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I disagree with that. The problem of warrior police is addressable by other means (and it is obvious that people suffering the most from the warrior police are the poor people, both justifiably - violent crime usually happens around poor people - and not justifiably, as it's safer to victimize poor people, they wouldn't hire an expensive lawyer and the chance of them playing golf with your boss is none). There are many approaches, some (like not prosecuting minor crimes) more stupid than others, but I think there are ways to approach it without destroying the whole society.
The problem of worse social outcomes is harder to solve - but I think there are fruitful ideas how to approach it too. The thing is if black people start to have the same social outcomes as white people, they also start exhibiting same voting patterns as white people. And that's something that would be very bad for some of the current politicians. Granted, not all of them - some very white places are happy to elect very woke politicians - but overall the shift will be pretty noticeable, I think.
Oh no, they've been trying to do only the first part - the disarming. It doesn't decrease violent crime any (as it is obvious from the fact the places with the strictest gun laws still feature a ton of violent crime) and it doesn't make interaction with the police any safer as the police still has guns.
Which, of course, directly contradicts the previous sentence - if you get less police, you get more crime. Also, for each specific policeman, each interaction would be more dangerous - both because of more crime and because they can't rely on suppressing the criminals by sheer mass anymore, thus laying the burden on the shoulders of the individual policeman - who would, as expected, by more likely to feel threatened, and thus more likely to respond violently to the perceived threat.
Except of course DIE does not work this way - you can't make a drug-infested ghetto into a middle-class suburb by adding two more VP DIEs to Goldman Sachs roster. You can make those two black persons that are appointed VP DIEs at Goldman Sachs to move out of the ghetto - but there are many many more people in ghetto than VPs in Goldman Sachs, so that approach is obviously not scalable. Also, the opposite of meritocracy is dependence - and I don't think there's any example of hand-outing a populace into prosperity.
Which, again, contradicts the first sentence - and on the other side, makes the lives of non-criminal blacks so much more hell. While subtly suggesting to them that they shouldn't be bothering doing anything socially useful - since meritocracy is dead anyway - but instead should try their hand in something that brings easy money and not prosecuted anymore. Thus completing the circle of societal destruction.
The worst part is not even that, but that the bulk of these costs is borne by the same people they are supposedly "helping". As I noted at the start - they are promoting a tiny minority well beyond what they deserve (those VP DIEs) at the cost of further demoting and destroying the society for all the rest.
Is that obvious? The states with the most violent crime also have very loose gun laws (the top 5 states for murder rate are MS, LA, AL, MO, and AK, for example), while states with strict gun laws tend to have lower murder rates (IL is an obvious counterpoint, but, e.g. contrary to popular perception NY's murder rate is fairly low by American standards). Now, correlation is not causation and it's very probable that some of this is really due to an endemic culture of violence in the South that drives both homicide and weapon ownership (and, perhaps more importantly, weapon carrying), but I don't think you can at all conclude that efforts to curtail violence via gun regulations have failed. People may kill people, but firearms are a lubricant to violence.
Oh that's a fun dodge. Big democratic cities with substantial underclass black communities are the prime driver of murder rates, but let's look specifically at the ones in red states, while blaming the gun laws, at an arbitrary number that cuts off our Counterexamples: The next five states on your list.
Loose gun laws like Maryland and Illinois.
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"State" is big. At least most of US states are big (sorry, WY and RI). Thus, applying whole-state statistics to concentrated and heterogenŠµic phenomena is very misleading. San Francisco and Oakland are very different from Tahoe City and Napa Valley, despite both being in California. Martha's Vineyard and Springfield, MA are rather different places too. We can't just average them out and pretend gun laws and crime works the same way over all the California, for example.
Also, you may notice that your "objection" does not object to anything I said actually. I say "Decreasing X does not decrease Y, since we can witness data points with low X and high Y". And you say "we can also witness data points with high X and high Y". Well, yeah, OK. You got me. We can. That's not an objection to the lack of correlation between X and Y, you see.
Even more the lack of correlation is not causation. You see, for correlation you need that high X comes with high Y, and low X comes with low Y. We have that high X comes with high Y (let's assume that, I won't for the sake of argument here fight you on that) and low X comes with high Y. That's not even correlation.
Yes I can, if I look at the places where these efforts were effective, as to taking legal guns away, and we still have plenty of violence. That's empiric data - if I change X and Y does not move substantially, then I can conclude the attempt of changing Y by changing X failed. We can debate why it failed, but the failure is plain in the data.
I can refer you to the case of CashApp founder, just recently murdered in SF in a very un-lubricated manner. He is still as dead as any other murder victim.
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Itās funny that this is obvious to you. I think it makes total sense the increasing the likelihood that someone has a gun makes police more jumpy. You might be interested in this graph I made in 2021
/images/1681087903738361.webp
Edit: found the other version of my graph with slightly different axes if it's interesting to anyone: link
In most interactions with the police, they happen in circumstances where a knife is as deadly (or more deadly) than a gun. So if the police are trained to shoot you for twitching wrong, they'd shoot you in any case (also they can't rely on laws to ensure the absence of guns, since they are already dealing with a person that they suspect is a criminal). Of course, there are marginal cases but in the general picture you can't gun control you way out of it unless you disarm the whole nation (good luck doing it to Red states) and Mexico too (because we don't have the Southern border anymore, so guess what would happen if the price of a gun on internal US market shoots up?). You can compare US to Japan as long as you want, but US is not Japan, and never will be.
Obviously every policy only acts on the margins. I'm not arguing it will make police shootings go to zero, or even that it's a good policy. Only that I think your original claim
is wrong.
To be honest I don't like focusing on police shootings. The fact that people whose job is to apprehend dangerous criminals shoot people 20 times more than the national average doesn't strike me as obviously reprehensible, especially since 89% of the time they (the police) were being threatened, attacked, or having a gun pointed at them.
But I absolutely believe reducing gun ownership would reduce fatal police shootings.
You're welcome to make conjectures like
I don't really have an RCT to solidly refute you, but so long as the only data I've seen supports the idea that greater gun accessibility correlates strongly with more fatal police shootings, I'm going to go with the data over your personal beliefs on how policies affect police interactions.
If you mean "reducing it to the levels of Japan" - yes, it probably would. Except that's not happening. As I said, US is not Japan, and no amount of magic thinking will turn US into Japan. You just can't do that. What you can do however, is to make gun ownership much more expensive and cumbersome - they'd been trying in California for years - so that for the lawful citizen, it would be almost un-attainable, while for a criminal, whose very life frequently depends on it, it still would be worth it, despite the costs. Which would still require the police to carry guns, since the criminals still have them. Thus, you would keep the problem around, while hurting the very people you have set out to protect - the lawful citizens (since the criminals, being the only people carrying guns, would seek to recover the costs of having them by imposing those costs on the lawful citizens with impunity). You see, you can't just wave a magic wand and transform the society wholesale. It moves in certain ways responding to the certain incentives, and has to move gradually. And any move directed at reducing gun ownership per se, now in US, would make the lawful citizens strictly worse without improving anything. It won't turn US into Japan.
I am disputing the concrete claim that you made that
You still have provided no evidence that that claim is true.
If you don't want to talk about that claim any more that's fine, but please stop implying that I've ever said
That reducing gun ownership will turn the US into Japan
That reducing gun ownership will drop fatal police shootings to zero
That reducing gun ownership will make life better for US citizens
Well, it would be hard to provide empirical evidence, beyond what is already observed (that places with very strict legal ownership laws still get a lot of police shootings). Since the data set is very multi-parametrical and diverse, we can not establish a clear experiment by isolating, say, San Francisco, reducing (legal) gun ownership to zero, and seeing what would happen. We only can observe that SF government has been doing all it can to bring it all close to zero as it practically possible, and police still carries guns and shoots people there. Moreover, the evidence that knives at short distances are as dangerous as guns is widely available and known: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tueller_Drill
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My prior is that gun ownership by right with proper firearm education increases politeness, and that owning a gun as a flex increases shootings. Make guns less legal, theyāll be owned as a flex more.
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