> Are you arguing that the police are more likely to kill people at random in areas with higher amounts of gun ownership?
Cops have to make split second decisions with their own lives on the line. In a country where it's very likely that the person they're interacting with in a tense situation could be armed with a gun, it's going to make them more likely to shoot.
Perhaps not quite so relevant to this particular case, as the caller said the person was armed, but I think this would have played out differently in a lot of other countries.
There are other countries with similarly high rates of gun ownership and divergently lower rates of police firearm deaths.
The problem is in the police culture towards discharging a firearm, not the greater ownership of guns. American society bears much of the blame for lionizing cops instead of scrutinizing them.
Many cases of police officers killing innocent civilians involved civilians who were either fleeing, submitting, or already subdued and pinned down. Cops in the US tend to be exonerated for using deadly force, even when the victim could not arguably have endangered others.
Cops have to make split second decisions with their own lives on the line. In a country where it's very likely that the person they're interacting with in a tense situation could be armed with a gun, it's going to make them more likely to shoot.
Perhaps not quite so relevant to this particular case, as the caller said the person was armed, but I think this would have played out differently in a lot of other countries.