Really? Europe has had low rates of private gun ownerships for many decades. However, police has yet to turn into the Gestapo (consider for instance the UK, where the majority of the police force does not even carry firearms).
On the other hand, it must be a lot easier to justify the use of snipers and military vehicles by the police when many civilians carry (possibly concealed) weaponry.
If anyone is curious about numbers. In 2012, out of 134,100 police officers in England and Wales [1], 6,756 are authorised to carry firearms [2]. So roughly 5%.
Even if a police officer is authorised to carry a firearm, they must be authorised to used it. The same document states that firearms were authorised in 12,550 times in that year, and only used 5 times.
Don't miss the very interesting historical perspective in the middle of the article:
> Arming the force would, say opponents, undermine the principle of policing by consent - the notion that the force owes its primary duty to the public, rather than to the state, as in other countries.
> This owes much to the historical foundations of British criminal justice, says Peter Waddington, professor of social policy at the University of Wolverhampton.
> "A great deal of what we take as normal about policing was set out in the early 19th Century," he says.
> "When Robert Peel formed the Metropolitan Police there was a very strong fear of the military - the masses feared the new force would be oppressive."
> A force that did not routinely carry firearms - and wore blue rather than red, which was associated with the infantry - was part of this effort to distinguish the early "Peelers" from the Army, Waddington says.
That's widely different from the Robocop mentality at play in the States (from what I can tell from the article).
The actual Gestapo was only 70 years ago. I'm referring to a longer historical time frame. Obviously most of Western Europe has been stable since World War II.
What time period do you have in mind then? I don't really see, say, during the middle ages, or further back during the Antiquity, a period during which the population was helpless in the face of state security forces and widely oppressed.
For real, does anyone actually thing civilian gun ownership could ever actually play a role in protest confrontations like this? If one dude started firing at the police so many bystanders would be in the line of fire. And just forget about an organized effort, that would turn into a massacre. The only path forward is law and regulation that mitigates this militarization of our nation's police. This is soooo obviously oppression and disservice not service and protection. Just goes to show you how racist this nation still is, can't imagine this same response to protesters in a white suburban neighborhood.
> For real, does anyone actually thing civilian gun ownership could ever actually play a role in protest confrontations like this?
I think it would absolutely play a role in deterring confrontations like this. I don't want government and civilians to fight. I want government to fear fighting civilians.
