Police in those countries don't shoot people because nobody in those countries carries a gun:
A system in which legal police shootings of unarmed civilians are a common occurrence is a system that has some serious flaws. In this case, the drawback is a straightforward consequence of America's approach to firearms. A well-armed citizenry required an even-better-armed constabulary. Widespread gun ownership creates a systematic climate of fear on the part of the police. The result is a quantity of police shootings that, regardless of the facts of any particular case, is just staggeringly high. Young black men, in particular, are paying the price for America's gun culture. . . .This is one of the dangerous side-effects of our gun-loving culture. Police are trained to be on hair-trigger alert against the possibility that someone will pull a gun on them, and as a result they open fire in all sorts of crazy situations. Nervous people with guns are a real danger to those around them, and in America many police are nervous.
A well-armed population leads to police shootings of the unarmed in two ways. One is that police officers have to be constantly vigilant about the possibility that they are facing a gun-wielding suspect. Cleveland police officers shot and killed a 12 year-old boy recently, because they not-entirely-unreasonably thought his toy gun was a real gun. The other, more relevant to the Michael Brown case, is that when civilians are well-armed, police have to be as well. That turns every grappling encounter into a potentially dangerous situation. The officer always has to worry that if he doesn't reach for and use his own gun, the suspect will. In his grand jury testimony, Wilson pointedly claims that at one point Brown put his right hand "under his shirt into his waistband" — i.e., made a motion that could be plausibly construed as reaching for a gun.
The comparison to Japan in particular may be a little off base - Japanese police have hugely sweeping powers that many Americans would never, ever stand for, combined with the general effects of an extremely strong culture of civic duty and deference to authority.
ReplyDeleteThat said, it's always seemed self-evident to me that the more guns you have, the more likely they are to get used. In the presence of other factors, you can of course have relatively large numbers of firearms and low numbers of firearm related crimes (see Canada), or relatively low numbers of firearms and high numbers of firearm related crimes (see Russia), but these are the exceptions, not the norm. (Canada's guns are mostly longarms employed for rural needs rather than criminal purposes, while Russia's high rates of gun crime are chiefly the product of mass corruption and strong criminal organizations such as the Vory operating in the tumultuous post-Soviet climate.)