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Excellent story on Darren Wilson

Discussion in 'Sports and News' started by Alma, Aug 3, 2015.

  1. Alma

    Alma Well-Known Member

    Oh, I strongly doubt you'd have more dead cops. You'd have fewer dead cops. The minute you disarm cops, killing them becomes akin to killing a social worker, who also don't have guns. When cops get shot at, they shoot back. That leads to shootouts. No gun to shoot back with, no shootout.

    Policing and punishment in America is a media relations disaster and a major drain on public finances. It's broken, badly. In many major cities, it's little more than an action movie with drug cartels, drug dealers and drug users. Solutions without major creativity won't work. If all of what we're doing is in service of preventing death, we may want to consider some other ways of doing that, because we're not preventing much.
     
  2. Dick Whitman

    Dick Whitman Well-Known Member

    This is an interesting thought experiment, and I'm going to have to devote a little time to thinking it through before eventually responding.
     
  3. Alma

    Alma Well-Known Member

    Speaking of the mob, it's worth noting that only once in record history have cop deaths exceeded 300 in a year. As bad as the 1970s were - and it was close to lawless in many major American cities, far worse than now, not that you'd know it - cop deaths only exceeded 300 in 1930.

    The start of the Great Depression. The height of prohibition.
     
  4. Vombatus

    Vombatus Well-Known Member

    Alma, interesting.

    Seems rather unAmerican though. The whole country is supposed to be the wild, wild west. Chaos.

    And then there is that thing called debate Thursday night, which will be chaos too.
     
  5. MisterCreosote

    MisterCreosote Well-Known Member

    "The cops shouldn't shoot back" is very different from "the cops can't shoot back."

    We can't ask cops to stand in the line of fire and protect us with no means of protecting themselves.

    I'm as anti-gun as anyone, but cops should be armed as long as cops being shot at remains a possibility.
     
  6. JC

    JC Well-Known Member

    How can you ask a cop in a country that allows its citizens to legally conceal weapons to not be armed?
     
    Hokie_pokie and LongTimeListener like this.
  7. Songbird

    Songbird Well-Known Member

    It's an absurd notion.
     
  8. SpeedTchr

    SpeedTchr Well-Known Member

    Great idea, Alma. And by great, I mean absolutely the worst idea I have heard in a long time.
    Police are armed in Canada, Germany, France, Spain, and on and on.
    It's not the arming of the police that is the problem. It is the training and recruitment process, combined with a host of societal ills.
     
  9. Dick Whitman

    Dick Whitman Well-Known Member

    Right. Alma says that people will view unarmed police as akin to "social workers." But social workers don't have arrest power.
     
  10. Dick Whitman

    Dick Whitman Well-Known Member

    I also think that it is misguided to look at the total hours spent on certain duties related to the job as de facto evidence of each task's relative importance.

    I'll compare to playing the guitar:

    It took me about five minutes how to learn to play an open G chord. It will take me months to be able to confidently play and solo out of the five positions of the minor pentatonic scale with some level of competence. Ultimately, the open G chord is a lot more important to an acoustic rhythm player than soloing out of the minor pentatonic scale. You use it all the time, the chord. Nearly every damned song. You couldn't function without it, even around the camp fire.

    But it would be absolutely absurd to suggest it would follow that I should spend as much time learning to play the open G chord as the five scale positions. Some things are simply harder, even if they are less important.
     
  11. poindexter

    poindexter Well-Known Member

    I think the point trying to be made is that the G cord (communication and de escalation) are as hard as the other stuff, and should be practiced more.
     
  12. Baron Scicluna

    Baron Scicluna Well-Known Member

    Why would any criminal be deterred by a cop if the cop isn't armed? They can just start robbing people by gunpoint at will and they won't have to fear getting caught.
     
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