To be fair, far fewer people own guns in Germany than they do in the US. Police in Germany likely carry weapons to deal with knives and other close range weapons, while police in the US carry weapons to deal with long range weapons.
>
To be fair, far fewer people own guns in Germany than they do in the US.
Call it 9/10 in the US and 3/10 in Germany[1]. Note that this is number of guns, not number of people owning guns. Not sure how that changes the odds of any one person having access to a gun.
Perhaps more interesting is the number of verified homicides commited with a gun[2]: ~4/100 000 in the US, 0.2/100 000 in Germany. So one could guesstimate the odds of encountering an armed potential murderer in the US is about 4/0.02 ~ 200:1 -- or 200 times more likely for an US cop than for a German cop.
Not sure how valuable such macro-guesstimations are, really. But hey, numbers.
> police in the US carry weapons to deal with long range weapons.
I'm not so sure. Doesn't the typical US patrol officer carry a pistol, possibly with a shotgun for backup? If the aim really was to take out a single shooter (potentially in a crowd) surely something along the lines of an mp5 would make more sense?
Police in Norway has also been generally armed now, and waltz around with glocks. It strikes me as entirely useless -- the number of situations that can be defused/resolved with a somewhat poorly aimed 9mm bullet doesn't seem to justify the increase in weapons available (all you'd need to get them off a pair of cops would be a hunting rifle -- or a mob).
No, it's based on some hand-waving about "terror threats" due to us helping NATO alienate people in the Middle East. The "threats" are classified (but really dangerous, ok, trust us, wink-wink) -- and no one's tried to explain how moving the handguns from lock-boxes in the police command cars to the hips of random patrol officers are supposed to help counter these "terror threats".
I was recently at a music festival with some ~3000 people -- and a couple of police officers with handguns. I have a hard time divining a scenario where those guns are going to help. If the aim was to be able to shoot attackers, at least some snipers at an elevated vantage point with low-power ammunition might have had a chance at taking someone out without endangering the crowds too much.
On the other hand, if the crowd went mad an rioted, you can be sure that the end result would've been that someone in the crowd would've ended up in possession of those guns.
How often do police kill people who are obviously armed? Many of the police killings I've heard of were perpetrated on unarmed people. It seems disingenuous to dismiss concerns about police violence because the civilian could have been a gun owner. What matters is whether the killing could have been avoided if the police had reacted differently.
