Soldato
It's not about whether or not the individual cop is black or white, the argument put forward is that the police in America are institutionally racist.
Today's mass shooting in the US
- Thread starter Rroff
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It's not about whether or not the individual cop is black or white, the argument put forward is that the police in America are institutionally racist.
Caporegime
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gun_crime_in_south_Manchester
39 deaths in 10 years.
Bad for a country that has very restrictive gun laws, but compared to America? Not even similar.
I would imagine so considering the massive socioeconomic differences between black and white people in America that mean black people are committing crimes at a much greater rate. 40% of the prisoners in the US are black, they're 13% of the population, 39% are white, they're 64% of the population. Under those conditions, who am I more likely to suspect is a criminal? You can probably even say black people are more likely to get sent to prison for a crime they've committed, and I'd agree, but not to that degree.
Soldato
I'm more interested in why we even have another thread about America. I very much doubt in the US there is a thread about the UK of any subject.
Caporegime
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Watch '13th'
It's eye opening.
Because from the outside looking in, it's mental that they let children get shot up in schools and do nothing?
Soldato
I don't have enough information to debate you on the wider topic, just correcting the assertion that the issue is perceived individual police prejudice rather than institutional prejudice.
Soldato
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because we don't have mass shootings on a regular basis to talk about
But they send their thoughts and prayers? Surely that will help?
Caporegime
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Silly me, It was all part of Gods plan to make that psychopathic person murder your children with assault rifles.
As did the suicide rate from Gassing when we switched from town gas to natural gas, and when Cats became common in motor cars.
Take away the very easy methods of offing oneself and the spontaneous drunken (Etc) suicides will go down, but the overall rate not by much..
We are looking at percentage points here rather than factors and certainly not orders of magnitude.
"Most" suicides are not actually spontaneous. Killing oneself is a serious issue and most suicides put a considerable amount of thought into the matter before doing so!
Overall the USA's suicide rate is comparable to that of most other developed country's, even countries where firearms are, for all practical purposes, unavailable.
Now, sure it is slightly higher in states where firearms are common than in ones where they are not, but the margin really is just that, Marginal.
The claim that stricter firearm control would have a major and permanent effect on overall suicide rates is questionable at best
Suicide is more of a social/cultural issue than simply the availability of the tools with which to commit it.
Are we looking at different graphs?
Looking at the blue line, (In both charts) what i see is a steadily declining trend over time that continues to decline with no clear before/after rate change at the points the new gun laws were introduced.
I cannot see anything there that shouts out to me
"Oh look at what a difference stricter Gun control made, Just look at all the lives we have saved that would have been lost if we had just left things the same"
Interestingly, the charts also suggest that there was a declining trend in non-firearm related homicides/suicides as well so something else was clearly going on at the same time anyway.
Now, I take your point about the incidence of mass shootings as a specific subset, But 13 over 20 years?
In Oz, This was a very rare event to begin with. Not quite as rare as a "Blue Moon" but definitely getting there.
Shouting "Success" from the rooftops because of a policy that has reduced the annual homicide rate by the equivalent of a couple of serious RTA's per year seems a bit OTT, Sorry if I seem somewhat underwhelmed!
There is also the definition of "Mass shooting" to consider too.
There are many different ones. The distinction whereby only "Deaths" seem to be counted seems spurious to me. I wonder how many "Mass shootings" there have been both before and after where people have only been injured (Or even that the gunman was such a rotten shot that he failed to hit anybody at all)
There are also improvements in medical tech to consider too. Gunshot victims in 2018 may well end up surviving wounds that would have proved fatal in 1980.
(Which is one reason why I feel that there should be new "Murder" laws to take this factor into consideration. At the moment people who would certainly have been convicted of "Murder" in 1980 (Say) now walk away with an assault or GBH conviction. Not because their intent was any less, but simply because their victims had better doctors! But that is for another discussion)
Much has been made in this thread about the supposed spectacular success of the Australian experience. But really, I cannot see anything particularly dramatic there or even of any real significance.
And yet it would have been quite expensive to implement and had a significant impact on the civil rights of millions of people. (Whether or not one feels that they should have had those rights in the first place is irrelevant. They did have them before and now they dont) all for what seems, at best, to be an utterly trivial gain, at worst actually made no difference at all over what was already trending anyway..
:/
Caporegime
I didn't make that claim. You made the claim that the suicide rate would not be affected because people would simply commit suicide in other ways. I've shown that this didn't happen, and the overall suicide rate went down (however slightly). So your claim is debunked.
Speaking as someone whose father committed suicide with a firearm when I was 16 years old, I entirely agree.
I've already directed you to an article showing that the decline accelerated in a way that cannot be accounted for by previous trends. Did you read it?
Yes, it was rare and now it's incredibly rare. Great result!
Mass shootings in Australia are defined by shootings in which four or more victims are killed (not including the gunman).
Thanks for your unsubstantiated opinion, which contradicts the conclusions by qualified experts.
It was paid for by a temporary increase in the Medicare levy. The increase was 0.2%, and lasted for just 12 months. You would know this already if you'd taken the time to learn about it before spouting an uninformed opinion.
Tell me which rights it had a significant impact on. I'll wait.
Meanwhile, consider:
* this tighter legislation was overwhelmingly DEMANDED by Australian voters
* the legislation was introduced by the most conservative Prime Minister Australia had seen since the immediate post-war period
* the legislation was independently negotiated with the governments of all states and territories, whose consent was required in order for it to pass; it was therefore achieved by consensus, and not imposed on an unwilling population
To some extent it is, AIUI, Black cops are rather more likely to open fire on Black suspects than white ones
Soldato
That's a really interesting statistic. However in terms of how you deal with that there's a tendency on an individual level to treat stats like that as evidence of one particular subset being predisposed to being trigger happy for whatever reason e.g. this isn't an issue of race because black cops shoot are more likely to shoot black suspects than white cops are. I think the US is in a situation where it really needs an overarching, holistic review of police practices with a view on identifying the reasons behind their tendency to be a bit trigger happy in general, you can then drill down into whether or not there are other factors which means this is affecting demographics in a disproportionate way.
The whole black cops on black suspects thing is particularly interesting and it could be a range of issues; are black cops having to work harder to prove themselves and therefore do they take a more authoritarian line? Do they come from the same communities as the perpetrators and therefore have a greater exposure to criminal violence? Are there differences in training or approach between forces with higher diversity levels compared to those with lower diversity levels. For example I was looking at a small idyllic town in Colorada with a 97.5% white population, so are you likely to find greater diversity in higher population, higher crime areas. These are probably the easier questions to answer, there are a lot more factors I would imagine.
It's a complicated web, and to be honest it's one that America doesn't seem overly bothered about untangling so, whilst it's interesting to drill down it's probably a futile exercise.
Soldato
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i think potentially a big reason is that with such a high civilian ownership of firearms it's a case of if you're a cop on duty you have to assume people are armed, and if you make that assumption the cop is a normal human being who likes doing things like going home to your family at the end of the day you're going to assume the attitude of "if this situation ends up with someone getting shot, then it isn't going to be me".
Soldato
Absolutely this will be part of it, but then where does that attitude come from? Is it a case that most individual officer have come to the conclusion themselves, and the level of killings is kind of a pooling of cops individual opinions on risk? Or is it the case that the training given by forces focuses on threat elimination instead of de-escalation, and if either of those are the case to what extent do those approaches represent the actual risk to officers? If .05% percent of violence related call outs end up in shots being fired at police then where do you put the line in terms of the cop opening fire first? What's the individual and organisational approach to that risk?
I can't answer any of these questions by the way, but if I were tasked with looking at it then the training, guidance and culture of the force would definitely be my starting point.
Soldato
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i guess you make a fair point, us cops seem to have much less accountability for shots fired compared to cops in other countries, but as you say what level of that is really acceptable to have based on how many times it's really justified to go in guns blazing.
So now the police are shooting the "good guy with a gun"...
Soldato
The flip side to my argument is that once you start crunching the numbers it might turn out that the risk level is so high for US cops that the current level of civilian deaths is the correct balance in terms of keeping cop fatalities down. Unfortunately there will be a trade off somewhere, that's the price they pay for civilian gun ownership. Depressing when you think about it.
Soldato
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yep, and i can't really see how they can change it without doing something about handguns, even removing concealed carry will still only leave the honest folk with their glocks on display so the cops are still going to be jumpy, although it's maybe a start.
it's why i dislike any argument about armed cops in other countries like the uk as everyone almost always compares to the us when in reality there are lots of nations with armed police where cops aren't trigger happy, and as far as i can see the 2 main reasons for that are a lack of gun ownership meaning cops are less jumpy and severe accountability for opening fire even when it is justified.
It is.
One of the more common examples of an "Unarmed Suspect Shooting" is the so called waistband shooting. (Where the cop shoots a suspect who apears to be going for his pockets but before a weapon becomes visible)
In around 50% of cases the suspect is subsequently found to be unarmed (Big fuss of course) Unfortunatly this also means that in around 50% of caaese the suspect IS armed and WAS going for aweapon. This figure is often ignored by campaigners.
It is a brave (Foolhardy even) cop who is, literally, willing to toss a coin for his life on the grounds thast an uncoperative suspect might not be armed
As I have said before on the matter...