But there are a lot of cops in the USA, and plenty I'm sure have nice, cozy jobs, and then there are some who spend thee majority of their career policing areas that more closely resemble warzones or 3rd world nations but this isn't the majority by any means.
Expanding that, the deadliest part of being a police officer is almost certainly the driving component. No gun will save you from smashing your SUV into a pole. And the aftermarket modifications made to the vehicles aren't crash tested. A police cruiser is full of potential projectiles.
Like sure, areas with higher rates of criminal violence will probably have more police homicides, but it's likely enough that you can pair things up based on rates of criminal violence.
Relevant fictional quote:
There's a reason you separate military and the police. One fights the enemies of the state, the other serves and protects the people. When the military becomes both, then the enemies of the state tend to become the people. - William Adama
> Insane take truly. First, CCW carriers are statistically the least likely to be involved in any kind of "violent life ending incident".
Sure, you could argue this, with the exception of suicide, found guns (usually by kids in the home), and stolen guns. It's not just the person certified, it's everyone around them who can obtain access to the gun they now own
>The number of non self-defense homicides caused by them is approximately 0 per year.
Only because there's no public data on this particular statistic. A nonprofit produced a database based on news headlines and limited state data, though, and found 1700 suicides and 600 convicted murders by CCW carriers between 2007 and 2025: https://vpc.org/concealed-carry-killers/
A better way to phrase it would be that the number of homicides are far less than the violence that a lack of CCW would enable, though that on its own is statistically shaky.
> Second, to suggest that people should allow themselves to be victims to violent crime because it's safer for the whole is some sort of collectivist trotskyite nonsense we will never agree on. Under no circumstance should an innocent person forfeit life or property for a violent criminal.
You're right, we (the USA) probably won't ever agree on it, due to the intense financial incentives behind firearms manufacturing and ownership and the subsequent lobbying and influence over public influence that those companies fund, but every other country apart from the US is a sweeping counterexample to this. We lose 45,000 people per year to guns (~60% by suicide). It's the #1 cause of death for children since 2020. https://www.cdc.gov/firearm-violence/data-research/facts-sta... https://www.gunviolencearchive.org/
It's reductive to suggest that the only thing having more guns around does is "prevent victimization" when the guns themselves enable violence to so many nearby parties, including to the owner themselves.
> Its astonishing to me people can look at FBI statistics, total gun deaths trending down for the last 30 years, and then suggest people who are statistically the most safe with guns shouldn't be able to carry them.
The figure you're quoting appears to be the graph from page 1 of https://bjs.ojp.gov/document/tpfv9323.pdf, which is nonfatal victimization, which hasn't trended down--it's hovered between 1 and 2 per 1000 since 2003, and appears to be more of a reflection of improved medical skill than anything about guns.
Anyway, you were quoting gun deaths--that's page 13. That chart has stayed roughly the same since 1999: 4-5 per 100k persons (except for the spike during covid)
>The qualifications for CCW are harder than police qualifications in most states. But you wouldn't know this because Everytown, MSNBC, CNN, and others have spent the last 12 or so years lying through statistics so that the government has the monopoly on violence.
No permit required for CCW in 27 states. You also have states like Utah that will mail you a permit that's valid in 30 different states and doesn't require proof of live-fire training.
But yes, in CA, for example, it's a 16 hour course, background check, fingerprints, clean record, (sometimes) psych evals, and even then there are restrictions.
This isn't an indicator that CCW is difficult to obtain, though, since this is a reasonable barrier--it's an indicator that police qualifications are laughable. (While we're on that topic, by the way, law enforcement officers (both active and inactive) are allowed to concealed carry in all 50 states)
https://aliengearholsters.com/blogs/news/how-to-get-a-concea...
Share more feedback if you have it. Would love to learn more
This is only true because they include 18 and 19 year-olds as children. So while it's still awful, that stat is a bit misleading
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Town_of_Castle_Rock_v._Gonzale... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maksim_Gelman_stabbing_spree#L...
> the other serves and protects the people
The only time this was actually true was at the advent of organized policing in the United States - there were two purposes for cops. In the north, they were meant to ensure the protection of property, particularly commercial.
In the south, it was the same except that usually meant slaves, so in the worst kind of technically correct sense, they did at one point protect people…kind of. Well, kept them “safe” from freedom and such.
Something I learned from a friend is to ask permission for every movement or at the very least narrate and move slowly.
"I'm going to reach in the glovebox for my registration. Is that ok?"
I think it's the only way to protect yourself from their hyper-nervousness.
Edit: friend and I are also white.
All they have to prove is that they fear for their life. It does not have to make sense, does not have to be 'justified', etc.
That's not really true. The standard is a reasonable fear for your life. That's reasonable standard is evaluated in court by how a reasonable person would have reacted. Yes, they do give some deference to the individual who was actually there (police or civilian). The real problems happen because the DA and the courts tend to have bias when it comes to subjecting members of the system to the same process that others face.
In which case, they should spend the rest of their life in a high-security psychiatric hospital.
They're obviously too mentally fragile to be allowed out in the world.
Qualified immunity tends to chime in.
https://law.justia.com/cases/federal/appellate-courts/ca9/17...
> The panel held that at the time of the incident, there was no clearly established law holding that officers violate the Fourth or Fourteenth Amendment when they steal property seized pursuant to a warrant. For that reason, the City Officers were entitled to qualified immunity.
> Corbitt v. Vickers, 929 F.3d 1304 (11th Cir. 2019): Qualified immunity granted for officer who, hunting a fugitive, ended up at the wrong house and forced six children, including two children under the age of three, to lie on the ground at gunpoint. The officer tried to shoot the family dog, but missed and shot a 10-year-old child that was lying face down, 18 inches away from the officer. The court held that there was no prior case where an officer accidentally shot a child laying on the ground while the officer was aiming at a dog.
> Young v. Borders, 850 F.3d 1274 (11th Cir. 2017): Qualified immunity granted to officers who, without a warrant, started banging on an innocent man’s door without announcing themselves in the middle of the night. When the man opened the door holding his lawfully-owned handgun, officers opened fire, killing. One dissenting judge wrote that if these actions are permitted, “then the Second and Fourth Amendments are having a very bad day in this circuit.”
> Estate of Smart v. City of Wichita, 951 F.3d 1161 (10th Cir. 2020): Qualified immunity granted for officer who heard gunshots and fired into a crowd of hundreds of people in downtown Wichita, shooting bystanders and killing an unarmed man who was trying to flee the area. The court held that the shooting was unconstitutional but there was no clearly established law that police officers could not “open fire on a fleeing person they (perhaps unreasonably) believed was armed in what they believed to be an active shooter situation.”
(And a bunch of others.)
And a matching case has to be very specific:
> Baxter v. Bracey, 751 F. App’x 869 (6th Cir. 2018): Qualified immunity granted for officers who sent a police dog to attack a man who had already surrendered and was sitting on the ground with his hands in the air. The court held that a prior case holding it unconstitutional to send a police dog after a person who surrendered by laying on the ground was not sufficiently similar to this case, involving a person who surrendered by sitting on the ground with his hands up.
"No clearly established law", my ass.
Here are a bunch going the other way. https://policefundingdatabase.org/explore-the-database/settl...
I never said that qualified immunity wasn't an issue, just that there tends to be more protections when use of force is involved than with property.
In other words, from the victimized populace.
I think a cop who steals seized evidence should be personally liable to the person they stole from.
(…and I'd note "v. City of Wichita" is clearly responsive to your question.)
Sadly, yes. They're also the populace that voted for that leadership. There are many leaders of major cities that continually push policies that are highly probably to result in legal action due to their conflict with existing law and case law. I don't like it, but its true.
The prior opinion in this case, found at Jessop v. City of Fresno , 918 F.3d 1031 (9th Cir. 2019), is hereby withdrawn. A superseding opinion will be filed concurrently with this order. Plaintiffs-Appellants’ petition for rehearing en banc remains pending.
I picked the second one to start. So I don't think that's a great source.
“the only way” puts me in mind of The Onion headline “‘No Way To Prevent This,’ Says Only Nation Where This Regularly Happens”
The goals are to make the officer comfortable and minimize the time.
He told me a story about a noise complaint. He said him and his partner banged on the front door of the house, but there was no response. He said they called in the status, but were told to wait. About 10 minutes later multiple SWAT vehicles arrived. He said one of the vehicles literally drove into the side of the house, making a huge hole in the house. About a dozen SWAT officers ran into the house, multiple shots were fired, the tear gas started a fire. The house was absolutely destroyed. ... No one was home; the house was empty. A kid left the TV on really loud when he left for school. A neighbor called it in, hoping the cops could just go into the house and turn off the TV. Worse, there was no punishment to anyone involved; the cops were doing as they were trained.
This sounds like a generic urban legend "A friend of a friend told me".
If something like this happened, it would have to be in the news, right?
https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/police-trainer-best-sex-ki...
> Cop says, 'Knock down drag-out fight, cuffed 'em and stuffed 'em. Finally get home at the end of the shift, and?' Cop says, 'Gun fight. Bad guy's down, I'm alive. Finally get home at the end of the incident, and?' They all say, 'The best sex I've had in months.' Both partners are very invested in some very intense sex. There's not a whole lot of perks that come with this job. You find one, relax and enjoy it.
> That clip took my entire, full day presentation, and took it completely out of context.
-They left out the part where I say that this is a normal biological, hormonal backlash from fight-or-flight (sympathetic nervous system arousal) to feed-and-breed (parasympathetic nervous system arousal) that can happen to anyone in a traumatic event.
-They left out the part where I say that there is nothing wrong if it doesn’t happen, and absolutely nothing wrong if it does happen.
-They left out the part where I say it happens to fire, EMS and even victims of violent crime.
-They left out where I say that it scares the hell out of people.
-They left out where I talk about it (and remember it is common in survivors of violent crime), as kind of a beautiful affirmation of life in the face of death; a grasping for closeness and intimate reassurance in the face of tragedy.
There's plenty of video of the guy. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ETf7NJOMS6Y
> They left out where I say that it scares the hell out of people.
People literally pay money to do things that feel that way. Haunted houses, bungee jumping, skydiving.
Context: Grossman's employed to train cops to overcome relutance to shoot.
Like, they could just not, you know, go around creating the conditions for their own trauma.... that's a much more legit strategy. That's why folks aren't having this discussion about, say, "fire, EMS and even victims of violent crime".
I know that violence creates traumatic responses, I've been getting a lot out of therapy after being illegally pepper sprayed by DHS last year. Real fuckin' hard for me to feel super sad that those officers probably had big feelings about that violence themselves when they could just, like, not go around assaulting folks.
Also, I feel like “nothing wrong if it does happen” regarding shooting someone, is the wrong perspective. If shooting someone is necessary, then it is necessary, but that doesn’t mean nothing went wrong. Anytime someone gets shot is a time something has gone wrong.
In context, its correct, that's not up for dispute. The question is "does it add anything to the context?" and more importantly "could a student misconstrue its inclusion as something else?"
You'd think that, being so educated on the hormonal backlash from experiencing trauma, that cops and the greater judicial system would be more forgiving of e.g. emergent hypersexuality in rape victims after experiencing a rape that Grossman calls out there. But you would be wrong, because even if Grossman wants his students to understand that concept for their own health, he wildly misunderstands the culture he helped create where the police view themselves as a thin blue line holding back the manifold forces of Chaos Undivided.
People generally do not shoot at cops, because whether or not they hit the target doing so is pretty much signing their own death sentence. All cops have to do to protect themselves is to not provoke people to fight-or-flight reactions.
The reality is there are aggressive people in society that have a tendency to escalate things. If police are trained to only de-escalate, it removes a powerful check on aggressive escalation.
The second order effect is an increase in events like people being pushed onto train tracks, glass bottles being thrown if you glance the wrong direction, etc.
I think optimally you have a police force that is trained in de-escalation but also escalates things slightly more than the average citizen and thereby provides a service to society as a buffer.
I'm claiming that some antisocial behavior is only triggered by some degree of escalation.
It would be violent crime trend correlation with de-escalation training. Or even with complaints of police aggression.
Even more useful would be to separate out assault + battery where the victim is random vs. non-random, IE domestic or gang.
I've had a gun pulled on me twice for traffic stops when I went to grab something. I'm white.