Thank you. When I’ve said something similar in the past, I’ve generally been severely flamed for implying that guns might not be entirely positive in their effects.
Personally, I’m with Mark Steyn. American LEOs kill WAU too many Americans. It’s not a white/black thing, it’s a cop thing.
By some counts, there are about 1000 American killed, in one way or another, by cops every year.
http://fivethirtyeight.com/datalab/another-much-higher-count-of-police-homicides/
Meanwhile, German cops killed 6 Germans last year. Since Germany has about 4x the US population, that means American cops kill Americans at roughly 40x the rate German police kill Germans.
That’s a pretty big differential. Without saying anything in particular about a specific case, surely our cops kill more often than necessary. And, yes, most German police are armed.
Note: There are all kinds of reasons the above figures might be off in one way or another.
If we keep ignoring the realities of our cultural problem with violence, we will be left with not other option other than to severely restrict or ban guns. It doesn't have to be like that.
Gun and non-gun violent crime rates are higher in the US than in other developed counties. Likewise, police probably shoot more people that in our other peer countries. Our violent culture (criminals with guns who are hardened by violence with other criminals) is part of that, our mental health care system is part of that too.
I'd like to see better survey work on the philosophy of police in the US vs in the UK, Germany, Canada, France, etc; to see whether they view their roles in society differently. But, to many people, that's anti-police.
I'd like to see whether we have fewer violent demonstrations and riots compared to say the UK, France, Germany. Might be something there about our “individualistic” culture that makes it less likely that people people will get swept up into mob violence (it happens, but it's relatively rare, compared to Southern Europe where labor strikes turn into riots).