. Firearm use has declined by more than half since 1989-90 as a proportion of homicide methods, and there has been an upward trend in the use of knives and sharp instruments, which in 2006-07 accounted for nearly half of all homicide victims."
I interpret this as meaning that access to guns might not deter those who, for whatever reason, want to kill. Of course, mass murders are far more difficult with knifes or sharp objects. Yet, I think it is fair to say that the vast majority of people murdered are not killed in mass murders.
What are the roughly equivalent US stats today? Homicides, about 15,000/year; Robberies, about 400,000 per year.
That's a huge difference. In Australia the pre and post ban ho...
> How plausible do you think it would be, given that it is nearly impossible to get rid of the second amendment, to pass Australian-style legislation in the US?
I don't care.
You said people didn't give details. I gave you precise details.
You limited the topic to gun control. Now with "I'd rater spend $50K a year educating kids" you broaden the topic. This shows you didn't actually care about the original question. If you want to broaden the topic, well, I live in Sweden. I think many aspects of Nordic social policies should be copied in the US, including gun control laws, parental leave, education, day care, social support, and prison rehabilitation. But you didn't ask about those.
Look at all the questions you asked that were irrelevant to your original question, and show that you were constructing a leading question so you could then followup with a barrage of additional questions.
Typical JAQ'ing off behavior.
And the responses you could get are well-worn, boring to repeat, and covered by many others in great detail. Research it for yourself.
> Sealioning involves jumping into a conversation with endless questions and demands for answers, usually of entry-level topics far below the actual conversation ... The questions themselves, when done properly, are normally polite - just an irrelevant distraction.
You can see that "nothing short of respectful" is therefore expected behavior for someone who is "just asking questions".
You'll also note the caution:
> A particularly toxic thing about sealioning is that people who are genuine newbies asking serious questions are easy to mistake for sealions.
Based on your comment history you do not seem to be a "genuine newbie." I of course may be wrong, in which case my apologies. If that is the case, you may wish to investigate this rhetorical style in order to avoid structuring your investigatory question in a similar fashion, to avoid having others in the future respond with similar knee-jerk reactions.
However, note that earlier in this thread you said:
> "To clarify further, I am not for or against guns. I am completely neutral about them."
which appears to mean that you are, actually, against guns.
As you said then, "Each one of those line items could be a months-long discussion as to the merits, or lack thereof, of the idea", so you must realize that the questions you ask now fundamentally cannot be addressed to your satisfaction on HN.
Which further strengthens my belief that you were not asking these questions here in good faith.
Second, you picked that completely out of context, yet there's nothing wrong with wishing humanity didn't have guns or wars. It's utopia. Outside utopia, in the real world, I am neutral. I enjoy target and skeet shooting with my kids and friends, that's about the extent of it. I don't care about personal protection. Don't need guns for that.
Third, you must be young. I learned the Socratic Method when I was in high school decades ago. It's a productive and non-confrontational way to engage in conversations where we can both discover our positions and, perhaps, but not necessarily, guide each other towards conclusions. I've had many amazing discoveries in my life through this approach. And, no, I am not always correct.
Anyhow, I wanted to have a genuine conversation with you and the original person to whom I asked that simple question. Instead it turned into a lot of wasted effort. It would have been far simpler to answer (or ignore) the simple question and engage (or not) in an exploration of ideas, which can be very enjoyable.
BTW, I own several companies. We engage in this kind of exploration every day in order to discover flaws or new ideas in the various projects we undertake. It is a really productive way to explore corners of thinking or areas previously not well understood.
Another method is the "five why's". I haven't really used it much so I can't comment.
The US crime rate is much higher because the priority is declaring people to be criminals and then punishing them, including immediate execution on the street, rather than reducing crime and promoting a harmonious society.
There's also a large political faction who believe that a private right to kill people is important and inherent in gun ownership.
> There's also a large political faction who believe that a private right to kill people is important and inherent in gun ownership.
"private right to kill people" - hah. I assume you value the lives of criminals more than the law-abiding.
If you burglarize my home, attack me, or otherwise commit felonious acts on my property, my person, I have the right to stop that threat. You do not believe that people should have the right to protect themselves?
Just because you have an easy button for homicide doesn't mean it's called for in every hostile situation. Courts agree. Try killing someone for robbing your house.
There is no such thing as shooting to disable. You always aim for center of mass and if you do not feel threatened enough to shoot to kill then you shouldn't be shooting at all.
Now the caveat to this is if you shot an intruder and they're still alive, but now injured to the degree where you can safely disarm them and keep a gun drawn on them; current U.S law makes this a problem. You can get in legal trouble/sued by someone who broke into your home with a weapon intent on killing you, but only if they live.
This means not only are you shooting to kill - you're now dumping an entire magazine into the person to make sure they are dead.
E:
To the people who downvoted, how would you disarm an intruder with a gun? Ask them politely to put the weapon down? Run at them with a baseball bat (and risk getting shot)?
Or maybe shoot them in the arm or leg? Where major arteries are and the shot is still likely to be fatal and also has a higher chance of missing entirely.
Life isn't Call of Duty and shots to the legs/arm don't just "injure", they kill. So I'll repeat myself: there is no such thing as shooting to disarm or disable in real life. Only in fantasy first-person-shooter land.
If you hit the brachial or femoral artery they can bleed out within minutes. If you puncture a lung they can still survive. It all depends on where they get hit. Many people live from potentially fatal areas being hit and others bleed out from non-fatal regions being hit.
In either case, their survival puts you in legal trouble under current law. You should be shooting to kill if you feel deadly force is justified. If your intent is not to kill, then deadly force was not justified.
Good luck aiming for a hand. I advise you go to a firing range and see how often you can hit the arm of a moving target without taking time to aim (remember: taking time to aim = you are now the one being shot). You'll have fractions of a second to get someone in your sights and take the shot.
It'll cost $30-40 to use a range, rent a gun, and buy ammunition for an hour. You'll leave with a more informed opinion of how operating a firearm works.
I know you can't possibly accurately hit someones extremities, never made that claim either.
My post was in response to you making it sound like wounds to the extremities would be equally likely to kill as wounds to the center of mass, which is definitely not true.
My point is you're far less likely to even hit the hand. Aiming for it would be the worst decision you could make when your life is on the line and depends on you actually hitting and disabling the threat.
My point was you should never shoot to harm, only to kill. That means no hand shots. Period. Regardless of the chances of a fatally wounding shot.
My point - furthermore - was that it isn't a guaranteed "disabling" shot. It's still possible to kill. The thought of "shoot to disable" is a misinformed thought educated on nothing but Hollywood movies and video games.
You're either replying to the wrong post or didn't read mine, shooting at "hands or legs" is ridiculous but wounds to ones limbs are still far less likely to be lethal... Which is all I'm suggesting.
In most jurisdictions this is completely legal under most circumstances. You can't always kill someone fleeing your just-robbed home (state-specific laws), though.
If someone breaks into your home with the intent to felony, in my state, yes, you can use lethal force to stop the threat or apprehend the alleged felon.
You can't always kill someone fleeing your just-robbed home (state-specific laws), though.
In terms of law, case law is critical here, to my knowledge only Texas allows that, after a verbal warning. And like e.g. Oklahoma, I expect judges to eventually nullify that.
There are many states with justifiable homicide statutes allowing a citizen to apprehend persons whom they've observed committing felonies (or even to stop the felony-in-progress from occurring.)
Have you ever tried to apprehend a violent felon? They'll typically attack you, resulting in a case for traditional self-defense.
“Violent crime contains a wide range of offences, from minor assaults such as pushing and shoving that result in no physical harm through to serious incidents of wounding and murder. Around a half of violent incidents identified by both BCS and police statistics involve no injury to the victim.” (THOSB – CEW, page 17, paragraph 1.)
“In the FBI’s Uniform Crime Reporting (UCR) Program, violent crime is composed of four offenses: murder and nonnegligent manslaughter, forcible rape, robbery, and aggravated assault. Violent crimes are defined in the UCR Program as those offenses which involve force or threat of force.” (FBI – CUS – Violent Crime)
In the UK a push that results in no physical harm could be counted as a violent crime. That same push, resulting in the same lack of physical harm, would not be counted as a violent crime in the US.
What if a crazed meth head is kicking in my front door and is holding a knife?
This isn't a hypothetical and happened to me 15 years ago. I yelled I had a gun and would shoot him if he came through. He kicked a few more times then ran away.
One reason I bring this up is that a "duty to retreat" requirement manufactured by the Massachusetts courts was used to convict a man in the early '80s who wasn't willing to do that. There's a previous better known case were a woman was convicted because she didn't try to climb out of the high windows in her basement apartment.
That's what I though, but I read it in the unsympathetic Boston Globe as it proceeded, even they couldn't spin it into anything but a travesty. Well, to someone from outside the state.
I lived on the second story of a crappy apartment complex. There were no backdoors or fire escapes. And why should I have to grab my wife and run? What is it about this dangerous criminal invading my home that requires me to risk my wife's and my life over his? How is that just in any sense of the word?
History has shown repeatedly that humans are prone to emotional responses. And people that were otherwise law abiding right until a moment of anger now have easy hip-level access to a 'thing' to act out their anger.
Take the case a couple years ago of the retired cop that shot a guy in the movie theatre during previews for throwing popcorn at him. (Guy called his baby sitter during previews, the retired cop yelled at him to be quiet, guy threw some popcorn back at the cop, retired cop shoots guy dead) If this retired cop, who was a law-abiding citizen his whole life and was professionally trained in firearm safety and usage couldn't control his anger during an argument about a guy using his cell phone, I don't see how the average American can be trusted.
And speaking of guns in movie theatres, there's the case of the guy who accidentally dropped his handgun under his seat during a kids movie and then left. Luckily the ushers found it and not a kid. Guy had the nerve to go back to the theatre and demand it back.
I don't see how the average American can be trusted to keep their gun safe.
What you also don't see is the 11 million plus with concealed carry licenses, and those in the states of Maine, Vermont, Arkansas, Kansas, Arizona, Wyoming, and Alaska who don't need a permit, abusing their guns in public to any serious degree. The Violence Policy center did their best in a paper titled "Concealed Carry Killers", and I and some other research minions helped Supreme Court cited scholar Clayton Cramer demolish it.
Pearl clutchers have warned us of "blood in the streets!" and "Dodge City!" every time a state switched to shall issue licensing. Well, there are now 45 shall issue states, holding more than 2/3rd of the population, and its never happened, history does not show what you claim. Sure, there are occasional bad incidents (the VPC paper did find a few) ... but if in this HN topic you're going to claim police are the acme of responsible gun use, we're not living in the same reality.
We do not demand you get a jury verdict before using lethal force on someone threatening lethal force, there's no "alleged" from my viewpoint if someone is pointing a gun at me.
Which, I should point out, isn't punishment. Which 15155 never said we could do, he only talked about what you can do in felonious acts, defend yourself, and about a value system that puts criminals above the law-abiding.
Not even alleged criminals; the right to self-defense usually requires that the threat comes from someone without a legal privilege for the act, but the requirements for actual criminality (particular mens rea) are not necessarily required to trigger the right to use force in self-defense, even lethal force.
And this makes sense: the right to self-defense is not about the criminal culpability of the one against whom violence is permitted, its about a limit on the criminal culpability of the user of violence.
Now, one can argue that in some jurisdictions the details of the rules on self-defense are drawn overly broadly, or that they are applied selectively and in a discriminatory manner. But I don't think the general principal that people will not be held criminally accountable for use of force reasonably scaled to deal with an imminent threat which had no legal privilege to be made, independently of whether the one making the threat met the legal standards for criminal culpability in so doing, should be even slightly controversial.
the general principal that people will not be held criminally accountable for use of force reasonably scaled to deal with an imminent threat
As long as once the threshold of lethal force is reached, all lethal force in reply until the threat is over is legitimate.
Midway through it's now almost total ban on guns the U.K. made self-defense with more force than being used on you illegal, first in the courts in the '50s and then by law in the '60s. Outlawing effective self-defense then makes it that much easier to outlaw guns altogether.
This isn't a matter of criminal liability, it's one of immediate survival.
If a violent aggressor who is shot happens to survive, the court can decide their fate later, but that's completely separate from the right to self defense.
This is the law that we, a civilized society, live by. If you don't like it, there are countries (UK!) where self-defense is almost entirely illegal - they may be more fitting.
Furthermore, we decree the right to self-defense as a _natural_ right, not one that could be potentially amended away.
For the lazy, murders per death by cop, based on those numbers:
Germany: 83
California: 17
Murders per capita:
Germany: 1/124,000
California: 1/23,000
So California's murder rate is 5.4x Germany's, and its death by cop per murder rate is 4.9x Germany's.
Is it just me, or wouldn't you expect the death by cop rate to be more than a linear function of the murder rate... perhaps even a polynomial function?
A difference in murder rate of x does not necessarily mean a difference in levels of violence/danger of x.
America's LEOs may kill way people per capita, but our LEOs also get killed by people way more per capita. Even the most unhelpful lists of killings by police officers have an overwhelmingly common trend: "Officers arrived. Suspect drew gun. Suspect didn't drop gun when ordered to. Suspect pointed gun at officers. Officers opened fire." There are dozens or hundreds of people that are on killed-by-LEO lists only because they shot second.
Similarly, if you look at Sweden's first-ever police killing from a few years ago, the story isn't about police dying heroically because they're sacrificing themselves rather than killing criminals. It's that they don't have to kill anybody because nobody needs to be killed in order to defend others. "Violent crime is almost non-existent there." No violent crime, no violent police. No problem.
So let's not blame officers. They're probably doing the best they can with a bad situation. Let's blame the politicians who criminalize everything, the socioeconomic system that screws with poor people's minds, the macho culture that drives gun nuttery and 'stand-your-ground' and 'fuck-tha-police' sentiments, and violence in general. Until we get rid of those we're not going to be able to fix the police because, for the most part, the police aren't broken.
Of course we should not, by and large, blame the individual officers, sans those who have clearly overstepped boundaries. This should not in any way distract from the point that police forces in the U.S. (and many other jurisdictions) serve as paramilitary organizations which, as set by common law precedent, have no obligation to protect anyone, but only enforce a legal framework on a macro scale, i.e. their only duty is to serve the state (see: Castle Rock v. Gonzales).
It's interesting you mention "gun nuttery" as a problem. I take it you approve the citizenry be asymmetrical w.r.t being armed relative to the police? I do not.
By all means, fuck the police. Why would I approve of, say, the LAPD any more than I would approve of the MVSN?
> Why would I approve of, say, the LAPD any more than I would approve of the MVSN?
I had to look up MVSN. They were the Italian Fascist Blackshirt thugs.
If you think life in LA would be improved by the absence of the LAPD, I strongly question your grasp on reality. If you think the LAPD hassles people they shouldn't, beats them up, and sometimes kills them, you're almost certainly correct. But if you think that, in the absence of the LAPD, the total number of beatings and killings would go down, you're dreaming.
First: I agree that the police are, in too many ways, broken.
But you said, "Why would I approve of, say, the LAPD any more than I would approve of the MVSN?" My reply is that you would approve of the LAPD and not the MVSN, because despite the brokenness, the LAPD is still a net positive, and the MVSN were not.
Actually your comment didn't state they were a net positive, but merely that their absence wouldn't translate to a decrease in crime rates.
It may well be that some paramilitaries are more efficient than others, but their incentives are by definition always stacked against community building, and in favor of adversarial enforcement.
I know it's a little esoteric to ask, but where does violence begin and where does it end? If no one in our society is willing to step forward and give a helping hand, the cycle of poverty and violence will continue, always. It takes very little creative energy to imagine reasons why the police should shoot first and ask questions later. It is much harder to tackle problems like early childhood education, access to jobs and healthy food, and at a moment of explosive confrontation, for the police to show mercy.
I know that reducing violence is a big, complicated problem. Not increasing violence is also hard. I'm just annoyed by this particular conversational gambit: I suspect that, when you say things like "the police are going to kill you", a lot of people read that as "kill them first", and the result is increased violence in both directions for no real purpose.
I would be much, much happier if this conversation moved more in the direction of fixing the war on drugs, the prison complex, and in particular the political attraction to being "hard on crime".
Because we are all a part of society, and as such we all have some small responsibility to one another (e.g. paying taxes, obeying laws even when there's no risk of being caught, etc).
What you are asserting is that governments have 'political authority'; the only problem with that is that very few philosophers actually agree with that (despite a great deal of work attempting to justify political authority).[1][2][3]
If a suspect draws a gun, the officer has already failed.
Now, I don't expect cops to just stand there and die at that point. But, few cops are going to admit they fucked up, and many have planted a gun after the fact.
If a suspect had a gun drawn before officers were even involved, then society has failed.
I don't expect us to suddenly not have violence at all. Few people are going to admit that they're part of the problem. But it's clearly possible for civilizations to have socioeconomics and underlying political systems that can raise populations that don't resort to violence.
It seems like the US did have "socioeconomics and underlying political systems that can raise populations that don't resort to violence" or at least was moving that way until 1 to 2 years ago when the decades long decline in violent crime came to an abrupt halt.
While I first heard "fuck the police" in the context of rap, it certainly doesn't seem to be a non-mainstream concept anymore. All of the people I know that feel that way are, as far as I know, law-abiding citizens. They've seen first-hand the ways that our local police have treated them (or neighbors) poorly, and have nearly zero trust that they would be treated fairly in any encounter with the police. They've arrived at that philosophical stance after seeing misbehaving officers protected by their departments, or "on leave" instead of fired or prosecuted.
After seeing and reading about various types of (local and national) police misconduct, not to mention the fact that police have asserted that it's __not__ their job to protect us, it's hard not to feel that their perspective is somewhat reasonable.
Governments and police (from all over the world) have repeatedly asserted that police owe no specific duty of protection to any individual.[1] What is truly remarkable is that so few people have realized this. Most governments assert that they only have a duty to provide security for themselves and/or 'society'; leaving aside the fact that collective rights have a horrific history, this is purely self-preserving.[2][3]
We just need to ban guns. The second amendment isn't written in stone. Or it could get some extremely significant limitations added.
People wouldn't like it of course, so it would never fly. But we need to get rid of this idiotic notion that you need a gun to protect yourself in a civil society. You don't. You're not going to rise up against the government, and you're not going to need it to protect your family.
Are there exceptions? Sure. But when guns are so readily available, any criminal that wants one has one.
The ridiculous line "if you outlaw guns only outlaws will have guns" or whatever, is nonsensical. If guns are outlawed, most criminals will have a hard time finding guns. But all law enforcement officers will still have them.
Have you ever tried your argument with s/guns/encryption/?
"We just need to ban encryption. The First Amendment isn't written in stone. Or it could get some extremely significant limitations added, like backdoors.
People wouldn't like it of course, so it would never fly. But we need to get rid of this idiotic notion that you need encryption to protect yourself in a civil digital society. You don't. You're not going to rise up against the government, and you're not going to need it to protect your family.
Are there exceptions? Sure. But when AES is so readily available, any criminal that wants one has one.
The ridiculous line "if you outlaw encryption only outlaws will have encryption" or whatever, is nonsensical. If encryption is outlawed, most criminals will have a hard time finding algorithms. But all three letter agencies (ie: NSA) will still have them."
> Have you ever tried your argument with s/guns/encryption/?
This substitution is nonsensical. Fundamentally, encryption is a defensive tool. Where proponents of gun control (and I mean moderate folk, not just the let's ban the 2nd amendment folk) disagree with others is that guns aren't just a defensive tool. Given a sufficiently large population with poor safety nets and discrimination, adding encryption in everyone's hands will not change my day-to-day life significantly. Throw in guns and things change drastically. Now I have to be worried about a dark alley mugging at night at gunpoint.
Tight regulation of legal gun ownership and possession does not appear to lead to reduced gun-related deaths, (based on a comparison between state Brady Campaign score and gun deaths,) except perhaps suicide, though this is debated .[1] What you worry about is of little import to anyone but yourself (,for example, I am scared of getting hit in the head by coconuts, which are 10 times more deadly than sharks!), if you have a fact-based concern, we may be able to address it.
> if you have a fact-based concern, we may be able to address it.
I didn't quite enjoy this dismissive tone, so I'll be more pedantic than usual. The study you cited is interesting but it's not the end all of gun control discussion. It's barely even the beginning.
First, it considers Brady scores at a state level to try to find correlation. Gun control legislation might be at a state-level but that's a nonsensical level of granularity. My concerns are about my neighborhoods, poverty, and guns. Not the state of California as a whole with over 35 million people.
Second, from the article you cited:
> Perhaps even controlling for those factors, there will be other missing factors that are hard to control for — for instance, maybe as the crime rate increases, calls for gun controls increase, so high crime causes more gun restrictions, or maybe calls for more freedom to defend oneself increase, so high crime causes fewer gun restrictions (e.g., liberalized concealed-carry licensing rules). And of course when small changes in the model yield substantial changes in results (e.g., if you calculate the state gun scores differently, the results will likely be different), you know how little you should credit the output. Figuring out the actual effect of government actions, whether gun laws, changed policing rules, drug laws, or anything else, is devilishly difficult.
is a succinct summary of why this comparison study is meaningless. It's a good retort to someone who says that gun control leads to fewer deaths but it has so many caveats and such imprecise applicability that the only useful take away point is that at a state-level with some gun-control scoring pattern (viz. the Brady Campaign scores) discounting ALL other factors, gun-related deaths are not correlated to gun control.
Should we give every individual easy access to ICMBs, Tanks and Nuclear Weapon ?
The difference is two fold.
1) Encryption is useful to society outside the need for killing people. That is why you really cannot compare encryption to guns.
2) Even When criminals do use encrpytion - its used to facilitate killing rather than a direct way to kill people.
Someone cannot just throw a bunch of random paper filled with numbers and I will fall dead. There is a long chain of events between transmission of secret information to people being killed. If you give the world's top two criminals access to encryption but lock them away in a plastic room - they cannot even theoretical hurt anyone.
TLDR : Guns are stupid and people who like guns are stupid
That's not necessarily the aspect I was thinking of when I wrote my post. Surely, guns and encryption are different in their function... but who gets to use them is the more interesting point.
Try this on for size. In a post talking about our inability to analyze the potential abuse of deadly force by police, we're talking about surrendering the use of deadly force... ...to the police.
Guns and encryption aren't fungible in that sentence.
No one's ever been injured or killed by accidental application of encryption, but thousands of people are injured or killed by accidental gunfire every year.
Swimming pools are much more dangerous (100 times more deadly) than guns when it comes to accidental deaths; should swimming pools not be banned before guns?[1]
>Accidental gun deaths are not remotely interesting compared to murder and suicide.
I was responding to a comment regarding accidental deaths and injuries, not suicide or murder. If this is insufficiently interesting to you, I suggest you read another comment.
ban guns? really, tell me how making drugs illegal has stopped their procurement. tell me how making guns illegal will stop the violence?
Why not ban cars, more people are accidentally killed with automobiles than guns used for homicide or suicide.
as for the statement people won't rise up against government, where have you been? They did after the shootings in LA, Oakland, and recently St. Louis.
Frankly the idea of a society where only law enforcement has guns with their track record isn't a society anyone should want to live in.
Other societies that have banned most gun use do not have nearly as many guns around nor do they have as many gun deaths.
Well, that's in part because once you've disarmed the populace, you don't need guns to slaughter them wholesale. Well over a 100 million previously disarmed people in the 20th Century, a fate US civilians are quite determined to avoid.
I agree drugs are different, but if the will exists, guns and ammo are a lot more compact.
Are there some instances where dictators have been stopped because of guns? Because the assertion that guns could prevent a dictator from taking overs seems, well, outlandish, if I'm being honest. I'm willing to be corrected, however.
I think it's a difficult question because "guns" are a moving target along two or so dimensions. The obvious is rate of fire with an efficacy twist:
Muzzle loaded smooth-bore (short range, relatively fast to load).
Muzzle loaded rifle (long range, slow to load)
Then the muzzle loaded rifled musket, which used the Minié ball to achieve both, and great carnage in the Crimean War and our Civil War.
Now the developments are rapid:
Breach loaded single shot rifles.
Repeaters with relatively slow loading, with a move to smokeless powder.
Clip fed repeaters, a critical Mauser innovation. With the 1898 model, the battle rifle is fully "modern". With of course effective semi-auto models to follow, plus the lower powered/lower range assault rifle (and I can't help but notice that the short ranged AK-47 is something a dictator would prefer to be issued, vs. something more able to reach out and touch him).
But ammo, going back to the rifled musket, we're using corrosive primers, and black power residue attracts moisture. That is, it takes a fair amount of diligent effort to keep a rifle from rusting out.
In 1911 the Swiss switched to non-corrosive primers, appropriate for their militia system. Our first weapon with 100% non-corrosive primers was the WWII M1 Carbine, a weapon for officers and rear echelon troops.
So the likelihood of a less organized having a lot of functioning weapons increases with their using non-corrosive primers. Or, in the case of the Soviets, using chromed barrels.
Now you have to factor in wealth. Poor people who can't afford much in the way of weapons aren't going to have a chance here. See e.g. Rwanda, where rifles didn't play a big part on either side.
So ... what examples might we have? The successful resistance to the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan is suggestive. You might count Hitler deciding it wasn't worth breaking 80 divisions to take (most of) Switzerland.
More than a few liberals had an epiphany about gun control in the dark days of Watergate ... how many dictators/oligarchs/tyrannical whatever didn't try, or try very hard, because the cost would have been too great?
I'll start looking for examples; today, all I know is case after case, USSR, PRC, Cuba, Nazi Germany, those are just the most prominent off the top of my head, where gun confiscations preceded slaughter.
These are pretty weak correlations. Gun control has passed all sorts of other places, which looks like gun confiscation, without mass slaughter.
Also, gun confiscation was not at all the defining characteristic of these other places that experienced mass slaughter. There are many more things that accompany that type of political landscape, and are more common.
And without an example of where citizen gun ownership prevented a dictator from coming to power, the whole argument is extremely weak, though it definitely gets repeated quite a bit.
Probably all of them, to some degree or another, although not every culture considers the US libertarian ideal of limited government (much less the right to keep and bear arms) to be necessary, so any realistic answer to that question would probably be more complex than you're implying. But, where remedies within a political system exist, then the system can't be assumed to be tyrannical.
An equivalence drawn between the US and other governments would seem to suggest that civilian gun ownership doesn't deter the violence and corruption of the state, nor does its absence elsewhere appear to have led to the inevitable slaughter of those populations for whom gun control is much more strict than in the US.
Rather, it seems that when one enshrines into the culture the precept that the only free state is one cultivated by popular violence, it gives both the state and the people an excuse to justify violence as being an unavoidable cost of civilization. Political and social alternatives can't be seriously considered when, for many people, all other roads lead to slavery and death.
Instead, mass shootings in the US lead to a spike in gun sales, because they're effective advertising and recruitment tools for the NRA, even as the police and the government are becoming more militarized and surveillance more aggressive, in no small part because after 9/11 the American people wanted them to be. And if it's the case that the US is a more tyrannical state now, then I believe that's due to American democracy having worked as intended, rather than that tyranny having emerged from a vacuum, or some implicit tendency of states to creep towards totalitarianism.
> Why not ban cars, more people are accidentally killed with automobiles than guns used for homicide or suicide.
The auto fatality rate has been drastically reduced through better regulation and better technology. Safety features, insurance, inspections, traffic regulations, registration and transfer documentation, taxation have all increased public safety and reduced the burden auto use has on society.
What, exactly, would you have us do to "regulate cars like guns"? What safety features are missing from them? How many accidents can be traced to a lack of inspections or the like (a few, I grant you).
Can you make a case for insurance requirements? Seeing as how we shoot billions of rounds per year with few incidents, and only 600 accidental deaths per year. Guns are much easier to use safely than automobiles, and the 25% decrease in fatal accidents during a period in which the population and number of guns increased by roughly 50% indicates there's not a crying need here. We gun owners do, you know, teach gun safety and proficiency, that's what the NRA was about until the mid-'70s, when they couldn't ignore the political threat.
Treating possession of guns as a revocable privilege, with the necessary licensing and registration to make it meaningful, would very likely result in fewer gun deaths. I think it is pretty likely that this will continue to get more politically tenable over time (my hand wavy impression is that younger people are generally less interested in guns, at least, lower rates of young people care about them).
Insurance might come into play in such a world, if people were made liable for (at least some) misuse of guns registered to them (the at least some means that I would hope such a thing would only really come into play if actual negligence were involved).
> Sure, go ahead if you want a 2nd Civil War, we know our 20th Century history. Never again are not empty words to us.
That sort of sentiment and posturing is very core of what is wrong with the "gun-ownership" movement.
Do you really think if the government wanted to put down a rebellion (or whatever you are ominously alluding to) your paltry weapons would really make a difference? The "suicide by cop" statistic would increment and things would carry on.
There really needs to be a change on how easy it is to procure fire-arms in the US. That shouldn't be up for debate or sidelining through traditionalist arguments. We have a problem today where people are actually getting murdered. So, your rhetoric is pretty empty and over-used.
Our adventures in the sandbox suggest your faith in our government's ability to suppress armed rebellion is grossly excessive. It also had a secure rear area. You're also assuming all the military will agree to this, despite what it'll cost them.
I'm not alluding to anything, I'm frankly stating that, if you and yours succeed in this effort, me and mine will start killing you and yours (assuming you're in the US, of course). And if you think we're limited to out "paltry weapons". you suffer from an extreme lack of imagination.
We've been debating this since at least the 30s, and I'm (not very) sorry to say that your side has decisively lost the debate. Sucks to be you, but in balance I like the result.
You are doing it again. "killing you and yours"? Give me a break.
If rebellion or change is what you really want to affect, then you would be better served to look into how Gandhi managed to win against overwhelming odds, rather than whatever hollywood(?) fantasy you envision living out.
Yeah, I have guns just like I have other tools and toys. But I don't have the same chip on my shoulder.
If there needs to be a rebellion, I will be reaching for my camera and my twitter account, not my walther.
If rebellion or change is what you really want to affect
No, not in the least. Leave me and mine alone, and you'll be perfectly safe from us. Sure, I'd like for my brethren in California, Hawaii and the northeast (well, if you count Maryland and D.C. as part of that) to be less oppressed, but they can vote with their feet. As I did when I left Massachusetts.
Gandhi won against an exhausted, civilized empire. Change the antagonist and he's a forgotten anonymous corpse.
> What, exactly, would you have us do to "regulate cars like guns"?
Given what I have read about most guns used in crimes originating through straw buyers or stolen guns, I think substantial penalties for people who don't properly transfer guns if they wind up being used illegally would be the most effective way to reduce gun related violence. This, of course, would require a system of registration and proper transfer documentation, like we have for cars.
This, along with secure storage requirements, I think could do a lot. I agree accidents aren't that big an issue when compared to intentional violence, I assume secure storage would substantially help with this along with suicide. I'd also be in favor of severe penalties for not using secure storage.
In terms of new technology that could improve safety, fingerprint readers and id stamped ammo would help with both violence and safety.
Insurance could play an important role. If you pass a test, get your refresher training and have proper storage you'd pay a low rate. If you have an accident or have a gun stolen insurance could pay part of your penalty but your rate should go up enormously.
> ... non-starter in an environment where the people proposing these measures continuously demonstrate their bad will.
Continuously demonstrate bad will? 10s of thousands die yearly and even modest proposals are dismissed with hysteria like:
> Registration? Sure, go ahead if you want a 2nd Civil War, we know our 20th Century history. Never again are not empty words to us.
Seriously, this is into "UN black helicopter", "Obama is an Al-Qaeda member" territory.
Because we entrust certain actors to be the enforcers of laws in society. This is the way societies have worked since the dawn of time; we aren't all charged with upholding laws, we give that task out to people to have that be their job.
This is in fact not how "societies have worked since the dawn of time".[1] The innovation of the monopoly of use of violence by the state is a relatively recent one, and not demonstrably necessary or sufficient to maintain an orderly and just society.[2]
The 2nd amendment was added based on how societies have worked since the dawn of time. Keep in mind that even in our "modern" era ~100,000,000 people were murdered by their own governments in the 20th century.
> But we need to get rid of this idiotic notion that you need a gun to protect yourself in a civil society.
Civilized and peaceful society is a great goal, but how are you actually achieving that if you set about confiscating 300 million guns by force? Assuming that somehow the government could prevail in such an endeavor, you haven't made society any more civilized. You were just more successful at using violence to achieve your goals than the other side was.
Make no mistake, there are plenty of people who would kill and die for the right to bear arms. Trying to take those guns by force would probably lead to civil war.
If your goal is truly civilized society then you've got to work towards eliminating the roots of violent behavior. The more successful you are at that, the less people will even want to have firearms. But the more you threaten to 'civilize' by force, the more intransigent people will be about giving up their firearms.
> You don't. You're not going to rise up against the government, and you're not going to need it to protect your family.
If the government decided to try to confiscate firearms by force people probably would fight it tooth and nail. Luckily that kind of rhetoric is not prevalent, but it is exactly the fear of state-sponsored violence that many ardent gun owners are afraid of. Some of those people may seem irrational and paranoid, but just looking at the 20th century, somewhere around 100 million civilians were murdered in state-sponsored killings. State-sponsored mass murder is almost exclusively visited upon unarmed populaces.
Making guns highly restricted/illegal doesn't make them hard to get. Did making meth completely illegal make it hard to get? To make this even remotely feasible imagine the New Orleans 2005 door to door SWAT raids coupled with the worst part of New York's stop and frisk.
In France, where guns are highly regulated, full automatic military AK's can be had for a few thousand dollars. A bargain by US standards.
I think you raise some good points. Another issue is the prevelance of guns. From a recent article (I don't know enough to vouch for these numbers in any way) [1]
* "America has 4.4 percent of the world's population but almost half of its civilian-owned guns."
* "In 2013, the US had 106.4 gun deaths per million people. In 2011, the last year for which we have numbers, the UK endured 146 gun deaths total - or 2.3 gun deaths per million people."
* "Plenty of research has found a strong correlation between the amount of guns in an area and its gun homicide rate" ... "Perhaps the single most supported contention in all of gun research is that more guns mean more gun deaths."
> let's not blame officers. They're probably doing the best they can with a bad situation.
If by "blame officers" you mean assign group guilt to all individual police officers, I'd agree, but it's just as mistaken to say all police officers are doing the best they can. We have many examples of specific police officers harming civillians, including outright murder (something clearly not related to threats to police and not happening in Sweden). Whole classes of Americans see the police as a threat. As these problems occur in many places, I think we can say there is a systemic problem with policing in the U.S.
Plenty of research has found a strong correlation between the amount of guns in an area and its gun homicide rate
This is of course a tautology. If you were to magically remove that tool, do you really think Americans would become more peaceful???
As for your other numbers, no one denies we're the top in per-capita civilian gun ownership. Good laws + wealth lets us swamp Serbia and Yemen, after which comes ... Switzerland. Known extremely violent country (well, they were notorious so back in the days of pike bearing infantry).
Not sure the U.K. is that useful, they've been suppressing civilian gun ownership for a century, and they're on a small island.
"Perhaps the single most supported contention in all of gun research is that more guns mean more gun deaths."
I'm sure there's a Clint Eastwood quote about it mattering who gets shot. More to the point, to the extent criminals are killed by civilians, what's the general problem?
"...do you really think Americans would become more peaceful???"
No, but they would probably become less deadly.
(But, without a gun, people might not be so emboldened as to physically attack someone at close range. Violence might go down.)
Around the time of one of the mass shootings in the past 5 years, my conservative relatives were posting on facebook a story about a mass-stabbing. They asked rhetorically, "Why aren't we calling for a ban on knives?" Well, the question sort of answered itself-- no one had died from the attacks.
Less deadly, yes, but qualitatively so? Not from everything I've seen. We've got a lot of inherently violent populations, like the Scotts-Irish that settled the Appalachians. And the cost, a 2nd Civil War, would dwarf any putative improvements.
It also completely disregards that after British and Australian buy-backs, even though the number of gun homicides decreased, the total number of homicides increased.
The article I linked to has a section on Australia; here's an excerpt:
Evaluations after the reforms suggest that they saved lives. A study by Andrew Leigh of Australian National University and Christine Neill of Wilfrid Laurier University estimated that buying back 3,500 guns per 100,000 people led to a statistically significant drop in firearm suicides — 74 percent, in fact, with no parallel increase in non-firearm suicides. ...
The results on homicides were a little less clear. Leigh and Neill found that the buyback resulted in a 35 to 50 percent decline in the gun homicide rate, but because of the low number of homicides in Australia normally, this change wasn't statistically significant
I don't have the numbers for Austrialia, but from the same article:
Nearly two-thirds of gun deaths in the US are suicides
If the proportion in Autralia are similar, reducing gun suicides, if not homicides, could save many lives.
> So let's not blame officers. They're probably doing the best they can with a bad situation.
I don't know how you come to this conclusion from the data you're citing.
You seem to be claiming that LEOs kill more people because more people attack LEOs with guns; i.e. you're arguing that LEOs kill more people in self-defense. But you're far from proving that point.
In fact, the easiest way to prove this point would be to have data on police shootings: if every officer had body-cam footage of every time they fired in self-defense, your argument would be proven. Yet the majority of police officers are resistant to wearing body cams. If LEOs are really firing in defense of self or others, why are they so opposed to proving it?
One could make the opposite argument: that people who use guns against LEOs are doing so in self-defense. The fuck-the-police attitude is equally explained by this: if the police are murdering your fathers, brothers, and friends, of course you're going to thing "fuck the police". And this would explain why LEOs in the US are so resistant to body cams: if they are the aggressors in these situations, then they aren't going to want footage showing their crimes.
I think that the evidence better supports the latter argument. But of course, we're short on evidence: we're a long way from proving either point. This is why we need more evidence. If, as you claim, LEOs are acting in self-defense, the evidence will only exonerate them.
None of my friends or relatives has been killed by a police officer and even at this stage of my life I still have that "fuck the police" mindset.
I'll explain.
Ever since I was about 15 years old, police have treated me like a suspect. I have been stopped, patted down, searched and generally harassed in the vast majority of my interactions with police.
On one occasion, I was walking from a friend's house back to mine and I watched a cop do a u-turn in the middle of a highway to pull up and start questioning me. I have been pulled over because it "looked like the air in your rear passenger tire is low" and I had two units behind me with cops peeking into my car while they ran my information.
Just about six months ago I was pulled over for "excessive lane changing". I asked the officer if he saw that I changed lanes to get around someone who was turning and that I had to return to that lane because approximately a quarter of a mile later, I was going to making my own turn. He responded that he had been following me for a few miles and I had made other lane changes. I was on my way home from work and I had things to do. I signaled before every lane change and I did nothing dangerous or reckless. It was a pretextual stop.
About two years ago, I was stopped while riding my bicycle. The officer who stopped me is someone that I have known since elementary school. When he saw that it was me, his demeanor was nice and friendly. I can only imagine how he would have acted if I had been a stranger.
In every one of those encounters, had I reached too quickly for my wallet, I would have likely ended up dead.
My experiences are not unique and these are not the worst. A lot of the black, brown and increasingly poor white guys with whom I grew up have had similar things happen.
The point that I'm trying to make here is that the antipathy that police officers experience is primarily of their own making.
This isn't the first account I've heard of this. I personally haven't been targeted, but every interaction with a LEO seems to be shit. Where I am being treated as a criminal by default. I had a traffic stop a few months ago and the LEO had their hand on their gun while having the conversation. WTF.
Agreed. We're all short on evidence, and I'm unwilling to rely on my (very negative) anecdotal experience to make confident general statements about police. But many people see police as groups of thugs who show up and harass or abduct you at gunpoint when they don't just murder you outright. From where I stand there's more evidence for that viewpoint than against it.
Another datapoint (Apologies for the wall of text)
I've also had a few DWBs (Driving While Black, which is ironic cause my friends tell me I drive like an old grandma, adhere to the speed limit etc). Keep in mind that the only ticket I’ve ever gotten was for 42 MPH in a 35 MPH Zone, and the cop lied, I was doing 37 MPH. Also, the cop kept me there an hour while he run my license and repeatedly asked me questions from his car over a bullhorn (‘what do you do’ etc) to humiliate me.
DWB in Boston Metro area was a frequent occurence for me until a blockbuster Boston Globe/Northeastern University study in 2003 showed how prevalent it was and forcing change. The funny thing, Boston Globe profiled one cop over 2 months and showed how he tended to give white drivers warnings but gave black drivers tickets for lesser infractions, and his excuse was essentially that ‘blacks gave him attitude’.
An officer's pattern in two months might not reflect a career's work. But one patrolman's decisions shed some light on how gaps in ticketing can emerge.
At his speed trap on VFW Parkway in West Roxbury on Monday, April 2, 2001, Officer William G. Knecht wasn't guessing the speeds of cars headed toward him. He had the newest instrument for clocking motorists, a LIDAR gun. But his day was filled with moments of leniency and of toughness.
At 9:30 a.m., Knecht wrote a $115 ticket to a 35-year-old black woman from Boston, for going 14 m.p.h. over in a 35 zone. Five minutes later, the officer clocked at the same speed an 80-year-old white man from Medfield, and gave him a written warning.
The next day, Tuesday, back on the VFW Parkway, Knecht warned a 33-year-old white woman from Boston at 9:25 a.m., after he clocked her driving 16 m.p.h. over in a 35 m.p.h. zone.
Exactly 25 minutes later, Knecht ticketed a 28-year-old black man, also from Boston, though he was driving slower -- 15 m.p.h. over in the 35 m.p.h. zone.
In the two months studied, Knecht wrote 105 citations. He ticketed 84 percent of the minority speeders, and 72 percent of the whites. He ticketed men and women equally. And the older the driver, the more leniency Knecht showed, especially if the older driver was white.
...
"There are always mitigating circumstances in a stop," Knecht said in an interview. "Anything could be said or could happen. Attitudes, people talking back to you. The circumstances change with each individual driver. But for most cops I know, race has nothing to do with it.”
So in order to buy Officer Knecht assumptions we have to assume that every black person he stopped gave him attitude (which any black person with any sense of self-preservation would not be likely to do).
We also had a disconcerting incident in Brookline MA (2004). My wife (fiancee at the time), who is white lived there, and we were once walking hand in hand. A cop car drove by, and then pulled a sharp tire screeching U-turn and came right up to us, almost onto the sidewalk. The white cop looks at my wife and asks ‘Are you OK?’. She says yes, and the cop fixes me with a glare that could have killed, and then roared off in disgust. We were gob-smacked, but not really surprised.
Not all my cop interactions have been bad (I was rear ended on Wellington Circle in Everett and the MA State Trooper who responded and sorted out everything was incredibly efficient and polite), but that has been the exception. When dealing with cops, I know that anything I do/say (or even the initial stop) is colored by race. What would be simple assertiveness from someone white of my same socioeconomic status would be seen as being uncooperative/suspicious coming from me. As a black person, I cannot operate under the mistaken assumption that the cops are actually there for my safety/ben...
I breathe a sigh of relief when I see that it's a State Trooper who has pulled me over. I have never had a negative experience with a State Trooper.
One time, I was speeding and got a ticket for it but the cop was really cool about it. I was in Cadiz county Ohio and I was doing 75MPH. I was in a 65 zone and then it dropped to 55 and I failed to notice the sign. A cop clocked me doing 75 and started following me. He waiting until two miles later to pull me over where the speed limit was back at 65MPH. He was very professional about the whole thing and I have no complaints about him.
Unfortunately, not every interaction goes well.
I know that I have these and I suspect that you do too.
Little verbal clues that I drop to indicate to the officer that I know what's going on but I'm not going to say it overtly and give him a reason to pretend to be offended at the suggestion.
A few examples:
When a cop asks "Do you know why I pulled you over?", I say "I have a pretty good idea, officer but I am not going to say it out loud."
"Where are you headed?" gets met with "I'm on my way to obey the law, officer."
They also like to ask "Do you have any drugs in the car?" and my response is always "No more than you do, officer."
When asked for my license, "I need to reach into my right front pocket to retrieve my wallet, officer." and I wait until he indicates that I should reach for it.
I have found these to be responses that deescalate the situation.
They're not direct challenges to his authority so he doesn't feel threatened and they allow me to get through the interaction with my sense of dignity intact. I know what's happening and just as importantly, he now knows that I know.
By chance, is your wife blonde? I have found that I get a more negative reaction if I am in the company of a blonde woman.
By chance, is your wife blonde? I have found that I get a more negative reaction if I am in the company of a blonde woman.
Heh, yes she is. And I second you on State Troopers, in the Northeastern/Boston Globe profiling study, they broke down statistics by police and they found that the Mass State Troopers were the most fair (tough but fair) when taking into account race/age/gender.
I was with you until here. Sorry, but what you call "gun nuttery" is very likely what I call a simple, principled belief that private individuals have a right to be armed, and a recognition that there will be "gear heads" around any hobby. Guitar players tend to own lots of guitars, shooting enthusiasts own lots of guns. Owning lots of guns and defending the 2A doesn't make somebody a "nutter" nor does it make them any more prone to committing violent crime.
'stand-your-ground'
What exactly is your problem with "stand your ground" laws?
'fuck-tha-police' sentiments
Sorry, but as long as police are "men with guns" using violence to enforce unjust laws, and especially as long as many of their numbers act like schoolyard bullies who never grew up, I'm going to remain firmly in the "fuck the police" camp.
for the most part, the police aren't broken.
I'm calling bullshit on this. Haven't we seen enough videos of cops abusing / beating / killing people who were clearly not posing any aggressive threat (including people who were already handcuffed and pinned to the ground) to realize that this is not true? Obviously not all cops are "bad" but to ignore the systemic problems in policing in America today is like sticking your head in the sand and pretending there's no problem because you can't see it.
Let's blame the politicians who criminalize everything
I have to agree with "for the most part", if you're talking about 90% of the interactions with the general public, things are just fine and dandy. Unfortunately a measely 10% of interactions means way, way too many go wrong. "For the most part" isn't good enough for me, and it shouldn't be good enough for America.
You are treating this as cause and effect, i.e. cops kill people because people shoot at them. This is more of a case of the chicken and the egg, do civilians shoot police because police shoot civilians or do police shoot more civilians because civilians shoot police.
Regardless of the answer, US police have a more violent response than other police. Anecdotally you just need to look at those situations where the police fire off 100's of rounds at a suspect, or where there is a chase and 50 cops leap from cars to jump on(and beat) as suspect.
Body cameras for officers are the only way for the US to reverse the trend of a hyper violent Law Enforcement officers.
I just posted the exact same thing! I wish I read your comment first. What's more, is that the LA police department actually put more bullets in 1 man than Germany police shot during 2013.
> “We have a system currently that is almost entirely
> reactive, a system influenced by anecdote and emotion,”
> said Harris, who has dubbed her database the “Open
> Justice” initiative. “The beautiful thing about numbers is
> that they don’t lie.”
Perhaps I'm being a bit contrarian, but numbers and statistics can lie more than you'd expect. Very few laymen can interpret statistics correctly, and you can even skew the proper interpretation by carefully selecting certain statistics which support your viewpoint.
I would be careful in saying that numbers cannot lie, or that they don't lie. Meaningful metrics don't lie, but this is not the same thing (and even then, how do we define meaningful?). I wish people would consider that it is perfectly possible to lie using math, especially so when the average person does not maintain an advanced understanding of statistics.
"Very few laymen can interpret statistics correctly" -- Correct, and that's why there are people whose job it is to do so. I imagine the FBI, like any large organization, has at least a few of these people on the payroll.
I don't imagine anyone who's enough of a data wonk to say something like ".. the beautiful thing about numbers .." is one of those untrained laymen. :)
Numbers don't lie. We lie as we try to make sense of the numbers and format them for display. At least when you have actual numbers underneath someone else can look and try to confirm or refute the prior presentation,or look for an entirely new meaning. Anecdote and popular sentiment to not allow this.
It's not that having numbers means they can't be massaged to tell a specific story, but at least there's more than blind luck that goes into whether the conclusion makes sense.
agreed, often you don't even need to massage too. If you collect some data without other data, you can almost logically derive an argument that wouldn't even be reasonable had other data been collected that puts it in perspective. So not only can you lie with data, complete data of a narrow query will lie to you even when you don't want it to.
The disparity is huge, but both sources could (and likely are, to the best of their ability) be reporting the truth. But they both have different opinions on what part of the issue should be prioritized.
I believe the WaPo has chosen its limited methodology (which would exclude Freddie Gray, among others) for an understandable reason: police shootings are hard enough to classify, nevermind all police killings. Read the Guardian's methodology to see the pitfalls of their own approach: http://www.theguardian.com/us-news/ng-interactive/2015/jun/0...
The Dallas PD is one of the few agencies that is actually publishing their officer-involved-incidents in a systematic, machine-readable way [1]...but if you check their official homepage and read a few of the narrative documents [2], you'll be able to see why things aren't cut and dry...and that how you choose to count things has a very strong impact on the numbers you end up with.
In small elections public sector workers share an unequal amount of the power with regards to political spending. This includes police workers.
It is against the best interests of anyone seeking office to act against these unions, especially DAs. Thus, you get far less oversight than you should.
People being apathetic or disillusioned with our political process is the biggest problem for the middle and lower classes right now.
Disclaimer: I am not anti-union, just making an observation.
Right, but local businesses want things like more parking on commercial streets, or lower property taxes. The things the police unions want are far more dangerous. Local businesses do not carry guns and are not charged with "keeping the peace".
I'm sorry, I had a big comment written up but Firefox ate it.
The general gist was that exercising power is not the same thing as having the ability to exercise power, and that while money is power, not all power is money.
I also tried to look up some numbers for my county but got distracted by an SQL injection vulnerability in my state's donation records archive.
Wonder if it pays to have every police gun have a GPS/microcontroller which uploads over cellular the GPS corrdinates and timestamp whenever the gun is discharged. If every gun has a unique id and is registered to a police member. We'd have very accurate data.
Heck combine this with the video system. Might not stop the shootings, but it'd give us useful data to help prevent them going forwards.
There was a system that apparently determines gunfire origin from triangulation reliably in cities too. Both combined sounds like power data (no pun intended).
I believe that system is called ShotSpotter. There are a couple drawbacks (coverage isn't perfect), and I've heard someone claim that it is nearing nanny-state levels of surveillance. I don't think the microphones are clear enough to get much more than a blur of noise, but I'm not sure.
A few years back I was in the Phoenix area for New Years eve, and the local police were using ShotSpotter. There's a tradition in parts of the city to fire shots into the air in celebration, but those bullets come back down and have killed a few people.
>> Wonder if it pays to have every police gun have a GPS/microcontroller which uploads over cellular the GPS corrdinates and timestamp whenever the gun is discharged
There are already a myriad of procedures in place for dealing with weapons being discharged.
You do realize its standard procedure in most states that if an officer discharges his weapon in any scenario other than department training or range practice its investigated by the department? This includes accidental discharges, warning shots, and shooting at animals and other scenarios. Also, the last time I checked with a buddy who's a cop, they have to check out and check in their firearms and ammunition. Any discrepancy between check out and check in, and a report has to be filed.
Easier said than done. Such a system would take at least a decade to be rolled out to every LEO in major cities, much less the whole country.
On top of that there is the issue of costs, of which there are many. Ranging from procurement and training to insurance and maintenance, no city councilor will want to take this one.
And I haven't even touched on the political implications, namely that no politician wants to appear to be scrutinizing police officers too much. The number one question on many officer's minds is the general populace aren't subject to the same restrictions.
There's also the issue of where the data (and related systems) is maintained and stored, with many preferring data remain under state control rather than federal.
We gun owners would also fight it very hard, since we'd see it as a prelude to rolling this out for us. Especially in the face of that, it would severely narrow the gun designs police would be able to carry, and since not everyone is alike, e.g. I hate the grip angle of the Glock, that wouldn't be good.
Pure GPS + time reporting strikes me as useless, unless people think police are killing people "off the books" a lot more than I think they are.
Adding video isn't likely to tell you much, since the predicates to drawing your gun are crucial and frequently wouldn't be visible from the gun.
I also shudder from an engineering viewpoint at trying to get all this to work. Service handgun are big enough as they are, and they add serious shocks, solvents, and primer and smokeless debris to the bundle of environmental stresses we demand of things like cameras on cops and their cars.
>We gun owners would also fight it very hard, since we'd see it as a prelude to rolling this out for us.
Arguments for the legitimacy of gun ownership tend to focus on deterrence and self-defense. This makes no difference at all in the deterrence scenario, and legitimate self-defense has no reason to be secret or anonymous.
When the gun community argues for a Constitutional right to commit murder and get away with it, then maybe we can finally stop taking it seriously.
This makes no difference at all in the deterrence scenario
Yeah, right, we're going to trust these "phone home" devices that much?
In fact, how do you know they're working, for police or civilians, unless they phone home every month or so, or at least when taken out of their metal safes.
In the current climate of bad faith, where our adversaries latest campaign for "gun safety" does nothing of the sort (and claims we don't care about it during a period where both the population and guns owned increased by roughly 50% and the absolute number of accidental gun deaths dropped by 25%; it is we gun owners who achieved that, not the gun grabbers)?
There's also the mass and volume problems. Not everyone can get away with carrying a near full sized M1911 like I can (originally a military service pistol, my carry model sacrifices some life with an alloy frame and some power with a 4 inch barrel). Require these and you will preclude a whole lot of concealed carry, and I for one would not like the extra mass, let alone having to replace some perfectly fine firearms.
Parent opposes a device that would record the timestamp, location, and owner of a gun when fired. This information should definitely not be secret in a self-defense or other justified killing.
Why demand privacy with regard to who you kill, unless you would be punished for it (i.e. it's murder?)
Parent opposes a device that would record the timestamp, location, and owner of a gun when fired. This information should definitely not be secret in a self-defense or other justified killing.
Parent, that is, myself, does not oppose on those grounds, as I explained in reply to you. I don't think it's constructive to imply that in a reply to another without replying to me.
And come to think of it, I don't want to have to explain to the state every time I fire one of my firearms. Especially seeing as how I've done that over ten thousand times without, you know, actually shooting anybody.
I would hope you could see the potential for abuse, for a chilling effect on good things like practicing with your firearms for proficiency.
And intentional. After watching The Wire, I can't help but feel like the series never ended and that I now live in it. Check out Toronto, white police chief that supports carding people (mostly black) gets replaced by new black police chief who maintains the policy. Now the new mayor that replaced the crack addict is playing police chief.
All will be confirmed once some trials wrap up:
Sammy Yatim
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Death_of_Sammy_Yatim
Marco Muzzo
http://globalnews.ca/news/2259358/vaughan-deputy-fire-chief-...
One radical solution woudl be to merge all the little police departments into a single state police and have federal standards for reporting, training, fire arm handling.
I have mixed opinions about this idea; here in Scotland (population roughly that of Colorado) the police force was consolidated into a single national entity and since then there has been a number of serious problems (including the brief adoption of a policy of routinely carrying guns unnecessarily).
But it does seem that there are too many little police departments in the US which are unaccountable. Or, worse, accountable only to racists.
It's sufficiently radical that I think it would be worth going to (civil) war over. It's an predicate to imposing anarcho-tyranny, where people and areas that don't, for example, vote "correctly" have their police protection largely withdrawn. This has happened in the U.K. and D.C. in recent memory.
It's also hard to see how this would make the police any more accountable to the people.
One thing you notice about these events in recent history is that they happened to already disarmed people (NYC < 60K each long and handgun licenses, D.C. all aside from grandfathering, U.K. pretty much all except shotguns, plus effective self-defense has long been illegal), it's most effective that way.
For my class, I've put together as many resources I could find (at least, in a few days of research), including every direct-downloadable dataset from the various crowdsourcing efforts and official places and investigative projects:
Counting police-officer-involved homicides is difficult -- but not more difficult than all the other things the FBI tries to count. That said, even if there were an official count, it's still very important that news orgs and independent groups also do their own count. Classifying these incidents gets significantly more difficult when you get into the details...but that's a problem common to every time we try to classify complicated information into a datapoint.
California also released a dashboard that covers arrests and the number killed by law enforcement which is based on data that is maintained by the CA Attorney General's Office:
I've also done a little investigation into why the number of reported homicides by law enforcement during arrests has been trending upwards in recent years:
Thanks for the tip...just to let you know, if you are interested in "Death in Custody"...a journalist recently was successful in getting spreadsheets from the state of California that list each death in custody:
Very cool, thanks for the link. I'm interested in seeing how well this matches up with the Attorney General's data if they are not from the same source.
Indeed; as far as we can tell, they executed one of the associates of the Tsarnaev brothers. Heck, we can go all the way back to Dillinger, they didn't give him a chance to surrender.
If the director wanted data on police shootings he could get it. Calling it ridiculous and embarrassing is deflecting. They're the FBI, not some county police department.
The US federal government gives tons of grants / access to resources to local governments and PDs that could easily be made contingent on supplying data upstream.
The FBI can compel ordinary people to hand over literally anything while also preventing them talking about it to anyone, including their lawyer(NSL). Pretty sure they can compel police departments to do hand over whatever they want.
When a person dies, particularly at the hand of a police officer, there is a corners report. There are police reports. If the FBI one statistics on the number of police shootings, they should go out and collect that data. It exists. If a police officer shoots someone, or has shot someone in the past 30 years, I think it will say so in a record somewhere. It's not going to say "Jimmy walked out of the liquor store and got shot and now he dead. Case closed."
"Mayors, police chiefs and state attorneys general said the lack of data is contributing to a dangerous trend in which police officers spurn aggressive tactics for fear of becoming the next officer to be caught on camera in a compromising situation."
First of all, mayors, police chiefs, and state attorneys general are the ones who should be collecting this data and the ones intentionally not doing so, so they should have no say in this. We gave them a few decades (or hundred years, if you wish) to become transparent and they haven't.
Second, I fail to see how spurning aggressive tactics is ever a negative. Police officers should spurn aggressive tactics whenever possible. If they're doing it out of fear of being caught on camera, they're doing it because they know that their aggressive tactics are wrong. So good riddance, if this is actually true (doubtful).
I have 2 really important things to say about this:
1. In 2013, the Los Angelos police department put more bullets into 1 man then the entire country of Germany shot during the entire year. Germany has twice the population of California and is roughly the same size.
2. For whatever reason, United States police are not required to keep a public record of how many shots are fired and how many people they've killed. This is not a common thing. It's pretty horrific. If they were to release such information we would see just how bad our police really are. And I don't mean bad as in evil, I just mean bad as in ineffective and out of control.
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[ 4.5 ms ] story [ 311 ms ] threadIf you believe that premise--and it's a very common mindset among do-gooder government types like FBI or U.S. Attorneys, then encryption is bad because it facilitates subversive tribes or factions pursuing their own ends independent of the mainstream of society. But lack of police transparency is also bad because it undermines the public's faith in their institutions, which cripples the effectiveness of those institutions.
I'd say that's a pretty good example of the freedom of the press doing work that's in the interest of the public. Just because it makes the FBI look bad doesn't mean it lacks merit. Maybe his quote is taken out of context though, in that it's "unacceptable" the FBI can't fiddle with the data for its own ends.
He's using a figure of speech, the meaning is that the current situation where the best effort is coming from the journalists should not be allowed to continue, but there isn't any implication that they should stop what they are doing, it is an acknowledgement that the FBI or whoever should be leading the way.
I measure public statements by persons in similar positions to him by how they could be cast as self-serving.
Deaths by police
in California: about 100 p.a.
in Germany: 8 in 2014
Population:
California: 39 Million
Germany: 82 Million
Source: http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2015/10/police-i...
I fully believe there's a problem with US and most certainly California cops, but this is not the way to approach the problem. Heck, it doesn't even suggest anything actionable.
Gun control is the elephant in this particular room. A cop who isn't expecting his next public contact to shoot him is not going to pull a gun when he walks into the room, much less shoot first.
Plus the law at all levels, as well as pretty much everyone but I suppose the criminal class, supports making it illegal for a "violent, law-breaking gang member" to possess a firearm if he's been convicted of a violent felony (well, any felony, but we all agree about the violent ones).
During prohibition, it was much harder (and more expensive) to get beer (or liquor), and more liquor than beer was consumed at a considerably higher price. One outcome was significantly lower alcohol consumption and all that that means (lower deaths by cirrhosis, lower city drunkenness arrests).
If we take prohibition as an analogy, then sure, a dedicated criminal will still be able to get guns. However, a casual street-level criminal is going to have to work harder to get them because they're no longer available in the mall or from the pawn shop, and he's going to have to pay ten times as much to get one from Benny in the pool hall. That'll significantly reduce the number of guns out there, and that is what creates the environment and the expectation that results in cops shooting civilians.
Almost every appellate court below does in some capacity.
As does the original text of the Second Amendment (as you said.)
But again, how are you going to stop violent gang members from getting firearms without infringing on the law abiding?
Why not focus on the problem: rehabilitating the violent individuals + improving mental health, instead of hoplophobic, knee-jerk legislation.
Hasn't and won't in the foreseeable future come up for 5-6th, 8th, and 10-11th circuits. So with the score currently 1-4 at the appellate level and 0-4 with the Supremes, I don't find the Federal legal situation at all encouraging, since there's no state that forbids all unloaded movements of guns, I don't see much wiggle room for your "in some capacity".
I don't dispute that some people may own illegal firearms, but its by no means an endemic problem. Somebody getting shot in the UK is guaranteed to make the news. Just the presence of a criminal with a gun will interrupt live news channels, that's how rare it is.
While I don't doubt that the knowledge of who to talk to and where to go to get a gun is present in certain UK communities, the basic fact that everybody involved in procuring, handling and importing guns is committing a criminal act certainly acts as a pretty solid prevention mechanism to stop, say, an angry 20-something man from acquiring sufficient guns and ammo to go on a shooting rampage at a college.
I can go to one of those countries with strong gun control right now and turn a formidable firearm if you like - do they need better mill control?
So if you do lock your house doors when you go out, you're implicitly agreeing that you do this to make it more difficult for someone to get inside your house, reducing the likelihood of theft.
Same thing with guns.
So America has zero house burglary?
Parent claims guns shouldn't be restricted since someone can make one on a lathe if they cannot buy one at a store.
Meanwhile parent almost certainly locks their house doors despite a thief with crowbar being able to bypass their lock.
Therefore, the parent's reasoning that gun control won't work because a criminal can mill their own gun is not logically sound.
I'm going to go out on a limb and claim murders are not an opportunistic crime. People are not killing because they can and can get away with it. The comparison you are trying to make dies there because the type of crime is not comparable.
Since someone can physically go and mill a gun, should that be the reason not to enact gun control? Seems like a ridiculous reason to me, but apparently is a core bit of logic for the gun crowd.
A US police officer who doesn't assume a public contact might result in a lethal threat from a gun or edged weapon is an idiot.
People who break one law will still obey countless others. It's also totally reasonable to think that someone who engaged in some kind of petty larceny would readily obey gun-restriction laws--why wouldn't they?
This whole "gun control won't work because criminals ignore laws" thing always struck me as a nasty piece of nonsequitor logic and identity politics, a way to "other" a group of people (i.e. more people who live in some counterculture way than people who have actually broken some law) as wild or deranged Hollywood-esque marauders, or a way to invent a bogeyman threat that only guns (in the hands of the so-called "good guys") can stop.
Someone who uses a gun illegally today, will use one when they're illegal. At best making guns illegal would stop some domestic murders, but that would have to be weighed against a massive number of people going to jail for not obeying, country wide stop and frisk, and New Orleans style door to door SWAT raids to confiscate.
Did that happen to Australia? I see no evidence for it.
If not, why don't we use the same mandatory buy-back approach that Australia did?
merpnderp made the claim that making guns illegal would end up with a "massive number of people going to jail for not obeying, country wide stop and frisk, and New Orleans style door to door SWAT raids to confiscate."
Guns are illegal in Australia, though certainly many guns remain. (Hunting and other guns remain.)
Australia did not end up with a "massive number of people going to jail for not obeying", etc.
Therefore, it's possible to make guns be illegal, in the way Australia has, and not end up with the consequences that merpnderp predicts must necessarily be the case.
Therefore merpnderp's claims are not believable.
Also if you look at the gun murder trend line in Australia it doesn't appear to change after the gun confiscation. Gun murders were on the decline and continued on the same pace.
I don't know where you got your 200K number. http://edition.cnn.com/2012/12/16/opinion/australia-gun-laws... says:
> In two nationwide, federally funded gun buybacks, plus large-scale voluntary surrenders and state gun amnesties both before and after Port Arthur, Australia collected and destroyed more than a million firearms, perhaps one-third of the national stock. No other nation had attempted anything on this scale.
I confirmed this at http://loc.gov/law/help/firearms-control/australia.php , which says the 1996 buyback collected "More than 640,000 prohibited firearms", and "there were about 3.25 million guns in Australia prior to the 1996–1997 buyback program". The 2003 buyback "resulted in about 70,000 handguns" being collected. I don't know where the CNN' "more than a million firearms" comes from, but the numbers I found are still 3x what you give.
It's also mostly meaningless to compare Australia's "200K guns out of circulation" to a total US ownership of 300M guns. Those are two different statistics. It's more appropriate to compare the 3 million guns from a then-population of 18 million, to the US ownership; Australia had about 1/6th the per capita gun numbers than the US currently has.
As for door to door raids and stop and frisk, that's the only way to get guns out of american hands. How do we know this? Because many cities and states have had draconian gun laws in the past. There have been buy back programs by the dozens. None of them worked. Just life France and much of Europe, guns are easy to get in restricted jurisdictions.
And why would you think telling people they have to turn in their guns will work? They won't even register them when required by law.
http://www.newsmax.com/US/new-york-gun-registration-law/2015...
I asked why Australia didn't have the horrors that you predict would happen should Australian-like gun control laws be put into place in the US.
Your only answer seems to be that the US has too many guns, so therefore can't change. (Which sounds like a bank which is "too big to fail", so we have to keep feeding it taxpayer money.)
> that's the only way to get guns out of american hands
That's irrelevant. As I demonstrated, only about 1/3 of the guns got out of Australian hands. Why would anyone think those same laws would get 100% of the gun out of American hands?
Let's start with the assumption it is impossible to alter the constitution to remove or severely cripple the second amendment, which, I think, is a reasonable assumption.
How, specifically, would you define "gun control"?
How, specifically, would you define "gun control"?
We throw this terms around but nobody bothers to define it. What exactly does "Gun control is the elephant in this particular room." mean?
Again, I ask, how, specifically, would you define "gun control"?
I am not refuting anything you are saying. I am simply asking a question.
Quoting from Wikipedia, "Gun control generally refers to laws or policies that regulate the manufacture, sale, transfer, possession, modification, or use of firearms." This is general agreement with how others use.
For example, this more policy-oriented survey of small gun laws in different countries ( http://www.smallarmssurvey.org/fileadmin/docs/A-Yearbook/201... ) breaks the regulations down into:
> "how states regulate the firearm ... what types of firearms civilians may be authorized to possess and which states keep centralized records of firearms in civilian hands", "how states regulate the civilian user, including the criteria used to determine eligibility to possess a firearm, how the licensing process works, and whether states permit private sales of firearms", and "how states regulate the use of civilian firearms, including the extent to which states require a reason to possess a firearm and the conditions that apply to firearm ownership."
I see nothing particularly ambiguous in how the term is used for you to call for a need for the us, the hoi polloi, to help you understand it better.
Gun control laws fall on a spectrum. Typically people say "we need more gun control" to mean that the laws should be more restrictive on what is allowed, while "we need less gun control" means the laws should less restrictive.
Wikipedia explains the phrase "elephant in the room" well:
> The term refers to a question, problem, solution, or controversial issue which is obvious to everyone who knows about the situation, but which is deliberately ignored because to do otherwise would cause great embarrassment, or trigger arguments or is simply taboo. The idiom can imply a value judgment that the issue ought to be discussed openly, or it can simply be an acknowledgment that the issue is there and not going to go away by itself.
> The term is often used to describe an issue that involves a social taboo, such as race, religion, or even suicide. This idiomatic phrase is applicable when a subject is emotionally charged; and the people who might have spoken up decide that it is probably best avoided.[8]
The phrase "Gun control is the elephant in this particular room" refers to the top-comment's list of "tangentially relevant facts". One inference is that the stricter gun control laws of Germany mean that fewer people have guns, so police are less likely to use methods which presume the civilians are both armed and likely to response with a gunfight.
However, saying that directly brings in well-worn nearly deadlocked arguments about changes to gun control laws, Second Amendment, etc. Hence, the top-comment's indirect reference, which avoids discussing gun laws by talking about possible effects - hence, the topic of gun control is "the elephant in the room" that is being avoided, for reasons Wikipedia illuminated.
Note that "I am simply asking a question." is often used by people who are derisively said to be "JAQing off". In order to avoid that accusation, I suggest you do some research first, rather than ask Wikipedia-level questions. You say that people do not define it; what is wrong with the definition from Wikipedia? Is it incompatible with how most people use the term?
Well, I am flattered to have a loyal follower! :)
I've already admitted guilt. Note that my comment about political discussion not belonging on HN got down-voted with some passion. The conclusion being: I am wrong. People want these discussions on HN. And so, here we are. Who am I to argue with that?
By "sucked into a political discussion" I think I mostly mean getting sucked into the kind of pointless back and forth that can happen when one (me included) resorts to attacking an idea rather than discussing it. When I do that I find I am never happy with the results. It has nothing to do with the childish idea of winning an argument but rather the concept of going about exploring something using exactly the wrong approach. I am personally going to try to change my approach when participating in these kinds discussions on HN.
Going back to the question I asked. No, this isn't about JAQ-ing off. This is about asking someone what they mean when they use the term.
And no, this isn't about a Wikipedia or dictionary definition either. And it certainly isn't about what the definition of the term might be in Germany or anywhere else.
Unless that is what the person using the term meant.
I feel that lots of people use the term "gun control" out of frustration. Why? Because when asked what exactly they --that person, not Wikipedia-- means by "gun control" they have a hard time answering the question.
And the context has to be right. If I am working with a friend in the garage and, in the course of our banter, I say something like "hey, asshole, hand me a 1/2 inch socket", what did I mean? Am I insulting him or is it actually a friendly jab? Should someone ask, giving them a link to the Wikipedia definition of "asshole" would not answer the question.
I am not attacking you or putting down your answer. I am simply pointing out that I was not looking for a universal definition of the terms but rather for what someone means when they use it.
Do they mean "disarm the entire population", "disarm all criminals", "disarm the mentally unstable", "institute severe penalties for doing X, Y or Z with guns", or something else?
So, again, I don't know what this person meant with "Gun control is the elephant in this particular room". In the next sentence they are talking about cops not having to worry about people shooting them. He says: "A cop who isn't expecting his next public contact to shoot him".
That, to me, implies that, to this person, "gun control" might mean something approaching total disarmament of the population, criminals included.
What else could it mean to the person using the term? How does the elephant in the room, gun control, if addressed, create a situation where a cop will never be worried about someone shooting them? What form would addressing the elephant in the room take? Again, to the person using the term. I don't want to make any assumptions or use the dictionary because that is not likely what they meant.
That's why I asked for a clarification of "gun control". Another way to put it might be:
In your opinion, what form would gun control have to take in order to provide cops with the assurance that they will not be shot the next time they have contact with civilians?
I hope that clarifies what I am asking. I am not challenging anyone, I simply want to understand how this person (or anyone else for that matter) thinks of gun control in the context of the problem he posed.
I think the question is simple. The answer, likely not.
EDIT: To clarify further. "What do you mean by gun control?" means "How would you propose to implement gun control in order for the scenario you are painting to become reality (cops not afraid of getting ...
"Gun control", in a policy sense that you want, where people define their terms, does not mean that. I gave you two sources with similar definitions. It means simply the laws related to the the production, sale, ownership, use, etc. of a gun and its ancillary components.
If your example regulations were in place, they would be considered part of gun control. Even if they are not in place, there can still be gun control.
The question I think you want to ask is "what gun controls do you want"? Not "what is gun control."
For purposes of this discussion, define "gun control" as having policies which are essentially identical to those of (your preference) Australia, or Sweden, or Japan.
I think that's as simple and unambiguous as you are going to get, and will satisfy most people interested in stricter laws.
> In the next sentence they are talking about cops not having to worry about people shooting them
That comment is a continuation of the thread, which started with statistics of the number of civilians killed by police officers.
> That, to me, implies that, to this person, "gun control" might mean something approaching total disarmament of the population, criminals included.
Again, "gun control" here is a synecdoche to mean "stricter gun control." Countries with strict gun controls, like Australia and Sweden, have a lot of private gun ownership, for hunting and target shooting. So no, it doesn't necessarily mean 'total disarmament of the population'.
Here's a hypothetical that might help understand the difference. Suppose hunting rifles are allowed, but hand guns are not. It's pretty hard to conceal a rifle as you go around town, especially since the law requires that it be locked up in a case when in transit, or stored in the house.
This means it's less likely that a petty thief will be carrying a gun to commit a crime. This means it's less likely that a drug dealer will be carrying a gun as protection against potential thieves.
In general, many police reports which involve the forceful police attack on what turns out to be the wrong person are justified because of the likelihood that the actual criminal is likely to have a gun, and may respond with a gunfight. For example, SWAT teams are often called out for low-level drug dealers. The assumption is that a dealer is likely to be armed. The team is figuratively armed for bear; expecting the worst possible case. Sometimes they end up killing or seriously injuring innocent people, including by forceful entry of the wrong house.
If years of SWAT team calls were go out, where no one ever has a gun, then it will be increasingly hard to justify the expense of a SWAT team and the deaths that sometimes occur when in a hair-trigger mode.
That was the statistics that the OP was referring to. That was the gun control style that the earlier poster was referring to. Very few seriously propose a 'total disarmament of the population', and if you had researched the topic you would have quickly learned that.
No, that IS the question I, in fact, asked. I did not ask "what is gun control?". Actually, what I asked is a bit more subtle than "what gun controls do you want?". This is what I asked, quoting:
"How, specifically, would you define "gun control"?"
Here, "would you define" is a very precise modifier. And the context, perhaps lost, was that the OP implied "gun control" was the "elephant in the room" when it came to police interacting with civilians.
That's a bit different from "what gun controls do you want?" but definitely NOT "what is gun control". If you think that's what I asked you misread my question.
Please don't try to push me into a corner with "if you had researched the topic". I actually know the topic very well. Here I am trying to understand what someone else thinks gun control has to be, their opinion or ideas, not the "book" definition. I know that latter very well, I care to learn the former.
Not sure how else to ask this. I thought I was clear. So, I'll try again, for the last time and then I'll unilaterally drop my attempt to understand.
What would you --not wikipedia, the dictionary or politicians-- you (or the person I originally asked) suggest would be the approach to gun control legislation that would allow police officers to not worry about whether or not civilians are armed when approaching them?
I will repeat, because this medium sucks at conveying emotion, I am not critical of anything you have said nor am I challenging anything anyone has said.
I am simply looking for someone to perhaps put up a five to ten bullet-point list delineating what form of "gun control" they think would provide a solution for the stated scenario, one where a cop is concerned about a citizen being armed when approaching them. What set of rules would constitute this version of "gun control" that would produce that reality?
BTW, I don't have an answer for that. Then again, I did not propose "gun control" was the elephant in that room.
To clarify further, I am not for or against guns. I am completely neutral about them. I am simply trying to learn because, frankly, I don't know what the solution might be or if we actually need one.
I gave one: implement national laws and policies equivalent to what's in Australia, Sweden, or Japan; wait the few years for use/presence of guns to go down; observe that the justifications for the stark use of police force have gone down; no longer permit those justifications.
To be clear, this is what I think of when I say "Australian-style gun control":
Now, in Australia there was no constitutional guarantee of gun ownership. How plausible do you think it would be, given that it is nearly impossible to get rid of the second amendment, to pass Australian-style legislation in the US?Their buyback program took out about 20% of civilian firearms (law-abiding citizens, I presume). In the case of the US, if we could pass such laws and achieve equivalent results, this would mean we'd have about 240 million guns in the hands of civilians rather than 300 million. Again, I presume this will exclude criminals, I think it is fair to say they, by definition, do not abide by our laws.
Let me propose we do a much better job than Australia and eliminate about 33% of guns. Guns in the hands of law-abiding citizens, then would go down from 300 million to 200 million.
How much of an effect would you say this would have on gun violence in the US?
Would people, cops included, be able to feel safer anywhere they go kn the knowledge that there are only 200 million guns out there?
Do you think the mentally unstable will participate in the voluntary buy back program? If so, to what degree?
None of this addressed guns in the hands of criminals, gangs or those who own guns legitimately yet might be on the "edge", psychologically speaking. How will we deal with that problem?
When it comes to these issues it is all too easy to find data on pro and anti-gun sites to support any conclusion. I opted to go to the source and grab Australian government data here:
http://www.aic.gov.au/dataTools/facts/vicViolentCol.html
It's a neat little tool. You can click on the various categories to enable/disable their display. This is what I conclude from quickly looking at this:
It's also interesting to see the trends in firearm and knife homicides, again, from Australian sources:http://www.aic.gov.au/statistics/homicide/weapon.html
Quoting from that page:
"There has been a pronounced change in the type of weapons used in homicide since monitoring began. Firearm use has declined by more than half since 1989-90 as a proportion of homicide methods, and there has been an upward trend in the use of knives and sharp instruments, which in 2006-07 accounted for nearly half of all homicide victims."
I interpret this as meaning that access to guns might not deter those who, for whatever reason, want to kill. Of course, mass murders are far more difficult with knifes or sharp objects. Yet, I think it is fair to say that the vast majority of people murdered are not killed in mass murders.
What are the roughly equivalent US stats today? Homicides, about 15,000/year; Robberies, about 400,000 per year.
That's a huge difference. In Australia the pre and post ban ho...
I don't care.
You said people didn't give details. I gave you precise details.
You limited the topic to gun control. Now with "I'd rater spend $50K a year educating kids" you broaden the topic. This shows you didn't actually care about the original question. If you want to broaden the topic, well, I live in Sweden. I think many aspects of Nordic social policies should be copied in the US, including gun control laws, parental leave, education, day care, social support, and prison rehabilitation. But you didn't ask about those.
Look at all the questions you asked that were irrelevant to your original question, and show that you were constructing a leading question so you could then followup with a barrage of additional questions.
Typical JAQ'ing off behavior.
And the responses you could get are well-worn, boring to repeat, and covered by many others in great detail. Research it for yourself.
In regards JAQing off behavior, the related term "sealioning" is relevant. Quoting from http://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Just_asking_questions :
> Sealioning involves jumping into a conversation with endless questions and demands for answers, usually of entry-level topics far below the actual conversation ... The questions themselves, when done properly, are normally polite - just an irrelevant distraction.
You can see that "nothing short of respectful" is therefore expected behavior for someone who is "just asking questions".
You'll also note the caution:
> A particularly toxic thing about sealioning is that people who are genuine newbies asking serious questions are easy to mistake for sealions.
Based on your comment history you do not seem to be a "genuine newbie." I of course may be wrong, in which case my apologies. If that is the case, you may wish to investigate this rhetorical style in order to avoid structuring your investigatory question in a similar fashion, to avoid having others in the future respond with similar knee-jerk reactions.
However, note that earlier in this thread you said:
> "To clarify further, I am not for or against guns. I am completely neutral about them."
while 74 days ago, at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9956552 , you wrote:
> This is (some of) what I want for humanity: ...
> - No guns
which appears to mean that you are, actually, against guns.
As you said then, "Each one of those line items could be a months-long discussion as to the merits, or lack thereof, of the idea", so you must realize that the questions you ask now fundamentally cannot be addressed to your satisfaction on HN.
Which further strengthens my belief that you were not asking these questions here in good faith.
Second, you picked that completely out of context, yet there's nothing wrong with wishing humanity didn't have guns or wars. It's utopia. Outside utopia, in the real world, I am neutral. I enjoy target and skeet shooting with my kids and friends, that's about the extent of it. I don't care about personal protection. Don't need guns for that.
Third, you must be young. I learned the Socratic Method when I was in high school decades ago. It's a productive and non-confrontational way to engage in conversations where we can both discover our positions and, perhaps, but not necessarily, guide each other towards conclusions. I've had many amazing discoveries in my life through this approach. And, no, I am not always correct.
Anyhow, I wanted to have a genuine conversation with you and the original person to whom I asked that simple question. Instead it turned into a lot of wasted effort. It would have been far simpler to answer (or ignore) the simple question and engage (or not) in an exploration of ideas, which can be very enjoyable.
BTW, I own several companies. We engage in this kind of exploration every day in order to discover flaws or new ideas in the various projects we undertake. It is a really productive way to explore corners of thinking or areas previously not well understood.
Another method is the "five why's". I haven't really used it much so I can't comment.
JAQ-ing off, sealioning,..., please.
That's a pretty steep assumption for a subject of this lethality, especially about something that's called an "amendment".
There's also a large political faction who believe that a private right to kill people is important and inherent in gun ownership.
"private right to kill people" - hah. I assume you value the lives of criminals more than the law-abiding.
If you burglarize my home, attack me, or otherwise commit felonious acts on my property, my person, I have the right to stop that threat. You do not believe that people should have the right to protect themselves?
Just because you have an easy button for homicide doesn't mean it's called for in every hostile situation. Courts agree. Try killing someone for robbing your house.
There is no such thing as shooting to disable. You always aim for center of mass and if you do not feel threatened enough to shoot to kill then you shouldn't be shooting at all.
Now the caveat to this is if you shot an intruder and they're still alive, but now injured to the degree where you can safely disarm them and keep a gun drawn on them; current U.S law makes this a problem. You can get in legal trouble/sued by someone who broke into your home with a weapon intent on killing you, but only if they live.
This means not only are you shooting to kill - you're now dumping an entire magazine into the person to make sure they are dead.
E:
To the people who downvoted, how would you disarm an intruder with a gun? Ask them politely to put the weapon down? Run at them with a baseball bat (and risk getting shot)?
Or maybe shoot them in the arm or leg? Where major arteries are and the shot is still likely to be fatal and also has a higher chance of missing entirely.
Life isn't Call of Duty and shots to the legs/arm don't just "injure", they kill. So I'll repeat myself: there is no such thing as shooting to disarm or disable in real life. Only in fantasy first-person-shooter land.
In either case, their survival puts you in legal trouble under current law. You should be shooting to kill if you feel deadly force is justified. If your intent is not to kill, then deadly force was not justified.
Good luck aiming for a hand. I advise you go to a firing range and see how often you can hit the arm of a moving target without taking time to aim (remember: taking time to aim = you are now the one being shot). You'll have fractions of a second to get someone in your sights and take the shot.
It'll cost $30-40 to use a range, rent a gun, and buy ammunition for an hour. You'll leave with a more informed opinion of how operating a firearm works.
[0] https://www.pfoa.co.uk/110/shooting-to-wound
My post was in response to you making it sound like wounds to the extremities would be equally likely to kill as wounds to the center of mass, which is definitely not true.
And thanks, I've already got a range membership.
My point was you should never shoot to harm, only to kill. That means no hand shots. Period. Regardless of the chances of a fatally wounding shot.
My point - furthermore - was that it isn't a guaranteed "disabling" shot. It's still possible to kill. The thought of "shoot to disable" is a misinformed thought educated on nothing but Hollywood movies and video games.
Sorry, I don't care about a violent criminal's life enough to try and take a well-placed shot at a small, moving extremity.
No police officer would attempt this, either, if they're following their training.
Center-mass shots are more reliable, and more importantly, more reliable under stress (larger target).
"Patching up" my aggressor is the least of my concerns morally and legally.
In most jurisdictions this is completely legal under most circumstances. You can't always kill someone fleeing your just-robbed home (state-specific laws), though.
If someone breaks into your home with the intent to felony, in my state, yes, you can use lethal force to stop the threat or apprehend the alleged felon.
In terms of law, case law is critical here, to my knowledge only Texas allows that, after a verbal warning. And like e.g. Oklahoma, I expect judges to eventually nullify that.
Have you ever tried to apprehend a violent felon? They'll typically attack you, resulting in a case for traditional self-defense.
If you need guns, call the police.
No thanks. Try to take my right of effective self-defense away (as the U.K. started doing in the '50s) and you won't like the consequences.
I'll take my much safer area plus my immediate means to self defense over your constables that are a hour out.
Violent crime in UK is much lower than in US. UK crime statistics are more robust than US crime stats.
In particular: The US uses a different definition of violent crime. The US doesn't bother to include a bunch of crime that the UK does include.
United Kingdom: http://www.homeoffice.gov.uk/publications/science-research-s...
“Violent crime contains a wide range of offences, from minor assaults such as pushing and shoving that result in no physical harm through to serious incidents of wounding and murder. Around a half of violent incidents identified by both BCS and police statistics involve no injury to the victim.” (THOSB – CEW, page 17, paragraph 1.)
United States: http://www.fbi.gov/about-us/cjis/ucr/crime-in-the-u.s/2011/c...
“In the FBI’s Uniform Crime Reporting (UCR) Program, violent crime is composed of four offenses: murder and nonnegligent manslaughter, forcible rape, robbery, and aggravated assault. Violent crimes are defined in the UCR Program as those offenses which involve force or threat of force.” (FBI – CUS – Violent Crime)
In the UK a push that results in no physical harm could be counted as a violent crime. That same push, resulting in the same lack of physical harm, would not be counted as a violent crime in the US.
> your constables that are a hour out.
That's weirdly wrong too.
This isn't a hypothetical and happened to me 15 years ago. I yelled I had a gun and would shoot him if he came through. He kicked a few more times then ran away.
The cops didn't show up for 17 more minutes.
His/her life matters, so you can't take it even if it means defending your own.
(Obviously sarcasm, but that's the thought process of these people)
One reason I bring this up is that a "duty to retreat" requirement manufactured by the Massachusetts courts was used to convict a man in the early '80s who wasn't willing to do that. There's a previous better known case were a woman was convicted because she didn't try to climb out of the high windows in her basement apartment.
Massachusetts is viciously anti-gun. Except, of course, towards the connected: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2010_University_of_Alabama_in_...
(Can't wait to see the study cited that considers suicide a "risk to you and your wife's lives")
If I need guns, I'll use the one on my hip.
You know, the one that the Supreme Court of the United States of America asserted that I have a right to keep.
History has shown repeatedly that humans are prone to emotional responses. And people that were otherwise law abiding right until a moment of anger now have easy hip-level access to a 'thing' to act out their anger.
Take the case a couple years ago of the retired cop that shot a guy in the movie theatre during previews for throwing popcorn at him. (Guy called his baby sitter during previews, the retired cop yelled at him to be quiet, guy threw some popcorn back at the cop, retired cop shoots guy dead) If this retired cop, who was a law-abiding citizen his whole life and was professionally trained in firearm safety and usage couldn't control his anger during an argument about a guy using his cell phone, I don't see how the average American can be trusted.
And speaking of guns in movie theatres, there's the case of the guy who accidentally dropped his handgun under his seat during a kids movie and then left. Luckily the ushers found it and not a kid. Guy had the nerve to go back to the theatre and demand it back.
I don't see how the average American can be trusted to keep their gun safe.
Pearl clutchers have warned us of "blood in the streets!" and "Dodge City!" every time a state switched to shall issue licensing. Well, there are now 45 shall issue states, holding more than 2/3rd of the population, and its never happened, history does not show what you claim. Sure, there are occasional bad incidents (the VPC paper did find a few) ... but if in this HN topic you're going to claim police are the acme of responsible gun use, we're not living in the same reality.
We have a legal system that determines innocence or guilt. Before that systems assigns one or the other, they are alleged criminals.
We, a civilized people, do not punish alleged criminals, because they are, by definition, not guilty of a crime.
Which, I should point out, isn't punishment. Which 15155 never said we could do, he only talked about what you can do in felonious acts, defend yourself, and about a value system that puts criminals above the law-abiding.
Not even alleged criminals; the right to self-defense usually requires that the threat comes from someone without a legal privilege for the act, but the requirements for actual criminality (particular mens rea) are not necessarily required to trigger the right to use force in self-defense, even lethal force.
And this makes sense: the right to self-defense is not about the criminal culpability of the one against whom violence is permitted, its about a limit on the criminal culpability of the user of violence.
Now, one can argue that in some jurisdictions the details of the rules on self-defense are drawn overly broadly, or that they are applied selectively and in a discriminatory manner. But I don't think the general principal that people will not be held criminally accountable for use of force reasonably scaled to deal with an imminent threat which had no legal privilege to be made, independently of whether the one making the threat met the legal standards for criminal culpability in so doing, should be even slightly controversial.
As long as once the threshold of lethal force is reached, all lethal force in reply until the threat is over is legitimate.
Midway through it's now almost total ban on guns the U.K. made self-defense with more force than being used on you illegal, first in the courts in the '50s and then by law in the '60s. Outlawing effective self-defense then makes it that much easier to outlaw guns altogether.
https://www.askthe.police.uk/content/Q589.htm
> The only fully legal self defence product at the moment is a rape alarm.
This is the sad state that the UK is in at the moment.
If a violent aggressor who is shot happens to survive, the court can decide their fate later, but that's completely separate from the right to self defense.
This is the law that we, a civilized society, live by. If you don't like it, there are countries (UK!) where self-defense is almost entirely illegal - they may be more fitting.
Furthermore, we decree the right to self-defense as a _natural_ right, not one that could be potentially amended away.
Germany: 83
California: 17
Murders per capita:
Germany: 1/124,000
California: 1/23,000
So California's murder rate is 5.4x Germany's, and its death by cop per murder rate is 4.9x Germany's.
Is it just me, or wouldn't you expect the death by cop rate to be more than a linear function of the murder rate... perhaps even a polynomial function?
A difference in murder rate of x does not necessarily mean a difference in levels of violence/danger of x.
America's LEOs may kill way people per capita, but our LEOs also get killed by people way more per capita. Even the most unhelpful lists of killings by police officers have an overwhelmingly common trend: "Officers arrived. Suspect drew gun. Suspect didn't drop gun when ordered to. Suspect pointed gun at officers. Officers opened fire." There are dozens or hundreds of people that are on killed-by-LEO lists only because they shot second.
Compare Canada to the US: http://canada.odmp.org/year.php?year=2014&Submit=Go https://www.odmp.org/search/year/2014
Similarly, if you look at Sweden's first-ever police killing from a few years ago, the story isn't about police dying heroically because they're sacrificing themselves rather than killing criminals. It's that they don't have to kill anybody because nobody needs to be killed in order to defend others. "Violent crime is almost non-existent there." No violent crime, no violent police. No problem.
So let's not blame officers. They're probably doing the best they can with a bad situation. Let's blame the politicians who criminalize everything, the socioeconomic system that screws with poor people's minds, the macho culture that drives gun nuttery and 'stand-your-ground' and 'fuck-tha-police' sentiments, and violence in general. Until we get rid of those we're not going to be able to fix the police because, for the most part, the police aren't broken.
It's interesting you mention "gun nuttery" as a problem. I take it you approve the citizenry be asymmetrical w.r.t being armed relative to the police? I do not.
By all means, fuck the police. Why would I approve of, say, the LAPD any more than I would approve of the MVSN?
I had to look up MVSN. They were the Italian Fascist Blackshirt thugs.
If you think life in LA would be improved by the absence of the LAPD, I strongly question your grasp on reality. If you think the LAPD hassles people they shouldn't, beats them up, and sometimes kills them, you're almost certainly correct. But if you think that, in the absence of the LAPD, the total number of beatings and killings would go down, you're dreaming.
But you said, "Why would I approve of, say, the LAPD any more than I would approve of the MVSN?" My reply is that you would approve of the LAPD and not the MVSN, because despite the brokenness, the LAPD is still a net positive, and the MVSN were not.
It may well be that some paramilitaries are more efficient than others, but their incentives are by definition always stacked against community building, and in favor of adversarial enforcement.
I would be much, much happier if this conversation moved more in the direction of fixing the war on drugs, the prison complex, and in particular the political attraction to being "hard on crime".
With parents hitting their kids (mostly moms, according to the statistics).
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Problem_of_Political_Autho...
[2] http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/authority/#ReaConConLegPol...
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philosophical_anarchism
Now, I don't expect cops to just stand there and die at that point. But, few cops are going to admit they fucked up, and many have planted a gun after the fact.
I don't expect us to suddenly not have violence at all. Few people are going to admit that they're part of the problem. But it's clearly possible for civilizations to have socioeconomics and underlying political systems that can raise populations that don't resort to violence.
That's Iceland, not Sweden.
Ah, the narrative is showing. Let's compare protection for law-abiding citizens to a thug mentality in the exact same sentence.
After seeing and reading about various types of (local and national) police misconduct, not to mention the fact that police have asserted that it's __not__ their job to protect us, it's hard not to feel that their perspective is somewhat reasonable.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Warren_v._District_of_Columbia
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Individual_and_group_rights
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_rights_in_the_Soviet_Uni...
People wouldn't like it of course, so it would never fly. But we need to get rid of this idiotic notion that you need a gun to protect yourself in a civil society. You don't. You're not going to rise up against the government, and you're not going to need it to protect your family.
Are there exceptions? Sure. But when guns are so readily available, any criminal that wants one has one.
The ridiculous line "if you outlaw guns only outlaws will have guns" or whatever, is nonsensical. If guns are outlawed, most criminals will have a hard time finding guns. But all law enforcement officers will still have them.
"We just need to ban encryption. The First Amendment isn't written in stone. Or it could get some extremely significant limitations added, like backdoors.
People wouldn't like it of course, so it would never fly. But we need to get rid of this idiotic notion that you need encryption to protect yourself in a civil digital society. You don't. You're not going to rise up against the government, and you're not going to need it to protect your family.
Are there exceptions? Sure. But when AES is so readily available, any criminal that wants one has one.
The ridiculous line "if you outlaw encryption only outlaws will have encryption" or whatever, is nonsensical. If encryption is outlawed, most criminals will have a hard time finding algorithms. But all three letter agencies (ie: NSA) will still have them."
This substitution is nonsensical. Fundamentally, encryption is a defensive tool. Where proponents of gun control (and I mean moderate folk, not just the let's ban the 2nd amendment folk) disagree with others is that guns aren't just a defensive tool. Given a sufficiently large population with poor safety nets and discrimination, adding encryption in everyone's hands will not change my day-to-day life significantly. Throw in guns and things change drastically. Now I have to be worried about a dark alley mugging at night at gunpoint.
[1] https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/volokh-conspiracy/wp/201...
I didn't quite enjoy this dismissive tone, so I'll be more pedantic than usual. The study you cited is interesting but it's not the end all of gun control discussion. It's barely even the beginning.
First, it considers Brady scores at a state level to try to find correlation. Gun control legislation might be at a state-level but that's a nonsensical level of granularity. My concerns are about my neighborhoods, poverty, and guns. Not the state of California as a whole with over 35 million people.
Second, from the article you cited:
> Perhaps even controlling for those factors, there will be other missing factors that are hard to control for — for instance, maybe as the crime rate increases, calls for gun controls increase, so high crime causes more gun restrictions, or maybe calls for more freedom to defend oneself increase, so high crime causes fewer gun restrictions (e.g., liberalized concealed-carry licensing rules). And of course when small changes in the model yield substantial changes in results (e.g., if you calculate the state gun scores differently, the results will likely be different), you know how little you should credit the output. Figuring out the actual effect of government actions, whether gun laws, changed policing rules, drug laws, or anything else, is devilishly difficult.
is a succinct summary of why this comparison study is meaningless. It's a good retort to someone who says that gun control leads to fewer deaths but it has so many caveats and such imprecise applicability that the only useful take away point is that at a state-level with some gun-control scoring pattern (viz. the Brady Campaign scores) discounting ALL other factors, gun-related deaths are not correlated to gun control.
Should we give every individual easy access to ICMBs, Tanks and Nuclear Weapon ?
The difference is two fold.
1) Encryption is useful to society outside the need for killing people. That is why you really cannot compare encryption to guns.
2) Even When criminals do use encrpytion - its used to facilitate killing rather than a direct way to kill people.
Someone cannot just throw a bunch of random paper filled with numbers and I will fall dead. There is a long chain of events between transmission of secret information to people being killed. If you give the world's top two criminals access to encryption but lock them away in a plastic room - they cannot even theoretical hurt anyone.
TLDR : Guns are stupid and people who like guns are stupid
Try this on for size. In a post talking about our inability to analyze the potential abuse of deadly force by police, we're talking about surrendering the use of deadly force... ...to the police.
No one's ever been injured or killed by accidental application of encryption, but thousands of people are injured or killed by accidental gunfire every year.
[1] http://freakonomics.com/books/freakonomics/chapter-excerpts/...
Accidental gun deaths are not remotely interesting compared to murder and suicide.
I was responding to a comment regarding accidental deaths and injuries, not suicide or murder. If this is insufficiently interesting to you, I suggest you read another comment.
Why not ban cars, more people are accidentally killed with automobiles than guns used for homicide or suicide.
as for the statement people won't rise up against government, where have you been? They did after the shootings in LA, Oakland, and recently St. Louis.
Frankly the idea of a society where only law enforcement has guns with their track record isn't a society anyone should want to live in.
Drugs, not so much. Your analogy completely fails.
Well, that's in part because once you've disarmed the populace, you don't need guns to slaughter them wholesale. Well over a 100 million previously disarmed people in the 20th Century, a fate US civilians are quite determined to avoid.
I agree drugs are different, but if the will exists, guns and ammo are a lot more compact.
... did you just blame the ukrainian genocide under stalin on a lack of guns?
For some inexplicable reason, dictators first seize the guns of targeted populations before trying such things.
Muzzle loaded smooth-bore (short range, relatively fast to load).
Muzzle loaded rifle (long range, slow to load)
Then the muzzle loaded rifled musket, which used the Minié ball to achieve both, and great carnage in the Crimean War and our Civil War.
Now the developments are rapid:
Breach loaded single shot rifles.
Repeaters with relatively slow loading, with a move to smokeless powder.
Clip fed repeaters, a critical Mauser innovation. With the 1898 model, the battle rifle is fully "modern". With of course effective semi-auto models to follow, plus the lower powered/lower range assault rifle (and I can't help but notice that the short ranged AK-47 is something a dictator would prefer to be issued, vs. something more able to reach out and touch him).
But ammo, going back to the rifled musket, we're using corrosive primers, and black power residue attracts moisture. That is, it takes a fair amount of diligent effort to keep a rifle from rusting out.
In 1911 the Swiss switched to non-corrosive primers, appropriate for their militia system. Our first weapon with 100% non-corrosive primers was the WWII M1 Carbine, a weapon for officers and rear echelon troops.
So the likelihood of a less organized having a lot of functioning weapons increases with their using non-corrosive primers. Or, in the case of the Soviets, using chromed barrels.
Now you have to factor in wealth. Poor people who can't afford much in the way of weapons aren't going to have a chance here. See e.g. Rwanda, where rifles didn't play a big part on either side.
So ... what examples might we have? The successful resistance to the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan is suggestive. You might count Hitler deciding it wasn't worth breaking 80 divisions to take (most of) Switzerland.
More than a few liberals had an epiphany about gun control in the dark days of Watergate ... how many dictators/oligarchs/tyrannical whatever didn't try, or try very hard, because the cost would have been too great?
I'll start looking for examples; today, all I know is case after case, USSR, PRC, Cuba, Nazi Germany, those are just the most prominent off the top of my head, where gun confiscations preceded slaughter.
Also, gun confiscation was not at all the defining characteristic of these other places that experienced mass slaughter. There are many more things that accompany that type of political landscape, and are more common.
And without an example of where citizen gun ownership prevented a dictator from coming to power, the whole argument is extremely weak, though it definitely gets repeated quite a bit.
An equivalence drawn between the US and other governments would seem to suggest that civilian gun ownership doesn't deter the violence and corruption of the state, nor does its absence elsewhere appear to have led to the inevitable slaughter of those populations for whom gun control is much more strict than in the US.
Rather, it seems that when one enshrines into the culture the precept that the only free state is one cultivated by popular violence, it gives both the state and the people an excuse to justify violence as being an unavoidable cost of civilization. Political and social alternatives can't be seriously considered when, for many people, all other roads lead to slavery and death.
Instead, mass shootings in the US lead to a spike in gun sales, because they're effective advertising and recruitment tools for the NRA, even as the police and the government are becoming more militarized and surveillance more aggressive, in no small part because after 9/11 the American people wanted them to be. And if it's the case that the US is a more tyrannical state now, then I believe that's due to American democracy having worked as intended, rather than that tyranny having emerged from a vacuum, or some implicit tendency of states to creep towards totalitarianism.
The auto fatality rate has been drastically reduced through better regulation and better technology. Safety features, insurance, inspections, traffic regulations, registration and transfer documentation, taxation have all increased public safety and reduced the burden auto use has on society.
Regulating guns like cars would be a great idea.
Can you make a case for insurance requirements? Seeing as how we shoot billions of rounds per year with few incidents, and only 600 accidental deaths per year. Guns are much easier to use safely than automobiles, and the 25% decrease in fatal accidents during a period in which the population and number of guns increased by roughly 50% indicates there's not a crying need here. We gun owners do, you know, teach gun safety and proficiency, that's what the NRA was about until the mid-'70s, when they couldn't ignore the political threat.
Most of the rest exists, e.g. taxation (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pittman%E2%80%93Robertson_Fede...), or is a non-starter in an environment where the people proposing these measures continuously demonstrate their bad will.
Registration? Sure, go ahead if you want a 2nd Civil War, we know our 20th Century history. Never again are not empty words to us.
Insurance might come into play in such a world, if people were made liable for (at least some) misuse of guns registered to them (the at least some means that I would hope such a thing would only really come into play if actual negligence were involved).
> Sure, go ahead if you want a 2nd Civil War, we know our 20th Century history. Never again are not empty words to us.
That sort of sentiment and posturing is very core of what is wrong with the "gun-ownership" movement.
Do you really think if the government wanted to put down a rebellion (or whatever you are ominously alluding to) your paltry weapons would really make a difference? The "suicide by cop" statistic would increment and things would carry on.
There really needs to be a change on how easy it is to procure fire-arms in the US. That shouldn't be up for debate or sidelining through traditionalist arguments. We have a problem today where people are actually getting murdered. So, your rhetoric is pretty empty and over-used.
Our adventures in the sandbox suggest your faith in our government's ability to suppress armed rebellion is grossly excessive. It also had a secure rear area. You're also assuming all the military will agree to this, despite what it'll cost them.
I'm not alluding to anything, I'm frankly stating that, if you and yours succeed in this effort, me and mine will start killing you and yours (assuming you're in the US, of course). And if you think we're limited to out "paltry weapons". you suffer from an extreme lack of imagination.
We've been debating this since at least the 30s, and I'm (not very) sorry to say that your side has decisively lost the debate. Sucks to be you, but in balance I like the result.
If rebellion or change is what you really want to affect, then you would be better served to look into how Gandhi managed to win against overwhelming odds, rather than whatever hollywood(?) fantasy you envision living out.
Yeah, I have guns just like I have other tools and toys. But I don't have the same chip on my shoulder.
If there needs to be a rebellion, I will be reaching for my camera and my twitter account, not my walther.
No, not in the least. Leave me and mine alone, and you'll be perfectly safe from us. Sure, I'd like for my brethren in California, Hawaii and the northeast (well, if you count Maryland and D.C. as part of that) to be less oppressed, but they can vote with their feet. As I did when I left Massachusetts.
Gandhi won against an exhausted, civilized empire. Change the antagonist and he's a forgotten anonymous corpse.
Given what I have read about most guns used in crimes originating through straw buyers or stolen guns, I think substantial penalties for people who don't properly transfer guns if they wind up being used illegally would be the most effective way to reduce gun related violence. This, of course, would require a system of registration and proper transfer documentation, like we have for cars.
This, along with secure storage requirements, I think could do a lot. I agree accidents aren't that big an issue when compared to intentional violence, I assume secure storage would substantially help with this along with suicide. I'd also be in favor of severe penalties for not using secure storage.
In terms of new technology that could improve safety, fingerprint readers and id stamped ammo would help with both violence and safety.
Insurance could play an important role. If you pass a test, get your refresher training and have proper storage you'd pay a low rate. If you have an accident or have a gun stolen insurance could pay part of your penalty but your rate should go up enormously.
> ... non-starter in an environment where the people proposing these measures continuously demonstrate their bad will.
Continuously demonstrate bad will? 10s of thousands die yearly and even modest proposals are dismissed with hysteria like:
> Registration? Sure, go ahead if you want a 2nd Civil War, we know our 20th Century history. Never again are not empty words to us.
Seriously, this is into "UN black helicopter", "Obama is an Al-Qaeda member" territory.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Police#History
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monopoly_on_violence
Civilized and peaceful society is a great goal, but how are you actually achieving that if you set about confiscating 300 million guns by force? Assuming that somehow the government could prevail in such an endeavor, you haven't made society any more civilized. You were just more successful at using violence to achieve your goals than the other side was.
Make no mistake, there are plenty of people who would kill and die for the right to bear arms. Trying to take those guns by force would probably lead to civil war.
If your goal is truly civilized society then you've got to work towards eliminating the roots of violent behavior. The more successful you are at that, the less people will even want to have firearms. But the more you threaten to 'civilize' by force, the more intransigent people will be about giving up their firearms.
> You don't. You're not going to rise up against the government, and you're not going to need it to protect your family.
If the government decided to try to confiscate firearms by force people probably would fight it tooth and nail. Luckily that kind of rhetoric is not prevalent, but it is exactly the fear of state-sponsored violence that many ardent gun owners are afraid of. Some of those people may seem irrational and paranoid, but just looking at the 20th century, somewhere around 100 million civilians were murdered in state-sponsored killings. State-sponsored mass murder is almost exclusively visited upon unarmed populaces.
In France, where guns are highly regulated, full automatic military AK's can be had for a few thousand dollars. A bargain by US standards.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/worldviews/wp/2015/01/09...
* "America has 4.4 percent of the world's population but almost half of its civilian-owned guns."
* "In 2013, the US had 106.4 gun deaths per million people. In 2011, the last year for which we have numbers, the UK endured 146 gun deaths total - or 2.3 gun deaths per million people."
* "Plenty of research has found a strong correlation between the amount of guns in an area and its gun homicide rate" ... "Perhaps the single most supported contention in all of gun research is that more guns mean more gun deaths."
> let's not blame officers. They're probably doing the best they can with a bad situation.
If by "blame officers" you mean assign group guilt to all individual police officers, I'd agree, but it's just as mistaken to say all police officers are doing the best they can. We have many examples of specific police officers harming civillians, including outright murder (something clearly not related to threats to police and not happening in Sweden). Whole classes of Americans see the police as a threat. As these problems occur in many places, I think we can say there is a systemic problem with policing in the U.S.
[1] http://www.vox.com/2015/10/5/9454161/gun-violence-solution
This is of course a tautology. If you were to magically remove that tool, do you really think Americans would become more peaceful???
As for your other numbers, no one denies we're the top in per-capita civilian gun ownership. Good laws + wealth lets us swamp Serbia and Yemen, after which comes ... Switzerland. Known extremely violent country (well, they were notorious so back in the days of pike bearing infantry).
Not sure the U.K. is that useful, they've been suppressing civilian gun ownership for a century, and they're on a small island.
"Perhaps the single most supported contention in all of gun research is that more guns mean more gun deaths."
I'm sure there's a Clint Eastwood quote about it mattering who gets shot. More to the point, to the extent criminals are killed by civilians, what's the general problem?
No, but they would probably become less deadly.
(But, without a gun, people might not be so emboldened as to physically attack someone at close range. Violence might go down.)
Around the time of one of the mass shootings in the past 5 years, my conservative relatives were posting on facebook a story about a mass-stabbing. They asked rhetorically, "Why aren't we calling for a ban on knives?" Well, the question sort of answered itself-- no one had died from the attacks.
A tautology is "a statement that is true by necessity or by virtue of its logical form."
That statement may be "obvious" but it is not a tautology.
"More x are used when there are more x" is not a tautology. It is often true, but it is not a logical necessity.
Evaluations after the reforms suggest that they saved lives. A study by Andrew Leigh of Australian National University and Christine Neill of Wilfrid Laurier University estimated that buying back 3,500 guns per 100,000 people led to a statistically significant drop in firearm suicides — 74 percent, in fact, with no parallel increase in non-firearm suicides. ...
The results on homicides were a little less clear. Leigh and Neill found that the buyback resulted in a 35 to 50 percent decline in the gun homicide rate, but because of the low number of homicides in Australia normally, this change wasn't statistically significant
I don't have the numbers for Austrialia, but from the same article:
Nearly two-thirds of gun deaths in the US are suicides
If the proportion in Autralia are similar, reducing gun suicides, if not homicides, could save many lives.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adrian_Schoolcraft
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frank_Serpico
I don't know how you come to this conclusion from the data you're citing.
You seem to be claiming that LEOs kill more people because more people attack LEOs with guns; i.e. you're arguing that LEOs kill more people in self-defense. But you're far from proving that point.
In fact, the easiest way to prove this point would be to have data on police shootings: if every officer had body-cam footage of every time they fired in self-defense, your argument would be proven. Yet the majority of police officers are resistant to wearing body cams. If LEOs are really firing in defense of self or others, why are they so opposed to proving it?
One could make the opposite argument: that people who use guns against LEOs are doing so in self-defense. The fuck-the-police attitude is equally explained by this: if the police are murdering your fathers, brothers, and friends, of course you're going to thing "fuck the police". And this would explain why LEOs in the US are so resistant to body cams: if they are the aggressors in these situations, then they aren't going to want footage showing their crimes.
I think that the evidence better supports the latter argument. But of course, we're short on evidence: we're a long way from proving either point. This is why we need more evidence. If, as you claim, LEOs are acting in self-defense, the evidence will only exonerate them.
I'll explain.
Ever since I was about 15 years old, police have treated me like a suspect. I have been stopped, patted down, searched and generally harassed in the vast majority of my interactions with police.
On one occasion, I was walking from a friend's house back to mine and I watched a cop do a u-turn in the middle of a highway to pull up and start questioning me. I have been pulled over because it "looked like the air in your rear passenger tire is low" and I had two units behind me with cops peeking into my car while they ran my information.
Just about six months ago I was pulled over for "excessive lane changing". I asked the officer if he saw that I changed lanes to get around someone who was turning and that I had to return to that lane because approximately a quarter of a mile later, I was going to making my own turn. He responded that he had been following me for a few miles and I had made other lane changes. I was on my way home from work and I had things to do. I signaled before every lane change and I did nothing dangerous or reckless. It was a pretextual stop.
About two years ago, I was stopped while riding my bicycle. The officer who stopped me is someone that I have known since elementary school. When he saw that it was me, his demeanor was nice and friendly. I can only imagine how he would have acted if I had been a stranger.
In every one of those encounters, had I reached too quickly for my wallet, I would have likely ended up dead.
My experiences are not unique and these are not the worst. A lot of the black, brown and increasingly poor white guys with whom I grew up have had similar things happen.
The point that I'm trying to make here is that the antipathy that police officers experience is primarily of their own making.
This isn't the first account I've heard of this. I personally haven't been targeted, but every interaction with a LEO seems to be shit. Where I am being treated as a criminal by default. I had a traffic stop a few months ago and the LEO had their hand on their gun while having the conversation. WTF.
I've also had a few DWBs (Driving While Black, which is ironic cause my friends tell me I drive like an old grandma, adhere to the speed limit etc). Keep in mind that the only ticket I’ve ever gotten was for 42 MPH in a 35 MPH Zone, and the cop lied, I was doing 37 MPH. Also, the cop kept me there an hour while he run my license and repeatedly asked me questions from his car over a bullhorn (‘what do you do’ etc) to humiliate me.
DWB in Boston Metro area was a frequent occurence for me until a blockbuster Boston Globe/Northeastern University study in 2003 showed how prevalent it was and forcing change. The funny thing, Boston Globe profiled one cop over 2 months and showed how he tended to give white drivers warnings but gave black drivers tickets for lesser infractions, and his excuse was essentially that ‘blacks gave him attitude’.
http://www.boston.com/globe/metro/packages/tickets/010603.sh...
An officer's pattern in two months might not reflect a career's work. But one patrolman's decisions shed some light on how gaps in ticketing can emerge.
At his speed trap on VFW Parkway in West Roxbury on Monday, April 2, 2001, Officer William G. Knecht wasn't guessing the speeds of cars headed toward him. He had the newest instrument for clocking motorists, a LIDAR gun. But his day was filled with moments of leniency and of toughness.
At 9:30 a.m., Knecht wrote a $115 ticket to a 35-year-old black woman from Boston, for going 14 m.p.h. over in a 35 zone. Five minutes later, the officer clocked at the same speed an 80-year-old white man from Medfield, and gave him a written warning.
The next day, Tuesday, back on the VFW Parkway, Knecht warned a 33-year-old white woman from Boston at 9:25 a.m., after he clocked her driving 16 m.p.h. over in a 35 m.p.h. zone.
Exactly 25 minutes later, Knecht ticketed a 28-year-old black man, also from Boston, though he was driving slower -- 15 m.p.h. over in the 35 m.p.h. zone.
In the two months studied, Knecht wrote 105 citations. He ticketed 84 percent of the minority speeders, and 72 percent of the whites. He ticketed men and women equally. And the older the driver, the more leniency Knecht showed, especially if the older driver was white.
...
"There are always mitigating circumstances in a stop," Knecht said in an interview. "Anything could be said or could happen. Attitudes, people talking back to you. The circumstances change with each individual driver. But for most cops I know, race has nothing to do with it.”
So in order to buy Officer Knecht assumptions we have to assume that every black person he stopped gave him attitude (which any black person with any sense of self-preservation would not be likely to do).
We also had a disconcerting incident in Brookline MA (2004). My wife (fiancee at the time), who is white lived there, and we were once walking hand in hand. A cop car drove by, and then pulled a sharp tire screeching U-turn and came right up to us, almost onto the sidewalk. The white cop looks at my wife and asks ‘Are you OK?’. She says yes, and the cop fixes me with a glare that could have killed, and then roared off in disgust. We were gob-smacked, but not really surprised.
Not all my cop interactions have been bad (I was rear ended on Wellington Circle in Everett and the MA State Trooper who responded and sorted out everything was incredibly efficient and polite), but that has been the exception. When dealing with cops, I know that anything I do/say (or even the initial stop) is colored by race. What would be simple assertiveness from someone white of my same socioeconomic status would be seen as being uncooperative/suspicious coming from me. As a black person, I cannot operate under the mistaken assumption that the cops are actually there for my safety/ben...
One time, I was speeding and got a ticket for it but the cop was really cool about it. I was in Cadiz county Ohio and I was doing 75MPH. I was in a 65 zone and then it dropped to 55 and I failed to notice the sign. A cop clocked me doing 75 and started following me. He waiting until two miles later to pull me over where the speed limit was back at 65MPH. He was very professional about the whole thing and I have no complaints about him.
Unfortunately, not every interaction goes well.
I know that I have these and I suspect that you do too. Little verbal clues that I drop to indicate to the officer that I know what's going on but I'm not going to say it overtly and give him a reason to pretend to be offended at the suggestion.
A few examples: When a cop asks "Do you know why I pulled you over?", I say "I have a pretty good idea, officer but I am not going to say it out loud."
"Where are you headed?" gets met with "I'm on my way to obey the law, officer."
They also like to ask "Do you have any drugs in the car?" and my response is always "No more than you do, officer."
When asked for my license, "I need to reach into my right front pocket to retrieve my wallet, officer." and I wait until he indicates that I should reach for it.
I have found these to be responses that deescalate the situation.
They're not direct challenges to his authority so he doesn't feel threatened and they allow me to get through the interaction with my sense of dignity intact. I know what's happening and just as importantly, he now knows that I know.
By chance, is your wife blonde? I have found that I get a more negative reaction if I am in the company of a blonde woman.
I was with you until here. Sorry, but what you call "gun nuttery" is very likely what I call a simple, principled belief that private individuals have a right to be armed, and a recognition that there will be "gear heads" around any hobby. Guitar players tend to own lots of guitars, shooting enthusiasts own lots of guns. Owning lots of guns and defending the 2A doesn't make somebody a "nutter" nor does it make them any more prone to committing violent crime.
'stand-your-ground'
What exactly is your problem with "stand your ground" laws?
'fuck-tha-police' sentiments
Sorry, but as long as police are "men with guns" using violence to enforce unjust laws, and especially as long as many of their numbers act like schoolyard bullies who never grew up, I'm going to remain firmly in the "fuck the police" camp.
for the most part, the police aren't broken.
I'm calling bullshit on this. Haven't we seen enough videos of cops abusing / beating / killing people who were clearly not posing any aggressive threat (including people who were already handcuffed and pinned to the ground) to realize that this is not true? Obviously not all cops are "bad" but to ignore the systemic problems in policing in America today is like sticking your head in the sand and pretending there's no problem because you can't see it.
Let's blame the politicians who criminalize everything
Now this we can agree on.
>>I'm calling bullshit on this.
I have to agree with "for the most part", if you're talking about 90% of the interactions with the general public, things are just fine and dandy. Unfortunately a measely 10% of interactions means way, way too many go wrong. "For the most part" isn't good enough for me, and it shouldn't be good enough for America.
Regardless of the answer, US police have a more violent response than other police. Anecdotally you just need to look at those situations where the police fire off 100's of rounds at a suspect, or where there is a chase and 50 cops leap from cars to jump on(and beat) as suspect.
Body cameras for officers are the only way for the US to reverse the trend of a hyper violent Law Enforcement officers.
Population: 5.5 Million
> reactive, a system influenced by anecdote and emotion,”
> said Harris, who has dubbed her database the “Open
> Justice” initiative. “The beautiful thing about numbers is
> that they don’t lie.”
Perhaps I'm being a bit contrarian, but numbers and statistics can lie more than you'd expect. Very few laymen can interpret statistics correctly, and you can even skew the proper interpretation by carefully selecting certain statistics which support your viewpoint.
I would be careful in saying that numbers cannot lie, or that they don't lie. Meaningful metrics don't lie, but this is not the same thing (and even then, how do we define meaningful?). I wish people would consider that it is perfectly possible to lie using math, especially so when the average person does not maintain an advanced understanding of statistics.
I don't imagine anyone who's enough of a data wonk to say something like ".. the beautiful thing about numbers .." is one of those untrained laymen. :)
It's not that having numbers means they can't be massaged to tell a specific story, but at least there's more than blind luck that goes into whether the conclusion makes sense.
The Guardian's "The Counted" reports "891 people killed this year [by police in the U.S.] - http://www.theguardian.com/us-news/ng-interactive/2015/jun/0...
The Washington Post reports: "758 people shot dead by police this year" - http://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/national/police-shoot...
The disparity is huge, but both sources could (and likely are, to the best of their ability) be reporting the truth. But they both have different opinions on what part of the issue should be prioritized.
I believe the WaPo has chosen its limited methodology (which would exclude Freddie Gray, among others) for an understandable reason: police shootings are hard enough to classify, nevermind all police killings. Read the Guardian's methodology to see the pitfalls of their own approach: http://www.theguardian.com/us-news/ng-interactive/2015/jun/0...
The Dallas PD is one of the few agencies that is actually publishing their officer-involved-incidents in a systematic, machine-readable way [1]...but if you check their official homepage and read a few of the narrative documents [2], you'll be able to see why things aren't cut and dry...and that how you choose to count things has a very strong impact on the numbers you end up with.
[1] https://www.dallasopendata.com/api/views/4gmt-jyx2?accessTyp...
[2] http://www.dallaspolice.net/ois/ois.html
It is against the best interests of anyone seeking office to act against these unions, especially DAs. Thus, you get far less oversight than you should.
People being apathetic or disillusioned with our political process is the biggest problem for the middle and lower classes right now.
Disclaimer: I am not anti-union, just making an observation.
I ask because I do follow local politics, and I not infrequently do see the public contribution lists.
Local businesses and trade associations top the list, always, with the exception of the rare rich guy giving to some hard-right-leaning candidate.
The general gist was that exercising power is not the same thing as having the ability to exercise power, and that while money is power, not all power is money.
I also tried to look up some numbers for my county but got distracted by an SQL injection vulnerability in my state's donation records archive.
Heck combine this with the video system. Might not stop the shootings, but it'd give us useful data to help prevent them going forwards.
There are already a myriad of procedures in place for dealing with weapons being discharged.
You do realize its standard procedure in most states that if an officer discharges his weapon in any scenario other than department training or range practice its investigated by the department? This includes accidental discharges, warning shots, and shooting at animals and other scenarios. Also, the last time I checked with a buddy who's a cop, they have to check out and check in their firearms and ammunition. Any discrepancy between check out and check in, and a report has to be filed.
On top of that there is the issue of costs, of which there are many. Ranging from procurement and training to insurance and maintenance, no city councilor will want to take this one.
And I haven't even touched on the political implications, namely that no politician wants to appear to be scrutinizing police officers too much. The number one question on many officer's minds is the general populace aren't subject to the same restrictions.
There's also the issue of where the data (and related systems) is maintained and stored, with many preferring data remain under state control rather than federal.
Pure GPS + time reporting strikes me as useless, unless people think police are killing people "off the books" a lot more than I think they are.
Adding video isn't likely to tell you much, since the predicates to drawing your gun are crucial and frequently wouldn't be visible from the gun.
I also shudder from an engineering viewpoint at trying to get all this to work. Service handgun are big enough as they are, and they add serious shocks, solvents, and primer and smokeless debris to the bundle of environmental stresses we demand of things like cameras on cops and their cars.
Arguments for the legitimacy of gun ownership tend to focus on deterrence and self-defense. This makes no difference at all in the deterrence scenario, and legitimate self-defense has no reason to be secret or anonymous.
When the gun community argues for a Constitutional right to commit murder and get away with it, then maybe we can finally stop taking it seriously.
Yeah, right, we're going to trust these "phone home" devices that much?
In fact, how do you know they're working, for police or civilians, unless they phone home every month or so, or at least when taken out of their metal safes.
In the current climate of bad faith, where our adversaries latest campaign for "gun safety" does nothing of the sort (and claims we don't care about it during a period where both the population and guns owned increased by roughly 50% and the absolute number of accidental gun deaths dropped by 25%; it is we gun owners who achieved that, not the gun grabbers)?
There's also the mass and volume problems. Not everyone can get away with carrying a near full sized M1911 like I can (originally a military service pistol, my carry model sacrifices some life with an alloy frame and some power with a 4 inch barrel). Require these and you will preclude a whole lot of concealed carry, and I for one would not like the extra mass, let alone having to replace some perfectly fine firearms.
By "commit murder" are you using hyperbole?
I think it is useful to distinguish between murder and killing in self defense from a real threat to life.
I don't know if you were counting them as different.
Why demand privacy with regard to who you kill, unless you would be punished for it (i.e. it's murder?)
Parent, that is, myself, does not oppose on those grounds, as I explained in reply to you. I don't think it's constructive to imply that in a reply to another without replying to me.
And come to think of it, I don't want to have to explain to the state every time I fire one of my firearms. Especially seeing as how I've done that over ten thousand times without, you know, actually shooting anybody.
I would hope you could see the potential for abuse, for a chilling effect on good things like practicing with your firearms for proficiency.
But it does seem that there are too many little police departments in the US which are unaccountable. Or, worse, accountable only to racists.
It's also hard to see how this would make the police any more accountable to the people.
> where people and areas that don't, for example, vote "correctly" have their police protection largely withdrawn.
The NYPD has actually done this in NYC more than once in recent memory.
One thing you notice about these events in recent history is that they happened to already disarmed people (NYC < 60K each long and handgun licenses, D.C. all aside from grandfathering, U.K. pretty much all except shotguns, plus effective self-defense has long been illegal), it's most effective that way.
Larger police forces have larger viability and its easier to enforce national standards eg UK style fire arms training.
You also increase efficiency and reduce costs by state wide procurement.
http://2015.padjo.org/briefs/tracking-police-involved-homici...
Counting police-officer-involved homicides is difficult -- but not more difficult than all the other things the FBI tries to count. That said, even if there were an official count, it's still very important that news orgs and independent groups also do their own count. Classifying these incidents gets significantly more difficult when you get into the details...but that's a problem common to every time we try to classify complicated information into a datapoint.
http://openjustice.doj.ca.gov/data
I've also done a little investigation into why the number of reported homicides by law enforcement during arrests has been trending upwards in recent years:
http://jonthewang.com/2015/10/06/homicide-by-law-enforcement...
https://www.muckrock.com/news/archives/2015/jul/31/californi...
There's plenty of data on that.
First of all, mayors, police chiefs, and state attorneys general are the ones who should be collecting this data and the ones intentionally not doing so, so they should have no say in this. We gave them a few decades (or hundred years, if you wish) to become transparent and they haven't.
Second, I fail to see how spurning aggressive tactics is ever a negative. Police officers should spurn aggressive tactics whenever possible. If they're doing it out of fear of being caught on camera, they're doing it because they know that their aggressive tactics are wrong. So good riddance, if this is actually true (doubtful).
1. In 2013, the Los Angelos police department put more bullets into 1 man then the entire country of Germany shot during the entire year. Germany has twice the population of California and is roughly the same size.
2. For whatever reason, United States police are not required to keep a public record of how many shots are fired and how many people they've killed. This is not a common thing. It's pretty horrific. If they were to release such information we would see just how bad our police really are. And I don't mean bad as in evil, I just mean bad as in ineffective and out of control.