> Are you arguing that the police are more likely to kill people at random in areas with higher amounts of gun ownership?

Cops have to make split second decisions with their own lives on the line. In a country where it's very likely that the person they're interacting with in a tense situation could be armed with a gun, it's going to make them more likely to shoot.

Perhaps not quite so relevant to this particular case, as the caller said the person was armed, but I think this would have played out differently in a lot of other countries.

> this would have played out differently in a lot of other countries.

This is precisely why the USA needs to reform its approach to police use of deadly force.

Sure, I think there's progress to be made, but the police - not wrongly - are more worried about getting shot at than in most other countries.

There are other countries with similarly high rates of gun ownership and divergently lower rates of police firearm deaths.

The problem is in the police culture towards discharging a firearm, not the greater ownership of guns. American society bears much of the blame for lionizing cops instead of scrutinizing them.

Many cases of police officers killing innocent civilians involved civilians who were either fleeing, submitting, or already subdued and pinned down. Cops in the US tend to be exonerated for using deadly force, even when the victim could not arguably have endangered others.

> Police everywhere have a shitload of guns.

Wrong, police in e.g. UK or Japan do not customarily carry guns. And SHOCKER these countries have fewer police-related homicides.

Most UK police do not carry guns, yet those police forces still have firearms officers, and in a case like this where they would be responding to a suspected armed murderer and hostage taker, you can bet that firearms officers would be involved. Those police forces have substantial armories, they just don't issue a firearm to the majority of cops. Comparing UK firearms officers to US cops, I would contend that armed officers in the UK are less likely to kill because of the cultural and structural unacceptance of such killings in their country.

I would expect poorly trained police to end up faster on the trigger in environments where anybody else may have a gun.