611–620 of 798 posts
I have a potentially silly question, and obviously naive - but why so many drawn guns? Fun music videos aside, what was the background here? Were they coming in on a Massive gang fortress? Or are all the stereotypes of American police forces true and they just come guns a-blazing all the time? I mean, that wasn't even police officers with hand guns, they have army-like guys with massive automatic rifles, and they see…
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> In my mind, what makes something a statistically safe assumption would mean that, more times than not, you'd be right. I assume I should buckle my seatbelt. Not every car ride results in an accident. But enough do.
It's safe to assume you won't get in an accident. You _should_ buckle your seatbelt anyway because it's low effort, high reward in the unlikely case you get in an accident.
If that were the case, I wouldn't need a seatbelt.
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Not the claim made. > Statistically that's a pretty sensible assumption. was the claim, ie. quite likely, tending toward more often than not. Versus your phrasing that any given cop is
Is there evidence to support the claim that, more often than not, a given cop is a white supremacist?
Again, that's _not_ the upthread claim made by somebody other than myself, a non-US read along.
Still, IIRC the US UCLA has written much on the matter, so perhaps start there if you're interested.
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So are we all just oblivious to the fact that in the US, civilians practically have access to military gear? How can you police that type of population with sticks and stones?
I can see the argument how you would treat a suspect with a gun differently than you would if they have a knife. However, American cops also use guns against suspects with knives or other weapons that they also use in places like Scotland. Why couldn’t American police use these techniques when the suspect doesn’t have a gun? I know the standard response is, “well, they COULD have a gun!”, but I don’t think that is a…
The sadly predictable response of the police in America is to overmatch the “enemy.” Presume they have a weapon for crimes of certain classes, obvious violence crimes like kidnapping and also drug crimes, which poor Afroman was accused of both.
Personally, having been SWAT’d as a young man, it’s not that I think they shouldn’t have access to armaments. It’s that their rules of engagement are obscenely lopsided to the point that they just bring them always, all the time, and will not use common sense judgement.
This could have been a knock-and-talk from Officer Friendly and if things didn’t go well - send in a higher level of officer. Starting at bootleg Navy SEAL raids for every accusation is a blight in modern law enforcement.
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It's rare even in NI. PSNI had one single firearm discharge in the two year period covering October 2023 - September 2025. Plus 948 uses of irritant spray, 496 uses of their baton, and 38 taser discharges in the same period. And 23,489 uses of "unarmed physical tactics". That's for a population of around 2 million. By comparison, SFPD had 10 "officer involved shootings" in the past year for a population of 800k, a ra…
The one thing I'll say in defense of American cops is that they are police a population that's vastly more likely to have their own guns, too. Of course it's not like American cops have recognized the danger that poses and politically aligned themselves with reducing or restricting access to guns, so they lose a lot of credit there, but they are genuinely facing a better armed and therefore more dangerous population.
There are 153k people who have legal firearms (so about 10% of the adult population, vs about three times that in the US). That's largely farmers with shotgun licenses (NI is pretty rural by European standards) plus licensed "weapons for personal protection" for people exposed to threats for whatever reason as a legacy of the Troubles.
And then there are some unknown number with illegally-held guns - the main armed groups put their weapons "beyond use" as part of the decommissioning process in the 2000s, but inevitably some will have been missed, and then there are the dissident groups who still hold significant amounts of weaponry.
Hard to put an exact figure on it, but if you guesstimate it at a weapons ownership rate at about half that of the US you probably wouldn't be too far from the truth.
So even after accounting for the differential in gun ownership, SFPD are still shooting people at ~25x the rate of the PSNI.
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Adams County paid for their civil suit???
> Foreman was sued by the Adams County Sheriff’s Office I presume this isn't coming out of the officers' paychecks....
https://s3.documentcloud.org/documents/23721379/afroman-comp...
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You can hardly make stricter gun laws; we have a right to them in this country. It's hard to limit the guns without infringing on the right of the people.
But not all States' gun laws are equally strict? So if the state with the stricted gun laws is acting in a constitutional manner then other states could also implement those laws but choose not to. So a lot of this stuff is truly self inflicted and the result of poor policy choices -- not because of governments reluctantly but dutifully obeying the 2nd amendment.
I expect to see them reigning in the states. The 2nd amendment is unambiguous.