I’m not appealing to common sense, I’m appealing to trends. We know that the US has an extremely high rate of homicide by police. If gun ownership is lowering it then it would have to be the case that it would be even higher were gun ownership levels not so high in the US. I’m comparing two hypotheses:
- American cops are more likely to shoot because they are aware of the likelihood that an American citizen is carrying a gun
- American cops have an unexplained propensity for shooting people that is even worse than it appears in the data but that is somewhat restrained by their fear of citizens with guns
I can’t prove the former hypothesis, but it’s not fair to say that the two have the same amount of explanatory power or align equally well with our general knowledge of how people behave.
If your point is that sometimes cops don’t hurt people because they are afraid and my point is that sometimes cops kill people because they are afraid those observations seems entirely consistent. Fear triggers a fight or flight response. People who are in afraid are more likely to retreat and more likely to use violence than people who are not afraid.
