See! It IS the gun...
Posted: Sat May 01, 2021 9:06 am
This choade-munch finally figured out why police are shooting "innocent" citizens at an alarming rate...it"s the GUNS!! 
With So Many Gunslingers Packing Heat, No Wonder Florida Cops Overreact
By FRED GRIMM
SOUTH FLORIDA SUN SENTINEL
MAY 01, 2021 AT 8:00 AM
The Small Arms Survey estimates the United States has 331 million people and 393 million firearms, or roughly 4% of the world’s population and 42% of the world’s civilian-owned guns.
The Small Arms Survey estimates the United States has 331 million people and 393 million firearms, or roughly 4% of the world’s population and 42% of the world’s civilian-owned guns. (Dreamstime/The Philadelphia Inquirer/TNS)
Maybe, a subtle, constant, utterly rational fear explains why police officers in the U.S. react with sudden and deadly force so much more often than their counterparts in other high-income nations.
U.S. police damn well should be apprehensive. They deal with unruly elements of a society in which civilian-owned firearms outnumber actual humans, with enough guns left over to arm the combined populations of England and Scotland. (Except England and Scotland restrict gun ownership.)
Criminologists, sociologists, psychologists, politicians and more than a few of us barroom experts have been trying to explain America’s wildly disproportionate rate of fatal police shootings. U.S. police killed 999 people in 2019, an average year. Juxtapose that against the three deaths attributed to police that same year in the United Kingdom.
We blame racism. We worry about police hiring procedures that fail to screen out volatile personalities, about police unions that make it insanely difficult to fire bent cops, about the reluctance among cops to report rogue behavior by fellow officers. We talk about too little training to deal with mental health crises. I doubt criminologists in the UK or Germany have devised their own brilliant solutions to these problems, yet Der Spiegel reported that in 2011, a typical year, German cops killed six criminal suspects.
American police officers simply operate in a much more menacing environment than law enforcement in Western Europe or Japan (two fatal police encounters in 2018) or Australia (less than two a year). Our cops face an ever-growing statistical likelihood that they’ll encounter someone packing heat.
The global Small Arms Survey, a project of the Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies in Geneva, calculated that 331 million Americans own 393 million firearms, giving the U.S., with 4% of the world’s population, 42% of the world’s civilian-owned guns.
Meanwhile, legislators in red states have been undoing gun laws that had limited who can carry a concealed weapon and where. Last week, the Florida Legislature passed a bill that would do away with the prohibition against concealed weapons on school grounds if the schools happen to be affiliated with a church. Another bill approved last week would expand the prohibition against local governments restricting “the purchase, sale, transfer, taxation, manufacture, ownership, possession, storage and transportation” of guns. The new legislation would also ban “unwritten” local policies that might inconvenience Florida’s gun owners. Judges, I suppose, will tasked with divining what the hell that means.
Legislatures in Utah, Montana, Iowa and Tennessee have passed legislation this year allowing concealed firearms without the bother of permits, background checks or courses in gun safety. Similar bills are pending in Texas and South Carolina. Nineteen other states already adopted similar anything-goes policies.
And the rightwing majority on the U.S. Supreme Court seems about to toss New York’s restrictions on who qualifies for concealed-carry permits, which would undo similar state laws in California, Delaware, Hawaii, Maryland, Massachusetts, New Jersey and Rhode Island.
It’s shaping up as a banner year for American gunslingers, who exercise their Second Amendment rights by turning road rage or other mundane disputes into bloody homicides. Same with police encounters. Six cops were shot dead in 2019 during routine traffic stops.
We’ve also left it to law enforcement, rather than trained specialists, to deal with psychological meltdowns, especially in Florida which ranked dead last in 2020 in per capita funding for mental health services. Trouble is, U.S. police answer reports of erratic, crazy-acting people knowing they might well be armed, which adds a dangerous level of apprehension to such confrontations and a heightened potential for police over-reactions. According to a database compiled by the Washington Post, a quarter of all the people shot dead by police since 2015 were mentally ill.
Florida legislators — as if the more pistol-packers, the better — passed the two new pro-firearm measures last week, unperturbed by the news out of Miami last Sunday that a three-year-old toddler was gunned down at his own birthday party (the third shooting in nine months of a small child in Miami-Dade County). Bullet-riddled children would have been shocking in more civilized places, but not Florida. Not enough to embarrass legislators from doing the bidding of the NRA.
Child shootings and road rage murders and 14,414 U.S. gun homicides in a year (according to the CDC count for 2018), remind cops that what would be routine police work in other industrial nations can escalate into deadly confrontations.
Maybe police approach suspects, guns out, apprehensive and apt to overreact because they’re afraid. In a country with more guns than people, they ought to be.
Fred Grimm, a longtime resident of Fort Lauderdale, has worked as a journalist in South Florida since 1976. Reach him by email at leogrimm@gmail.com or on Twitter: @grimm_fred.
https://www.sun-sentinel.com/opinion/co ... story.html
With So Many Gunslingers Packing Heat, No Wonder Florida Cops Overreact
By FRED GRIMM
SOUTH FLORIDA SUN SENTINEL
MAY 01, 2021 AT 8:00 AM
The Small Arms Survey estimates the United States has 331 million people and 393 million firearms, or roughly 4% of the world’s population and 42% of the world’s civilian-owned guns.
The Small Arms Survey estimates the United States has 331 million people and 393 million firearms, or roughly 4% of the world’s population and 42% of the world’s civilian-owned guns. (Dreamstime/The Philadelphia Inquirer/TNS)
Maybe, a subtle, constant, utterly rational fear explains why police officers in the U.S. react with sudden and deadly force so much more often than their counterparts in other high-income nations.
U.S. police damn well should be apprehensive. They deal with unruly elements of a society in which civilian-owned firearms outnumber actual humans, with enough guns left over to arm the combined populations of England and Scotland. (Except England and Scotland restrict gun ownership.)
Criminologists, sociologists, psychologists, politicians and more than a few of us barroom experts have been trying to explain America’s wildly disproportionate rate of fatal police shootings. U.S. police killed 999 people in 2019, an average year. Juxtapose that against the three deaths attributed to police that same year in the United Kingdom.
We blame racism. We worry about police hiring procedures that fail to screen out volatile personalities, about police unions that make it insanely difficult to fire bent cops, about the reluctance among cops to report rogue behavior by fellow officers. We talk about too little training to deal with mental health crises. I doubt criminologists in the UK or Germany have devised their own brilliant solutions to these problems, yet Der Spiegel reported that in 2011, a typical year, German cops killed six criminal suspects.
American police officers simply operate in a much more menacing environment than law enforcement in Western Europe or Japan (two fatal police encounters in 2018) or Australia (less than two a year). Our cops face an ever-growing statistical likelihood that they’ll encounter someone packing heat.
The global Small Arms Survey, a project of the Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies in Geneva, calculated that 331 million Americans own 393 million firearms, giving the U.S., with 4% of the world’s population, 42% of the world’s civilian-owned guns.
Meanwhile, legislators in red states have been undoing gun laws that had limited who can carry a concealed weapon and where. Last week, the Florida Legislature passed a bill that would do away with the prohibition against concealed weapons on school grounds if the schools happen to be affiliated with a church. Another bill approved last week would expand the prohibition against local governments restricting “the purchase, sale, transfer, taxation, manufacture, ownership, possession, storage and transportation” of guns. The new legislation would also ban “unwritten” local policies that might inconvenience Florida’s gun owners. Judges, I suppose, will tasked with divining what the hell that means.
Legislatures in Utah, Montana, Iowa and Tennessee have passed legislation this year allowing concealed firearms without the bother of permits, background checks or courses in gun safety. Similar bills are pending in Texas and South Carolina. Nineteen other states already adopted similar anything-goes policies.
And the rightwing majority on the U.S. Supreme Court seems about to toss New York’s restrictions on who qualifies for concealed-carry permits, which would undo similar state laws in California, Delaware, Hawaii, Maryland, Massachusetts, New Jersey and Rhode Island.
It’s shaping up as a banner year for American gunslingers, who exercise their Second Amendment rights by turning road rage or other mundane disputes into bloody homicides. Same with police encounters. Six cops were shot dead in 2019 during routine traffic stops.
We’ve also left it to law enforcement, rather than trained specialists, to deal with psychological meltdowns, especially in Florida which ranked dead last in 2020 in per capita funding for mental health services. Trouble is, U.S. police answer reports of erratic, crazy-acting people knowing they might well be armed, which adds a dangerous level of apprehension to such confrontations and a heightened potential for police over-reactions. According to a database compiled by the Washington Post, a quarter of all the people shot dead by police since 2015 were mentally ill.
Florida legislators — as if the more pistol-packers, the better — passed the two new pro-firearm measures last week, unperturbed by the news out of Miami last Sunday that a three-year-old toddler was gunned down at his own birthday party (the third shooting in nine months of a small child in Miami-Dade County). Bullet-riddled children would have been shocking in more civilized places, but not Florida. Not enough to embarrass legislators from doing the bidding of the NRA.
Child shootings and road rage murders and 14,414 U.S. gun homicides in a year (according to the CDC count for 2018), remind cops that what would be routine police work in other industrial nations can escalate into deadly confrontations.
Maybe police approach suspects, guns out, apprehensive and apt to overreact because they’re afraid. In a country with more guns than people, they ought to be.
Fred Grimm, a longtime resident of Fort Lauderdale, has worked as a journalist in South Florida since 1976. Reach him by email at leogrimm@gmail.com or on Twitter: @grimm_fred.
https://www.sun-sentinel.com/opinion/co ... story.html
