As you have no doubt seen many places and in many media, private citizens in open carry states (and sometimes in non-open carry states) stand in the open carrying semiautomatic sporting rifles with pistol grips and other “assault” features and standard capacity magazines. (30 rounds)
The weapons always appear to be loaded. Here’san example.
So I wonder. The cops are always super trigger happy to kill unarmed people when they so much as twitch in a way that suggests they might be reaching for a gun, when they run towards them, away from them, try to drive away, put their hands over their head, reach for a cell phone, and so forth.
Do the cops ever do this when there are several assault rifle toting individuals packing bigger guns than them? The “police as bullies” narrative would suggest that they would not as they would actually respect citizens who legitimately have the potential to kill them. I’ve heard of shootings happening when there is just 1 man with a rifle, but what about when there’s a group? (so a police officer firing on them would know there is a reasonable chance he will die when the buddies of the guy he shoots because he “fears for his safety” return fire)
I’m not talking about armed criminals, of course. Are the police eager to “de-escalate” when they are actually facing real threats or do they try to draw their handguns on the people with assault rifles?
If there are a bunch of people with weapons who are not committing any crimes, the police will just leave them alone. If there are bunch of people with weapons who are committing (or have committed) crimes, the police (or Federal agents) will eventually do something about it.
See: Ruby Ridgeor Waco or the Browns.
The bullies in grade school never seem to pick on the kids who look big enough to actually fight. That’s what I am saying. I am asking for a factual confirmation of this (hence the forum it’s in)
Not quite the answer you’re after, but tangentially interesting in itself. It’s very common to see large groups of people packing long guns into the backcountry of Glacier National Park in Montana. I was recently discussing the issue with several Park Service LEOs in a closed Facebook group. I asked them what, if anything they do about it, and they all bemoaned the fact that there’s nothing they can do about it, because it’s legal. The backcountry Rangers all agreed that is extremely disconcerting to come across such a group when they are patrolling solo in the backcountry, and they don’t like the idea one bit. But there’s nothing they can do or say to change the situation, so they just have to accept it and hope that they don’t have any malicious intent.
If you really wanted this in GQ, you shouldn’t have done so much well-poisoning in your OP. “Super trigger happy,” “so much as twitch,” putting scare quotes around “fears for his safety,” etc., are not things that are conducive to getting strictly factual answers. I think this is going to be better suited to GQ.
If you want strictly factual answers, keep your questions strictly factual.
In a group out in public, I can’t think of any specific examples. Maybe someone can.
In the past the Feds have challenged such groups pretty violently, the 1990s saw several such confrontations turn into bloodshed. I’ve never heard a true explanation as to why Cliven Bundy wasn’t directly confronted (maybe someone gave one), but I think that while municipal/State police forces have become much more “trigger happy” and “officer safety obsessed” in a way that leads to police that are essentially trained to shoot too quickly and in too many situations, the converse seems to have happened with Federal law enforcement. Remember the Feds lost a civil suit brought by Randy Weaver (the guy at Ruby Ridge) and ultimately the original charges against him were dropped and he wasn’t charged with anything related to the shoot out at Ruby Ridge itself. Waco also was a major black eye. I think Federal law enforcement is more likely to avoid direct confrontation when it frankly isn’t necessary. This echoes how law enforcement is done in many parts of the world (you can find videos online of British police simply backing away and getting into a defensive position in response to aggressive suspects wielding knives for example.
Local police have not been so response about controversial incidents.
No, the cops rarely do this. This is because the police can tell visually that White conservatives who are openly showing their gun ownership are almost invariably law abiding and supportive of law enforcement. In comparison, people who are minorities, making sudden movements, and generally exhibit a negative attitude towards law enforcement are much more likely to be criminals and consequently get shot because they pose a threat to law enforcement officers.
If you think this is a problem, you are welcome to start a country without law-abiding White conservatives, and the rest of us will laugh at your naivete and misery.
There are thousands of people arrested every day by police across the USA, most of them unarmed. But only a tiny percentage are shot & killed by police. I’d need to see some factual cites before I’d consider “super trigger happy” to be at all accurate.
I wondered about the OP’s question in light of the recent theater shootings. The police get a call about shooting going on in a dark movie theater and they move in, searching for threats. There’s a gunman in there and several cowboys trying to take him down. All are armed. Who do the police shoot? How are the police supposed to distinguish well-intentioned bystander from armed lunatic?
As to whether or not the police will de-escalate in light of superior firepower, they won’t. In the North Hollywood shootout the police simply commandeered larger guns from a nearby gun shop. Later, when Christopher Dorner (a former cop) went on a one-man rampage he was surrounded and the police simply burnt down the house he was hiding in. I realize these are what the OP considers armed criminals but the simple nature of pointing a gun at a police officer makes one an armed criminal.
Well, “super trigger happy” may not be quite the right term, but there does seem to be a problem here. When the US is compared with other western democracies, even after allowing for differences in populations and the generally higher rates of violent crime in the US, the US police seem to shoot citzens at dramatically higher rates than police in other countries. From this article we learn that US police forces shot dead more people in the first 24 days of 2015 than English police forces shot in the previous 24 years. Sure, the US has a population 6 times higher, but that can’t account for a fatality rate more than 360 times higher.
OK, it’s easy to cherry pick comparisons like this. If you had actually compared English and US police shootings over the same 24-year period, the difference might not be quite so striking. And similar points could be made of most of the other comparisons in the linked article. But the ease with which it’s possible to generate these comparisons to make the point does suggest that, yes, there is a point to be made. American policing ends up with lot more dead people than in most other countries that you might think should be comparable.
I’ve never seen these gun fanatics in real life,but there are lots of video clips of them . (Search youtube for “open carry”).
And one thing I’ve noticed from the clips is that most of the people are simply standing around in the open. Not “twitching”, not running, not threatening others.Their behavior is calm, they clearly show their faces and identity, and they obviously want to draw attention to themselves and their big gun*.
Criminals usually behave in exactly the oppposite way…trying not to draw attention to themselves, and keeping their guns hidden till the moment of use.
I would assume that policemen are aware of the difference.
If I ever run across a group of these guys armed to the teeth and standing openly and quietly in front of a shopping center , I would be worried…but after observing them for just a few seconds, I would realize that they are not criminals-------just assholes.
*(I originally typed this phrase as: " draw attention to themselves and their big [del]penis[/del] gun." )
I have never once heard of a group like this that was supportive of law enforcement. At best, they’re usually scornful, and consider the police useless. At worst, they consider the police to be government oppression.
Cliven Bundy is a criminal. His armed posse should have been taken out with whatever means necessary. Police will strangle an unarmed black guy for selling single cigarettes but a well armed white guy with vigilante stooges is allowed to stiff the government for millions in grazing fees.
Actually there’s little reason for police to escalate things when there isn’t an ongoing threat to public. Lots of good videos of European police deescalating things with armed criminals.
Exactly. Also, I’m saying that selfishly, the police know that they cannot bring Cliven in without either support from the military or accepting that several of them are going to die.
If you go up against assault rifle armed paramilitary folks on their own land, where they know the terrain, have dogs to detect intruders, know how to accurately shoot, and actually have rifles that can accurate kill people wearing body armor…
At Ruby Ridge, when they went after Jordan Dorner, and at Waco, several police were killed in all these incidents for this reason. It ain’t worth losing a man or 2 over grazing rights. Only way to make such an assault is you need a real APC with a machinegun and a remote weapon turret.
When the cops kill a man reaching into a pocket, they know at most he’s got a small revolver in there. They know they are wearing body armor and have better training. They know they can shoot him without any significant chance of him shooting back.
My take away from contrasting the law enforcement response to Cliven Bundy and the law enforcement response to lots of black men in stories publicized in the news over the past 2-3 years isn’t “we want to see them going after guys like Bundy the same way”, but rather “how about police show that kind of restraint when dealing with black suspects, too?”
I’ve never been a cop and I am sympathetic to the fact that cops do face, in this country with 300m+ guns, real situations where they need to be prepared to draw their weapon and fire it with deadly intent in a second’s time or they themselves will be killed. But I also think it’s telling in the recent article about Darren Wilson in the New Yorker, during his training he received like 60 instructional hours in firearms usage and 8 hours in deescalation tactics.
A lot of young cops get into it with not a whole lot of life experience, maybe a criminal justice degree from community college, and you give them over 7 times as much training in how to shoot people than in how to deescalate a confrontation. I’m not really surprised that someone uses the tool they’ve been trained on versus the one they largely haven’t. A lot of police will argue a suspect with any kind of weapon who acts aggressively can only safely be dealt with by shooting them, a suspect who just appears to be moving quickly should be shot because he could be going for a gun.
I don’t think the solution is what was proposed in another thread, only giving police the authority to return fire when fired upon, or even to say a cop should only be allowed to shoot if the person has a weapon already in their hand and is imminently going to use it. But most countries you don’t get shot in the head for reaching over to the ignition of your car, a place where a gun cannot be concealed, for example. I think the rules of engagement are probably okay, because the real world is messy. I think what has gone awry is the training and the emphasis is on using that firearm at a moment’s notice, and not working on ways to avoid using it as the first thing in an officer’s mind in an engagement with a potentially dangerous suspect.
I feel there is a perspective in many police departments that they are soldiers in a war, and the communities they police are occupied territory. If they “back up” from a confrontation, it’s akin to “retreat” in a military sense, and as a soldier they aren’t supposed to retreat. Take the Darren Wilson / Michael Brown incident, a situation where I think “at the time of the shooting” Wilson was probably acting correctly due to being violently assaulted by a dangerous person (and unlike people who have never been in a fight, I know that fists can mess you up pretty quickly, especially if the guy beats the shit out of you and you have a holstered gun on you that he can take away), but Wilson could have simply backed away down the block when he realized Brown was agitated to the point of violence. There was no reason he had to confront him the way he did. However, it does go against the “war” mentality of policing.
