You mistake me. I don’t think private gun ownership is good because you can shoot cops (though if the concentration camp future prophesied by some after the Disaster of 2016 came about, I’d expect people to take at least some blackshirts with them). I just mean that this huge confiscation program would give the untrustworthy police one more club to beat people over the head with.
“He was one of those illegal gun owners. That’s why I had to shoot him, Your Honor. Forty-seven times. Never can be sure with those gun nuts. They can snap at any moment.”
Exactly. That’s the excuse that becomes less and less viable as we reduce the likelihood that any particular suspect really does have a gun.
When was the last time a cop got away with shooting a kid holding an avocado because the cop said they thought the suspect had a grenade? Probably never, because it’s extremely rare for ordinary people to have access to grenades.
They get away with shooting people holding precisely nothing all the time.
And your solution is to expand this group of people massively and give them a mandate that can see them searching every private dwelling in the US because, of course, there could be guns there.
No, see, American police come in two types. The kind that shoots poor people randomly and the heroic kind that’ll take the firearms of just the right people with the minimum amount of violence.
Just like how Australian police used the National Firearms Agreement of 1996 to raid a bunch of ordinary people’s homes and shoot them down on suspicion of owning guns.
Again, I believe there’s a pretty clear causal link between “American citizens owning lots of guns” and “American police getting away with shooting people.” If the suspect had a gun he obviously had it coming. If he didn’t have a gun the police can still plausibly claim they thought he did, because it’s not like they’re hard to come by.
I think there’s a causal link between you choosing to staff your police force with sociopaths and the said sociopaths killing people randomly. We know of so many cases where the victim didn’t have a gun, there was no way for the victim to have a gun, the police officers themselves didn’t say the victim had a gun, and yet they still killed the victim and walked.
That particular dangerous lunatic aside, the fact remains that Australian police kill a lot fewer of their citizens. Based on the data I dug up, if Australia had the same number of people as the US its police shooting rate would be about 52.
America managed to shoot something like 982 last year.
