Sorry. Hunting rifles are really not part of this. How many of those hunters were walking the streets of their tons toting their weapons on a daily basis?
In a culture where personal weapons (not hunting tools) are already accepted, criminals are quite happy to “upgrade” to rifles and automatic weapons, but the majority of the violence, (by both sides of the law), in the U.S. continues to be based on personal weapons carried daily.
Uhh, football hooliganism has all but been stamped out in the UK, especially compared to the days of running street battles accompanying every football match in the 1970s, 1980s and early 1990s. Zero tolerance, better policing, and the Premier League wanting to attract more women and families to the game all but killed off widespread hooliganism.
No. Criminals do not generally need or use guns because they are unlikely to encounter citizens similarly armed.
The notion that disarming the police will cause most armed criminals in the U.S. to leave their weapons at home seems odd at the best. I have no idea where you developed this belief. Was there ever a time in Britain when the criminals routinely carried firearms, but they gave them up because Bobby Peel ordered his officers to refrain from carrying firearms? I would need to see some sort of citation for any similar sequence of events.
Who knew that the solution to all our problems was simple sanctimony all along? I am no fan of the police, as I have said many times at this board, yet you offer no compelling reason to disarm them. Honestly, what did you think you were bringing to the discussion that hasn’t already been considered and discussed many times, even right here at this board?
I am very much pro-gun control, but this is not the elephant in the room in Ferguson. If we (in the US) banned all firearms sales to individuals immediately there would still be 300 million guns floating around the country. We’re not Australians; we wouldn’t turn them in. Well, I would, but I don’t own any.
Firearms have been rare in British criminality. They are now mainly restricted to small gangs in urban centers. Ordinary decent criminals rarely use them.
The elephant in the room is US attitude to guns and their use by the public, the police and criminals.
I am not advocating disarming the police, merely making them accountable for their usage of firearms on each occasion they feel they have to do so.
That’s not the elephant in the room either. Brown was unarmed but twice Wilson’s size. If Wilson hadn’t been armed Brown would have beaten him to a pulp (assuming he did in fact attack him.)
ETA: US police officers are “accountable” for their use of firearms. Every officer-involved shooting is investigated by supervisors and other agencies (here in Florida, the state Department of Law Enforcement investigates each one whether it involves a state or local police agency). Officers are probably not frequently held accountable for wrongful killings by the criminal justice system, but that’s a function of our politics, not our attitude to guns.
Fine, so let’s say the violent crime rates are dead even between the US and UK. So as stated earlier … you won’t get shot in the U.K., you’ll “only” get beaten or stabbed at the same rate.
My dad was a cop. My uncle was a state trooper. I was a deputy sheriff. In all of those agencies, discharging a firearm would have required filing a detailed report of the incident. An actual shooting would have involved an investigation. Happily, none of us ever actually had to use a gun in the line of duty. The overwhelming number of LEos don’t, even in the US. You are fixated on guns. I consider the real problems with LE to be corruption, a pervasive bullying attitude, and widespread general assholery. To that, I will add that there are cops who aren’t like that, but they actively or passively cover for the ones who are.
This is a much better candidate for “the elephant in the room” - the us-versus-them attitude adopted by some police forces. Do you have any ideas for fixing that?
Fine. Can I quote various NRA presidents in response?
If Morgan thinks that a cop being charged in the middle of a struggle stops to think about whether he is going to be shielded from prosecution for using his weapon, I can dismiss his beliefs out of hand.
The Cleveland incident was a really rare situation and was such a clusterfuck that it has taken a while to sort through the situation, but multiple police have been disciplined, five have been charged criminally, and one has been charged with manslaughter. That was an incident in which better training would certainly have prevented the deaths. Disarming the police in Middlefield would have resulted in nothing more than two dead police. (One officer was wounded before they returned fire.)
Whenever a policeman fires his gun, an investigation is carried out. I will not pretend that all such investigations are sufficiently thorough or fair, but your implication (borrowing from Morgan) that the police have carte blanche to shoot people is absurd. You are sitting in a different world drawing conclusions based on nothing but your personal limited experience of totally different situations and cultures and trying to apply them outside your ken. ::: shrug :::
I think the reasons is much more fundamental than that. The taming of the western part of the country required guns. It was wilderness, vast wilderness, and the gun was both a boon to the lawless and the law. Once the bad guys had them—Day 1—law enforcement needed them, too. That settlement is unlike much of Europe, which resolved much of the settlement issues prior to the advent of very effective guns in the 1800s, particularly pistols. So, the good that guns can do is part of our reality. Any boy growing up in the '70s or before played cowboys and indians. Hell, we all got toy guns at Christmas. I still remember chasing my sitter around with my plastic rifle until a stray bullet hit a bulb on the Christmas tree. At which point I hid behind the couch thing out one bulb after another. (Which ended with a whooping and the gun being taken away, never to be seen again.) We also recounted the crime-fighting of Elliot Ness against bootleggers and racketeers. Similarly, many of our fathers, grandfathers and uncles used guns to help defeat the Germans and the Japanese in WWII. Exploits which we recounted in the woods near our houses. So, I think for us, guns were seen as the wonderful tools they can be.
Also, there’s the teensy-weensy matter of the Second Amendment. The very founding of the country is owed to the populace being armed. And compared to European countries, it’s a much more recent event. True, a lot of that thinking need not apply now, but I’m just trying to describe how and why the American view of guns differs from those in Europe.
And your solution is to simply start by limiting police weapons.
It actually is a cultural issue and if you come up with a realistic way to change the culture, I am sure that many people would be eager to hear it.
A minor correction - I’m pretty sure that criminals mainly use guns against other criminals. Drug dealers don’t need weapons to protect themselves from their customers, they need them to protect themselves from the competition. Likewise thieves, smugglers and pimps.
Still, that doesn’t change what you’re trying to say.
Pjen, I don’t know why you think Americans are ready for a sensible discussion of their gun culture. Haven’t the forty-bajillion gun threads on this board shown you that the subject is not up for rational consideration?
Like healthcare, there is too much national pride invested in the status quo to seriously consider someone else’s model. If society is armed, the police must be armed; if the police are armed, they must be able to shoot; if able to shoot, there must be casualties; if casualties, they must be an acceptable price for the social order, which includes an armed society.
Personally, I think the second amendment was a dumb idea from the get-go and should be scrapped yesterday. I do not believe Americans are capable of amending the Constitution any longer, and certainly not the Sacred Ten in the Bill of Rights.
And your solution is to simply start limiting police weapons.
It actually is a cultural issue and if you come up with a realistic way to change the culture, I am sure that many people would be eager to hear it.
So what is the extra ingredient that means this equivalent propensity for violence results in a hospital visit on one hand, or a morgue on the other?
I wasn’t downplaying gun violence - I was just disputing that the U.K. is a more civilized cultural model for others to look up to. Since they have fewer guns, they are evidently conducting an absolute boatload of beatings, stabbings, etc. to keep their crime rate on an even keel with the U.S.