#4. More Gun Freedom = More Police Shootings
Sorry, Second Amendment, but you're really fucking things up for us. Other countries don't seem to have this problem -- you never hear about cops in the UK accidentally shooting a kid for holding a toy gun, mainly because they rarely shoot anyone at all. This decade, England has averaged one deadly shooting a year, with none in 2013. That's despite the fact that English cops fired guns a whopping three times that year. All of them combined, that is.
Also in 2013, Iceland police shot a guy for the first time ever. Meanwhile, Germany and Australia had six cop-related deaths, and some people in Canada are currently scandalized that they've been averaging an estimated 25 deaths a year. Even accounting for population, and even if we go with the FBI's conservative (read: bullshit) statistic of 400 or so killings a year, US cops are still insanely prolific in this area. So what's the difference? It's not like these other countries don't have crime, racism, or police corruption -- shit, Europe probably invented those things.
But more importantly, they've also had troubles with guns. Like America, most of the countries we mentioned have had big gun massacres in the past 25 years. Unlike America, they've actually done something about it. In Australia, for example, 35 people were killed by a mentally ill gunman in 1996, and they reacted by immediately passing stricter laws that forced gun owners to surrender some types of firearms. We'll remind you that this is a country where saying "But what if a giant crocodile shows up in my living room?!" isn't bullshit.
For Canada, it was a 1989 massacre that made them create a registry of gun owners and require extensive background checks, plus a 28-day wait before you can hold your precious death dispenser in your hands. School shootings in Germany (2002) and the UK (1996) made them heavily restrict and outright ban the sale of handguns to regular people, respectively. And it's working! According to a Harvard study, America's murder rate is 15 times higher than countries with tighter gun laws -- Australia had 13 gun massacres in the 18 years before they changed the law, and none in the 18 years that followed. Gee, it's starting to look an awful lot like having fewer guns around means having fewer gun-related tragedies.
And of course, that also changes the disposition police officers have toward you. English bobbies can afford to go on patrol with basically no means of self-defense except tasers and those pointy hats, but American cops are trained to be afraid of us because we might have guns. And obviously we can't just get rid of our guns now, because they are dang cool and awes-- uh, protection. We need them for protection, yeah. Lord knows the cops aren't going to help you in an emergency; they're too busy shooting people who might have guns.
Holy shit, guns are turning America into a fucking John Carpenter film.
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