U.S. Police Should Not Carry Guns

They kill too many people

One of many scenes that stood out for me in the excellent HBO science fiction series Watchmen was when a police officer asked permission from headquarters to use his gun. The gun was held in a locking device in his car and couldn’t be unlocked without approval. Because of a glitch, the lock didn’t release and he was killed by the white supremacist he had pulled over.

Could that happen? Of course. But in the real world, police officers are killing citizens at an alarming rate — not the other way around.

It doesn’t look pretty because it’s hard to represent such disparate numbers in a graph. In 2018, according to Fatal Force, police officers in the U.S. killed 1,165 people. In England and Wales, they killed 8. In Northern Ireland, 1.

Something similar happened in the Burlingame, California neighborhood where I raised three children, but the outcome was worse. A mother called his psychiatrist for help when her mentally ill teenage son started banging his head on the wall. The psychiatrist told her to call police. When police arrived, he ran out of the house with a kitchen knife and they shot him dead.

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