Our (police) gun problem
Where are the police when you need them to help end gun violence
If the day ends in Y, then there has been another shooting in America. It could be violence at a school, a workplace, a drive-by, or a police officer killing a citizen. Guns are a problem, and the problem isn’t going away. Problems don’t go away when you do little to solve them.
Four days ago, an officer shot the unarmed Black 20-year old father, Daunte Wright, once in the chest, killing him. On Monday in Knoxville, a school shooting left a school resource officer wounded from friendly fire and the “possibly armed” Black 17-year old student, Anthony J. Thompson Jr., dead. That’s just from the past few days and just high profile cases that made national news. The Mapping Police Violence database reports there were only 18 days in 2020 where police did not kill someone.
During the pandemic, Americans who buy guns bought more guns. Californians who own guns made up 57% of the people who added to their gun collection, while 43% went to new gun-owning households who are at much higher risk of suicide. Deadly weapons are everywhere, and the answer to gun violence is not more guns.
What are the people who keep the peace doing about all this violence? Between being held responsible for excessive use of force, negligent shootings, shooting the mentally ill, and being shot or killed themselves, why aren’t the police on our side helping pass safe gun laws?
Are the police less affected by gun violence?
As far as causes of death, on-the-job gunfire does rank much lower for police officers than the general public. A 2015 study found that Americans had a 1/315 lifetime possibility of being killed by a gun assault. There are more than 800,000 sworn law enforcement officers now serving in the United States. If you factor a 25-year career on the force and use 45 deaths by gunfire a year, that’s only a 1/711 career probability of being killed by gunfire.
However, there isn’t some good guy with a gun myth at play, such as “police officers carry guns themselves and must be scaring people from shooting them.” When factoring in police suicide by gun — there are still plenty of self-inflicted police deaths. Police Executive Forum reports that “the risk of suicide among police officers is 54 percent greater than among American workers in general.” If local governments and police agencies cared about reducing gun violence, they would have to look at how their use of guns among their ranks might remove a significant source of gun deaths.
Do the police fear we’ll throw out their hobbies with other deadly weapons?
Millions of Americans own rifles and shotguns for hunting and sport shooting, including many police. For now, let’s assume that most of those rifles and shotguns are fired only for their intended purpose of hunting in America, despite Chekhov’s warning.
Most of the tragedies we see on the news involve lightweight semi-automatic rifles and handguns. The National Rifle Association of a more reasonable era that truly represented sporting uses would agree that you don’t need Teflon-coated bullets to kill a deer. Many of those semi-automatic rifles were banned but are now back on the market because George W. Bush failed to renew the Federal Assault weapon ban. We lived without them before, and we can surely do it again.
Do the police decide who gets to have a gun in America?
Jennifer Carlson interviewed eighty police chiefs across the country for her book “Policing the Second Amendment.” She researched gun licensing processes and how their regulation informs policing. Carlson found a paradox that characterizes the state of widespread civilian gun access alongside a system of gun criminalization aimed primarily at people of color.
Even Americans who support gun control turn to the police as enforcers of town policies, but the police themselves disproportionately support gun rights over gun control. Gun criminalization is aimed primarily at people of color, and it informs and justifies how police pursue enforcement. The police, in turn, pursue aggressive enforcement of gun laws unevenly, trying to determine the “good guys” from the “bad guys.”
We can not talk about gun violence in America without acknowledging that many of our laws are racist and unjust.
Are guns and being a police officer intrinsically linked?
We’ve all seen the statistics that the United States has one of the highest gun death rates than other high-income countries. However, many countries do not require police to carry firearms unless the situation merits it (like an active threat). For example, police in Iceland, Ireland, New Zealand, Norway, and the UK (minus Northern Ireland) do not carry. These countries have gun-homicide rates markedly lower on average than countries with armed police forces. Their police forces have adopted a philosophy of policing by consent. Policing by consent means the police officer is a citizen in a uniform. By contrast, in America, we have privileged and shielded officers from liability and afforded them special charges for things like “assaulting an officer,” which carries a longer sentence than assaulting a citizen. By removing guns from officers, perhaps we can go back to seeing them as peers, here to help as opposed to gun-wielding super citizens.
Maybe they can’t picture a world without guns?
We don’t know for sure why the police won’t protect themselves and others when it’s so clear that things aren’t going to get better without sensible legislation. There seem to be two major points when we wade into more profound arguments: a strict interpretation of the Second Amendment and a personal affinity for guns.
The Second Amendment argument, we could be here all week. Proliferation is the easiest way to see that the Second Amendment has already outlived its usefulness. Citizens can’t buy a tank or a missile defense system—the FAA has imposed software restrictions to control consumer drones. Cooler heads prevailed over a century after the Second Amendment passed when owning an automobile became possible. States recognized that to operate something with that much force and potential destructive ability, training and licensing were necessary. I can’t imagine any police officer truly wishing that people who owned weapons, not have at least that same amount of training and accountability.
A 2014 study of rural law enforcement found that officers were pessimistic about gun control laws' effectiveness. However, when asked about more specific gun control measures (i.e., license to own, training classes), they showed support but expressed that guns are an essential part of a rural upbringing. If someone has a cultural link to a piece of their childhood they feel nostalgia for, it may be hard to convince them to give that up, but we have to try. Noted home organization and de-clutter expert Peter Walsh spends a great deal of time convincing people that the stack of National Geographic magazines passed down from their departed grandfather is not their grandfather.
Maybe they’re more afraid of guns than they’d like to admit?
Watching the recent footage of the aggressive stop of a Black Army lieutenant was upsetting for several reasons. Compliance and unearned respect are what those police officers expected. De-escalation techniques and a calm, cool head were required and weren’t present. What drives an officer to behave that way? Is it Fear? Entitlement? Racism? Maybe it’s all of the above, but no matter what the situation called for, it did not require a gun (or pepper spray) to resolve. Police and gun reform are needed now. If we lived in an America without handguns and semi-automatic weapons, we could be more sure that traffic stops were safe. Ask your local peace officer or chief if they would still do their job if they weren’t required to carry a gun. Then ask what they will do to help us become a country where they don’t need one.
