Don't forget

Even if they're only suspected of being armed, the police always shoot, regardless of how old they might be or what they're doing. That is, if you look threatening to them. If you look like an average middle class white man, you'll probably be fine, even if you are carrying.

It would be nice if the police didn't automatically assume everyone near them is a potential life-ending threat.

@grimreaper, like the post said, if you’re from a country where almost nobody is armed, it doesn’t seem weird or suspicious. I could easily see myself making the same mistake if I ever were to visit the US

It would be, I'm sure that the many many many people who have been wrongly shot or threatened by police would agree with you on that.

It'd be nice if ambush killings weren't one of the leading causes of death for officers, with traffic stops gone wrong being in the list too, but we don't live in a perfect world.

Agreed. But paranoia is a real thing.

You're only paranoid if they aren't out to get you. Even then, I'd rather be judged by twelve than carried by six, and I feel most LEOs would agree.

No i mean the cop becomes paranoid.

You're only paranoid if people aren't out to kill you. Cops are highly visible uniforms that people actively target, often luring them out and shooting them in the back of the head, or they pull a gun during a routine stop, or just drive right over him.
You cannot accuse a person a paranoia when people really do want them dead.

The best numbers I can find are from 2015, ambush killing were up by ~60%, putting them at just under 2% of officer deaths. The increase was do to 3 more than usual. Ambush is not anywhere near a leading cause of officer death as far as I can tell.

I understand that in that sort of scenario a cop would feel the need to open fire, but the fact is that in most other countries, police shootings are a rarity. Police officers don't fear for their lives like in America because that sort of thing just doesn't happen. I think this scenario says more about America than the cop or citizen

Guess where ambush killing of police officers practically never happen? In pretty much every civilized nation on earth with something that rhymes with Bun Patrol. Which somebody will soon explain is purely correlative.

@guest
https://www.npr.org/2017/07/06/535732144/police-fatalities-on-the-rise
@finntrino
The United States of America is a nation where diverse peoples and cultures live near eachother, where people have inalienable rights, and where the military or feds cannot act to aid local forces in anything less than a national or interstate situation. We have systems and scenarios that simply don't exist anyplace else because of that, so we need to have our own solutions, rather than emulate places that simply aren't comparable.

Using methods that work for other countries wouldn't work for us because we have such a different culture and are so much larger.

Yea, that does totally not sound totally brainwashed. "Uh, we're so different that it's inevitable for us to be gun crazy and kill each other and ourselves in ten- to twenty fold compared to anywhere else". I wonder how that was before the NRA got hijacked by lunatics and gun manufacturers.

@grimreaper
It would be simpler if we were like the British and had no right to privacy, limited speech, compromised due process, and could have special forces handle criminals instead of SWAT, but that's not a door we should want to open.

Do Americans really have a right to privacy?

Yes we do

Enough of a right that any information illegally collected is inadmissible, and we can press charges in the event of any warrantless seizure of assets or papers. Among other things.

Which is also the case in almost all western nations...
The US needs to change its opinion that it is somehow different from the rest of the world. Australia has a higher diversity of culture and it worked for us

The rest of the world needs to grow up and realise that America is different from them. See, I can do it too.

I love it how so many debates on guns in the USA end like "because we're different" because, yeah, that's the point. There's lots of countries with pretty widespread gun possession but nowhere you can a) buy a semi-auto before you can buy a beer, b) can easily buy a semi-auto, like, at all, and c) are as likely to get killed by a gun. That's totally lunatic and the complete ignorance to seeing the relation of those facts has helped to turn a wonderful country full of possibilities into a dystopia full of loose cannons. That's way different indeed.

The one thing people always either ignore/dismiss is the fact that if you get shot in the US chances are it will be by either 1. A cop or 2. A criminal with an illegally acquired gun.

Or that we aren't a single state. We have 50 state governments the feds need to play ball with, and different parts of the country, even different parts of the same state, have very different needs, wants, and lifestyles.
Why punish a collector or hobbyist in Small Town, Montana for the crimes committed by repeat felons in Oakland?

Plus there's people like me and my kin that use semi-automatic rifles to hunt. If both me and my grandfather get a deer in each season that's a lot of food on our table. Trying to take guns away from us is trying to taking food away from us.

I watched a fantastic documentary on this topic that I strongly recommend everyone watch with an open mind, even if you end up disagreeing. Bowling for Columbine is a great film that encapsulates the issues with American gun culture, and why the arguments that you're different from the rest of the world fall apart. And regulation of guns is by no means taking them away. To ban guns entirely or even to ban all semi auto's would be a stupid move, its all about appropriate regulation.

Pick literally any other source. For fuck's sake, literally anyone is more credible than Moore.

Still recommend the watch

Very few arguments can justify taking guns away from hunters. We'd have a lot less money to spend on things we need if we weren't able to get part of our food from hunting.

Maybe even less arguments can justify allowing Hunters to use a semi-auto. Who wants to take away guns in general? Do you know real, dedicated hunters advocating the use of AR type rifles?

The only difference between a hunting rifle and an AR is chassis. It's a scary media buzz word. I am a real, dedicated hunter. My grandfather, step uncle, uncle, and cousins are real dedicated hunters. I use either a semi auto 223 or a bolt action 308 depending which is working better. With aiming time I can fire both just as fast and they both hold 5 rounds counting the one in the chamber.

Don't bother arguing with halfdead. You'll get nowhere, fast

"The only difference between a hunting rifle and an AR is chassis." - nearly all psychopaths on a killing spree see this very, very different. How comes?

Take the m14 for example. There is a variant with a wood stock and there is a variant with a synthetic plastic stock. The latter is banned in California while the former isn't, despite being the same exact rifle. It's pretty much banned only for looking scary.

"Nearly all psychopaths on a killing spree see this very very differently" for the same reason you seem to. Media makes it seem better for killing. Plus there's the fact a psychopath on a spree will kill on compulsion in a specific way because their fucked up brain forces them to. Knife killing sprees done by crazy mother fuckers are also fairly common in comparison to semi auto rifles. An "AR" has the same innards as a hunting rifle. It's just got a scary chassis and bad media reputation.

It's the pitbull of rifles. Maybe that's why I love it so much?

The pitbull of rifles is the bullpup. Back loaded magazine? That has to be military grade it looks so scary and the tv said ARs are bad and that's a not normal AR so it must be super bad.

I would love a bullpup

I like the look of the Tavor SAR. It comes in .300 BLK, 9mm , and 5.56, plus it's Israeli design so it's probably safe to assume it's a nice gun.

Israel doesn't fuck around, that's for sure

Sadly guns cost money and I don't really have much of that.

You folks have no idea how severely damaged you sound to any sane person.

I'm already set to get a few in the coming years. An AR-15, Glock 23, M-700 SB (modified for a lefty shooter), and an old 30-30 if I play my cards right.

I'll take insane over lack of sense any day. Buying into media scaremongering is a fatal flaw my good sir.

There will always be hard men ready to do violence on the behalf of good men.

I think it’s less getting out of the car than it is reaching into your back pocket while walking towards an officer.

Exactly. The officer doesn't know that you're getting your wallet out. For all he knows, you could be pulling a gun or knife out.

Getting out of the car in first place is a bad move. It's a sign of impatience and irrability. Not enough to warrant force, but definitely enough to put a cop on edge. Especially since it takes the initiative away from them and makes it so that they have to keep track of you while also running your tags, checking the area, and keeping dispatch informed.
Did you know that officers are responsible for the safety of whoever they stop for the duration of the stop?