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/benefit.
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.
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.
* "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.
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.
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".
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Problem_of_Political_Autho...
[2] http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/authority/#ReaConConLegPol...
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.
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.
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...
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.
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.
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.
... 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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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).
That's Iceland, not Sweden.
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.
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...
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.