The official spokespeople for the NRA rather seldom bring Switzerland into the discussion. The laws in Switzerland are not what the NRA would consider A-rated. Legal carry of handguns for self-defense is unobtainable for most citizens, for example.
NRA members, now, they often point to Switzerland (and Israel) in online debates because they have seen pictures of Swiss citizens and Israeli citizens carrying their military-issue weapons in public. They are, sadly, not really aware of the legal environment surrounding weapons in those countries and draw incorrect conclusions.
Right. And your claim was that they did not need or use them because the police were not armed. What you appear to have (somewhat) demonstrated, instead, is that firearms simply were never part of the overall culture. Your claim that the criminal do not use firearms BECAUSE (your caps) the police do not use firearms is wholly unsupported.
Nope, it’s about race, basically. You keep bringing up comparisons between the US and Europe, as if we are the same quasi-homogenous population that you are. But, see, we aren’t. There are nearly as many people of UK descent in the US as there are in the UK, and nearly as many people of German descent as in Germany. Same with people of French descent, Italian descent, Irish descent and Polish descent…etc etc. And that’s just the folks in this country with European ancestry. We also have people from all over the rest of the world mixed in as well, several groups of which have been treated poorly in the past.
What you call ‘police culture’ is a symptom of the underlying issue, not the issue itself, and it’s going to take more than your trite ‘well, just change your culture’ to ‘fix’ it.
Yeah, all those other countries that are better than us can illuminate our problems, right? 
I love Europeans…they have such limited memories and such a huge amount of hubris.
The US is not the UK. We aren’t France or Germany either (thank the gods on all counts). We have a rather large number of guns AND we have a rather large number of very violent criminals. We also have a large number of laws that run contrary to what is obviously a large percentage of our population wrt illegal drugs, which means that police are in the unenviable position of enforcing laws that are on the one hand extremely profitable to the criminals (due to a large percentage of the population partaking in them) and that same large percentage of the population essentially ignoring the law and buying those illegal drugs.
You can’t simply handwave away all of those issues and say it’s ‘police culture’ that is the root cause of our troubles, no more than you can spout trite solutions about simply changing our culture so we can be more like you. It’s not that simple, especially when the majority of Americans don’t agree that some of these problems are actually problems that need to be fixed. It’s all about collective risk analysis and risk verse reward comparisons.
A whole 150? Out of nearly 400 million. Well, yeah, I can see that this is a major issue that needs us to completely change our entire culture so that we can be more like every ‘other advanced western country’ out there! This is MUCH more serious than, oh, say obesity or deaths due to alcohol consumption…
Oh, bully for you! I guess the UK is just superior and you can naturally stick your nose in the air and look down on your poor American country cousins (who have just about as many folks of English, Scots, Welsh, Irish and other descent as live in the UK :p). We really appreciate your concern for us and will try and do better in the future to measure up to your exacting European standards of being civilized and advanced.
Yeah, it is rather rich getting lectured by citizens of nation that looted the world for centuries, plunged the world into war repeatedly, and drew artificial borders through all their former colonies that are causing misery and chaos to this day. Those citizens, of course, don’t speak for their nations as a whole.
Does anyone have statistics concerning the rate of police shootings in Canada? That would make a useful comparison, as Canada has (1) a very mixed population, and (2) the police here do, in fact, carry guns.
Anecdotally, my impression is that Canadian police shoot far fewer people, but I lack any evidence of that rate.
Assuming that fact is true, it would tend to indicate that the problem is not police carrying guns, or a non-homogenous population.
I’d suggest the numbers are merely indicative of a greater problem in terms of relationships between police and citizens. If that underlying relationship is poor then introducing poorly handled guns (on both sides) into the equation is going to result in people getting shot.
I recall a thread recently that warned against talking back to a police officer or getting out of your car when stopped. Utterly baffling to me. If a police officer asks me for ID I’ll ask him why he wants to know and would have no expectation of anything else occurring other than a civilised conversation. Same with getting out of the car, have done so, will do so. The relationship is very different here.
So improve the relationship, improve the handling of guns, control the guns, remove the guns…all are valid responses but the USA seems very determined to do none of it.
Oh, and probably best not to bring up health care issues seeing as that is the other baffling USA cultural artefact we can’t get our heads around.
seriously?
The British Empire was great and terrible.
*was *
Fact is, culturally the nation has changed. It may suit your argument to think that they never can because that way you can point to the historic roots of the USA and claim that you’ve got “guns in your blood” or something. I don’t buy it for a second. Germany is not the Germany of 1938, Spain is not Franco-era quasi-fascist, France drinks less wine, Italy has a tiny birth-rate. The UK has stopped stealing treasure and occupying countries and has even gone so far as to give (some) stuff back. We aren’t responsible for the ills of the past.
The USA may not change but that does not mean that it *can not *change. For better and worse the USA is a remarkable country, so don’t act surprised when other equivalent first-world nations continue to remark upon it.
[QUOTE=Novelty Bobble]
Oh, and probably best not to bring up health care issues seeing as that is the other baffling USA cultural artefact we can’t get our heads around.
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Um, I wasn’t bringing up health care issues, I was pointing out that drugs, alcohol and obesity are several orders of magnitude more deadly than police shootings…in fact, police shootings at 150(+/-) per year is down around death by tooth pick, numbers wise. And interestingly enough (wrt alcohol), some of our superior European cousins actually have bigger issues than we do wrt numbers of folks killed due to use/abuse per year. Obesity I think we have them licked though, so that’s something we can all be proud of.
Because simple solutions to complex problems are usually no help at all. If it was that simple, we would have fixed this years ago. Just like I could probably point to myriad issues in most other countries that we Americans could give simple solutions to and have the same sorts of rolling of the eyes when they were presented.
[QUOTE=Malthus]
Does anyone have statistics concerning the rate of police shootings in Canada? That would make a useful comparison, as Canada has (1) a very mixed population, and (2) the police here do, in fact, carry guns.
Anecdotally, my impression is that Canadian police shoot far fewer people, but I lack any evidence of that rate.
Assuming that fact is true, it would tend to indicate that the problem is not police carrying guns, or a non-homogenous population.
[/QUOTE]
I don’t think it would be a good comparison (though better than comparing us to many European countries) because population density is so different, but I still think it would be good to know. I know that the murder rate per 100k is somewhere between the UK and the US (closer to the UK than the US), but I don’t see any stats in a quick Google search of the number of people killed by police by year (it’s more than zero is all I can tell you…but almost surely less than 150, and probably a LOT less).
I don’t think the population density thing is a factor.
It is true that Canada is a huge country with a relatively small population, but the vast majority of that population is concentrated in a relatively small area - and that area has a reasonably high population density, in some cases as high as places in the US (look, for example, at southern Ontario and the metropolitan Toronto area).
Much of Canada is, essentially, uninhabited or very sparsely inhabited - the population is not spread anything like evenly.
I know, I lived in Canada for several years. 
I still don’t think it would be a good comparison as Canada is just a different place than the US in so many ways. That said, I’d be interested in seeing the stats if anyone can dig them up.
According to wiki an average of about six a year.
By calling it an elephant in the room you imply that it’s not known or talked about. That’s just silly. The subject is often brought up, discussed, debated, legislated, and litigated. It’s not an elephant in the room, it is an issue that is front and center. The US accepts that more personal freedom related to firearm ownership will result in a higer rate of gun death. I accept the current state of gun laws in the country and activley advocate for increased permissiveness regarding gun laws. The tradeoff is worth it.
There are many many cities and regions in the country that have little to no gun violence, and the local police are armed. It’s not the arming of police that cause people to get killed by guns. If magically every police force in the US stopped carrying firearms, what impact do you think that will have on the rate of police gettting killed and the rate of perpetrators of crime getting killed? Which group will rise and/or fall?
Of that 32, I wonder how many were killed by other police?
Nice defensive posturing. How about addressing the issue?
It is worth noting that the smug, moralistic lecturing began after the European powers exhausted themselves. Before that, while they were still great powers, we got lectured on being uncivilized, provincial bumpkins.
I did. Feel free to comment on any of the non-European smuggness bashing parts.
If you have a link that would be grand. However, taking your number at face value (I believe it), we can do some extrapolation. The population of Canada is about equal to the population of California (35 million verse around 38 million).
If you read Dickens ’ account of nineteenth century USA, the smug, moralistic lecturing dates back over 150 years.
Versus. Gah.
Counted from the last five years on the Wikipedia page.