The legal justification is a perceived threat which doesn’t have to be actual and is an objective measure. I don’t have a problem with it. However in society there exist biases which cause people to perceive a greater threat when interacting with those who don’t look like them. It’s natural human behavior. There is no simple fix. If there were it would have already been addressed.
This is true but reasonable bias is a component of fear and in play for a self-defense justification. For example, if a 100 pound 80-year-old grandmother expressed a fear of a 6’3 255-pound biker in leathers, that would very well be a reasonable fear if that biker was acting aggressively. There is an understandably real disproportionality of force between the two. Which matters as well. It’s more complicated than armed or unarmed.
The first step in fixing it is acknowledging this natural human behavior exists.
I don’t think it is strictly a police problem. Police in the United States are far far more likely to encounter someone with a gun than any other country. It makes perfect sense that they are armed. We have to deal with a culture of guns in the United States that other countries don’t have. Police have to be prepared to meet any potential threat and in the United States it is pretty standard for that threat to include a gun. Certainly more so than other countries. This emphasizes our natural prejudices around what we perceive as a threat since the result of a misjudgement when a gun is involved is often lethal. The same prejudices exist in other countries, but their policing methods and range of realistic threats is different and so the outcomes of that prejudice are not as severe.
The 2nd amendment leads to a massive amount of gun deaths.
It was more of a joke than a "straw man" lol. Honestly answer this, do you think the widespread ownership of guns contributes to the obscene amount of gun deaths in the US?
You have to look to other countries to be able to say. Yes, some places that have strict gun laws have led to fewer deaths, but there are also instances where it leads to genocide and mass killing by the government totalling in the hundreds of millions.
It would be helpful if you didn’t just lump everything together into gun deaths. People bent on suicide will find any way available to kill themselves. Guns are actually a poor way to go about it.
Slightly extreme language but I get your point.
I see your point, it's a clear oversimplification for sure.
Ok. I think the whole moral erosion societal decay thing is a little overdone personally. People have always been like this, just easier to see their tweets now.
Not to stray to far off-topic, but I think a lot of that "moral erosion" is due to spiritual oppression.
Depression is strictly an American thing?
You don't think that being more visible perpetuates it? It seems to me that it makes things more socially acceptable that otherwise would not be.
