• We can have guns just for the good guys
• We can have guns that only approved staff will use
• We can block all the bad people from having guns and it'll be like guns don't exist!
• If we have guns, only the good guys will use them.
Seems like any dangerous technology can follow this mindset. :P
That's not completely true. If bad guys didn't have guns, we'd still want good guys to have them. I don't want police having to take on a guy with knives and a baseball bat, themselves only armed with knives and a baseball bat.
I do. The police shouldn't have access to weaponry that citizens cannot obtain except in very specialized circumstances, like say a particular unit in a city like Detroit or Chicago.
Don't make the mistake of assuming that the police are always the good guys.
You actually can't assume that anyone is always going to be the "good guy", or that anyone else will always be a "bad guy".
And if you could program a smart gun to have a sense of morality, capable of judging between appropriate and inappropriate uses of lethal force, you no longer need a human to carry it around, do you?
If the bad guys can't have guns, good guys can't have them either, because sometimes they are exactly the same people in different circumstances. That's the big hole in good guy vs. bad guy reasoning.
Those cops were very brave, but you're going to be hard pressed to find even a tiny minority of Americans willing to put cop lives in that kind of danger.
The British approach is safer for both officers and the public. By emphasising containment and de-escalation, British officers avoid the kind of chaotic and unpredictable confrontations that lead to fatalities.
Only one British police officer was killed in the line of duty last year - PC David Phillips, who was run over during a pursuit. In the same year, eight American officers were killed by vehicular assault, 36 were fatally shot, three died after being assaulted and two died of accidental gunshot wounds. In 2014, no British police officer was killed on duty.
Even accounting for the difference in population and the prevalence of firearms, there is a substantial disparity. Britain does have armed criminals, but our police are not routinely armed.
There were riots across Britain in 2011, precipitated in large part by the fatal shooting by police of Mark Duggan. Only one other person was shot by the police in 2011. In the same year, the FBI estimated that 400 Americans were killed by police officers, but no official count exists.
There is considerable interest amongst US police forces in learning from the British approach, as shown in this documentary:
• We can have guns just for the good guys • We can have guns that only approved staff will use • We can block all the bad people from having guns and it'll be like guns don't exist! • If we have guns, only the good guys will use them.
Seems like any dangerous technology can follow this mindset. :P