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Comment by NhanH | Hacker News Reader

> By no means am I a right-wing/vigilante militia supporter, but this type of behavior from the police makes me support having a heavily armed citizenry.

Do you mind elaborate how firearm would help with combating civil forfeiture?

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More dead police officers, and a lesser incentive for the police to rob the commoners, most likely.

EDIT: To the multitude of downvoters and angry replies: I didn't say I agreed! I'm just saying where these arguments usually logically end up.

Of course, more guns does not bring that about but the willingness to kill and rebel against the government by a major part of the population.

... which leads more militarized policing.

Which doesn't work until we get to the point of all-out civil rebellion. The US has a heavily armed citizenry now and this is obviously happening. And drawing a weapon on a police officer will end badly no matter what the cop was doing. And that's not for entirely unreasonable reasons.

You mean more funding for swat teams and heavier militarisation to defend themselves? Which is the only way such a move would be politically spun in this universe.

And this is the core of the problem!!!

You're being downvoted you because what you propose is a self-defeating policy - those who gun down cops are enemy #1 and remove themselves from the equation pretty quickly.

> because what you propose is a self-defeating policy

Once again, I'm not proposing this. I'm answering a question with the honest logical conclusion that some peoples' worldviews take them to.

We'll keep that to ourselves. If you need a touchy-feely PC-approved reason why civil forfeiture leads to a more-armed populace, try this: Armed people don't need the police for immediate physical security. Unarmed people might need police for that (ignoring for a moment the fact police are actually terrible at that particular task), but because of civil forfeiture (among other reasons) they are reluctant to involve police. Therefore civil forfeiture makes unarmed people less secure, theoretically.

[EDIT:] In case I wasn't clear, I'm saying:

  civil forfeiture -> armed populace

I'm not saying:

  armed populace -> less civil forfeiture

You have a heavily armed population (the US has more guns per capita than anywhere else) and you still have terrible police.

...and less safety than in countries with better gun control.

Yes we do have terrible police. Gun ownership doesn't change that, but it does mean you don't have to call the police until there are corpses to be collected. That's only the immediate benefit, because the likelihood of armed resistance to crime is a strong deterrent in the first place.

> Armed people don't need the police for immediate physical security

That seems contrary to evidence, surely. Looking at stats for residential shootings:

"For every time a gun in the home was used in a self-defense or legally justifiable shooting, there were four unintentional shootings, seven criminal assaults or homicides, and 11 attempted or completed suicides."

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/m/pubmed/9715182/

I note that any incident that involves a gun is assumed to be caused by the gun, as though no unarmed person ever were assaulted or committed suicide. That tells me everything I need to know about how conscientious the research is.

Don't even get me started on how suicide has been redefined as pathological, as if nothing in this shitty world could ever lead a rational person to take her own life.

If these researchers cared about public health they would have helped us end the damned drug war a decade ago. As if.

So there may be valid arguments in here, but you're using a bunch of flawed logic in the way you've presented them here:

> I note that any incident that involves a gun is assumed to be caused by the gun, as though no unarmed person ever were assaulted or committed suicide. That tells me everything I need to know about how conscientious the research is.

Yes, they're looking at correlation rather than causation, but looking at real world data that's usually your only option. Dismissing the research on as not 'conscientious' on that basis seems a little weak, perhaps you'd care to support it some?

> If these researchers cared about public health they would have helped us end the damned drug war a decade ago. As if.

This is entirely fallacious... the world doesn't conform to your "if X really cared about Y they would have done Z" narrative. By that same argument no president, no congress, and nobody who approves of the war on drugs, cares about human life.

Edit:

If you prefer not to talk about suicide; how about self-defence... in 2014 (according to FBI data) there were 229 cases (total) where a criminal was justifiably killed by a civilian [1]. To put that in perspective there were 281 mass shootings in 2014... 1,759 people were killed by firearms during arguments [2]... and 1,601 injured in gun-related accidents.

Similarly this study [3] found that carrying a gun increased your chance of being shot by a factor of 4.5.

The whole "armed citizens don't need police" thing may actually be fair... but you're much more likely to need an ambulance.

[1] https://www.fbi.gov/about-us/cjis/ucr/crime-in-the-u.s/2014/...

[2] https://www.fbi.gov/about-us/cjis/ucr/crime-in-the-u.s/2014/...

[3] http://ajph.aphapublications.org/doi/abs/10.2105/AJPH.2008.1...

So there may be valid arguments in here...

Gee, thanks!

Ah yes, we must look under the lamppost. Sure, that's a pressing concern for "professional" "researchers" who must write grants somehow, but that doesn't oblige the rest of us to believe their tenuous constructed bullshit. Correlation might make sense, ceteris paribus, but they're comparing USA to nations of vastly different sizes, locations, and histories. Rather than, say, nations of similar sizes, locations, and histories. We are a high-population colonized nation of the Americas. We're not the only one, but we are the only one that shows up in this "research".

By that same argument...

Indeed. Normal voters have ignorance as an excuse (although that's less tenable as time passes) but every single legislator and drug warrior and surely every social scientist eventually figures out what's going on. Cops still don't join LEAP until they get their pension. Researchers continue to write grants that get funded rather than ask questions that data can possibly answer.

I just noticed the references in your edit. About that last paper: I note that two of the four cites at your link are about the poor methodology used in the paper. Indeed reading the abstract is enough to reveal that no attempt was made to track a carefully randomized population, which is the only statistically valid way to conduct research like this. (Apparently it's not the only way to get a grant.) Rather, they selected a bunch of young dudes who had already been shot and then designated a "control" of people of all ages and genders to which to compare them. Then they made some "adjustments". As if GSW victims aren't more likely to be carrying already, do to their personal risk assessments. Good grief.

> Armed people don't need the police for immediate physical security.

Police don't exist to stop the lone burglar from sneaking into your house. They exist to stop the gang of armed men driving up to your house in a bus.[1] Even small groups of organized and armed criminals can terrorize a large population, armed or not. Police exist to make it unfeasible for such groups to operate in the open.

[1] This actually happened to me, in Bangladesh.

This is a good point, and that's what I was trying to indicate with the "immediate" qualifier. Armed gangs like that are not invisible in an ordered society, they do not appear overnight, and police are well suited to combat them in that context.

Were there any firearms in the house that was robbed? In that neighborhood, would criminals expect the average resident to be armed?

Can't speak for Bangladesh, but in India there is rampant police corruption. Small groups of people gather for collective security.

It becomes dangerous when that small group becomes tainted by religion, as was the case with characters like Dawood Ibrahim.

I don't think either Bangladesh or India qualify as "ordered" in the way that I meant.

Police in the U.S. have no legal duty or obligation to defend anyone from any threat.

"Duty" is a legal term of art which refers to the circumstances under which negligence can give rise to a tort lawsuit. Police don't have a "duty" to defend anyone from any threat in the same way that teachers don't have a "duty" to teach your kids--i.e. you can't allege they negligently failed to act and sue for damages. But the fact there is no duty for the purposes of an action in tort doesn't mean there isn't an institutional obligation and other mechanisms of accountability.

If the police continue to escalate their militarization, and continue to ramp up their asset thievery - let's say for illustration purposes here - to a dramatically greater degree.

What other choice would the population have than to defend themselves against that kind of extreme assault on their liberty and property by what would be an obviously hostile, violent and radically unconstitutional force? The police would become little more than armed bandits at that point, modern pirates. It seems like an outlandish scenario to me, but it may not be if the police asset theft continues to soar as it has been. How about if it's ten times larger ten years from now? Latin America has had plenty of this going on, scenarios where the police have become bandits that plunder the population in numerous ways.

The police operate at the will of the people. They are as heavily armed as they are because the political process highly rewards "tough-on-crime" politicians.

Maybe instead of buying guns we should invest more of our time and resources into the political process.

I thought police were heavily armed for two reasons: the war on drugs and the programs put in place post 9/11.

The events of the last century have all but proven, in my mind, that the political process can do very little to change the political process.

Widespread private firearm ownership, known to the police, cause police to be more respectful when interacting with the public.

It's more of a hedge in case all these ridiculous situations just go off the deep end altogether.

If the the police believed that the average American is well armed and capable of defending their rights, that would change how Police interact with them, reducing the number of bullshit enforcements, such as civil forfeitures.

Those police do believe the average American is possibly well armed.. they live in the same country as everyone else and know what the Second Amendment is. Why do you think they have backup and guns at the ready every time they make a traffic stop?

Why is violence an effective means of coercion by the common citizen, but an unacceptable means of coercion by the state? Surely, if fearing for their lives would keep the police honest, having the people fear for their lives would keep them honest and law abiding as well?

No, it wouldn't. Heck, firearms are a not-infrequent subject of civil forfeiture, so clearly people having firearms doesn't discourage the government from applying forfeiture.

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