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reducesuffering

Is the rest of the world loaded up to the gills with weapons? There's 1.2 guns per citizen...

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Well, that's because we have to protect ourselves from SWAT teams!

Indiana just enshrined that right into law.

https://theweek.com/articles/474702/indiana-law-that-lets-ci...

Good? As a Californian who doesn't own a gun and hasn't fired one in 20 years, I'm unlikely to take advantage of that law, but I appreciate that it exists. A SWAT assault that isn't preceded by presenting a valid warrant is just a heavily-armed home invasion, and home owners absolutely should be able to respond to those. That was presumably already legal, but if "enshrining" it into law as you put it makes it pointedly obvious to the police that they can be legally shot dead if they don't follow a safe, legal procedure, great. Maybe swatting will be less of a thing then...

Edit: wow, just saw this part:

> Why did Indiana push this law? The state Supreme Court had previously ruled that citizens had no legal right to resist police officers, even in a case of unlawful entry

What a crazy ruling. I guess this law is checks and balances in action in two ways...

If you think about it in practical terms, I don’t think this is a good law. What’s going to happen if a house owner is opening fire at a heavily armed police team that is conducting an illegal raid. Is the police going to stand down and reassess the legality of their entry? Or are they going to shoot back? And what’s the likely outcome? Dead owner and dead police. Great.

Now, if you’d really want to dissuade the police from making illegal raids, make them liable for all damages, slap on penalties and put the burden of proof on them. Police entered and cannot prove it was legal? Pay fine, repair damage. At the same time lower the bar for personal liability for the officers: Can’t demonstrate that they did at least the basic due diligence? Pay out of their own pocket.

> Now, if you’d really want to dissuade the police from making illegal raids...

Why not both?

I don't think it's necessarily wise for a homeowner to open fire when outnumbered like that, but it's their right to make that choice when armed intruders break into their home. (And really without the whole knock, announcement, warrant thing the home owner doesn't know the intruders are police.) Making this clear shouldn't exclude these other excellent ideas.

The police dont pay fines or repair anything - tax payers do. But cops do enter the houses where they might find someone that answers fire. Only the latter is a dissuasive.

The funny thing is, while "to protect yourself from government tyranny" is the favorite phrase of gun enthusiasts and gun lobbies in this country, whenever a citizen uses a gun in justifiable defense against police (the most recent notable one being Breonna Taylor's case) these same people side with the police every time.

Some politicians have staked themselves on this issue publicly. Can't recall the name, but a GOP candidate explicitly said that he would shoot the police if the entered with a no-knock warrant into his home.

One challenge is that citizens side with the police in court.

It doesn't even get to court very often, thanks to police investigating themselves, and DAs who are beholden to them one way or another.

> these same people side with the police every time.

Not all of us.

This is inaccurate. I know many people on both sides of the gun debate and I don't know a single person who doesn't want police reform regarding no-knock raids. I don't know a single gun owner who supports the police in the Breonna Taylor incident.

The overwhelmingly vast majority of "protect yourself from government tyranny" types want to massively curtail police powers.

> The overwhelmingly vast majority of "protect yourself from government tyranny" types want to massively curtail police powers

I find this hard to believe. Back the blue, blue lives matter, thin blue line people are propagated by gun enthusiasts who use nice slogans like “government tyranny” to justify their positions in a shallow and emotional way. There’s no actual belief in government tyranny, otherwise they wouldn’t stand with the law enforcement arm of the government’s elevated agents.

You seem to be saying that if the majority of "back the blue" folks are gun enthusiasts, that means the majority of gun enthusiasts are "back the blue" folks. I'm not sure if either is true, but if it were, you still couldn't infer one from the other.

Weird that we can't vote for that then. Seems like you may be counting wrong.

There's an old saying in Tennessee — I know it's in Texas, probably in Tennessee — that says, "The only way to stop a bad guy from swatting you is a good guy with his own personal SWAT team."

Own a musket for home defense, since that's what the founding fathers intended. Four ruffians break into my house. "What the devil?" As I grab my powdered wig and Kentucky rifle. Blow a golf ball sized hole through the first man, he's dead on the spot. Draw my pistol on the second man, miss him entirely because it's smoothbore and nails the neighbors dog. I have to resort to the cannon mounted at the top of the stairs loaded with grape shot, "Tally ho lads" the grape shot shreds two men in the blast, the sound and extra shrapnel set off car alarms. Fix bayonet and charge the last terrified rapscallion. He Bleeds out waiting on the police to arrive since triangular bayonet wounds are impossible to stitch up. Just as the founding fathers intended.

Dear Diary,

Today the pasta was good.

And yet those same people you mock, using only the tools you described, threw off the yoke of the largest world power at the time.

Amongst the reasons they did, were situations eerily similar to what we call "swatting" (and no-knock warrants), which were some motivations behind the fourth amendment.

An amendment that we have, through twisted legal interpretations and arguments for expediency, managed to largely de-fang (civil forfeiture, I'm looking at you).

He graduated top of his class in the Navy Seals and was involved in numerous secret raids on Al-Quaeda, with over 300 confirmed kills. I think he knows what’s up.

> using only the tools you described

Well, that and the French navy.

There's evidence the framers of the Constitution intended for citizens to be able to own weapons that gave the federal government pause if the federal government decided to overstep its bounds.

Specifically, even in 1787 it was seeming likely that there was a good chance that at some point the federal government was going to abolish slavery by force, and the framers of the Constitution needed the southern states on board with the Constitution's stronger central government vs. the Articles of Confederation.

So, they probably intended weapons of some proportionate power compared to contemporary military weapons, but the ultimate underlying motivations are suspect.

On the other hand, I could imagine a world where in 1787 alcohol and/or marijuana were legal in some states and illegal in others and the framers were worried about federal troops imposing national drug policy on drugs that never crossed state lines. In that case, it seems more reasonable, which I guess lends respectability to their reasoning at a medium level of abstraction.

I have a few questions about the relevance of this.

> 1.2 guns per citizen

After 1 gun, do guns truly become more dangerous? For someone opening a door, I don't think handgun vs AR vs shotgun is a very meaningful distinction - you're going to die if you get shot in the face

> loaded up to the gills

Isn't it true that one of the top arguments used against gun control that criminals will have the weapons anyways?

Therefore, as a LEO being summoned to a potential crime scene, isn't it true that they would behave in accordance with the person being a potential criminal, and therefore living outside of "guns per citizen" statistics? And therefore isn't the global approach to SWATting likely done without respect to the local environment, but instead in accordance with best practices of deescalation and safety?

I look forward to hearing you expand your thoughts.

A small group of Americans actually own guns, maybe 20%. So yes, the average gun owner has more like 5 guns.

As for entering the property, if there’s five people and one gun, that’s a lot different to five people and thirty guns.

Most of the SWATing issues are in states where households have 30-40% rates, many with as high as 55-65% https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Estimated_number_of_civilian_g...

It's best to look at households because children generally don't own their own gun, and often if there is a couple, only one of them will own a gun (usually the man).

44% of US households have at least one firearm in the house.

Not "a small group".

In terms of individuals of all ages, it's 32% of all individuals owning guns -- 45% of all men own a gun but only 19% of all women own a gun.

Therefore the population where it's unusual to own a gun is single women. Single men are also less likely to own a gun than married men.

If we look at those who are married, 52% of all married couples live in a household with guns.

https://news.gallup.com/poll/264932/percentage-americans-own...

Your stats seemed low, so I looked it up on this Gallup poll. The data is from two years ago, but it probably hasn't changed much.

32% of US adults say they own a gun. 44% of adults say they live in a house that has at least one gun.

https://news.gallup.com/poll/264932/percentage-americans-own...

However, I agree with your overall sentiment -- the distribution is far from uniform.

You mean 44% of Americans have more like 3 guns, by the official record, which vaguely addresses my weakest point I suppose. Not sure this does anything to justify the US approach to policing

Switzerland is, yeah. No such issue there, however.

Switzerland is about 1/5 the guns per capita. If you look at US state gun prevalence, it reliably correlates to the where higher numbers of police are killed https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Estimated_number_of_civilian_g...

Chicken/egg problem. Who escalated first?

Probably solvable by de-escalating both at the same time.

You can solve this by not giving police guns in the first place.

While true, the culture of guns in Switzerland is very different to the US.

People spread this detail without knowing that the Swiss instead strickly control access to ammunition.

I’m unsure why people think this is true. If you have the ability to buy a gun in Switzerland you can buy any amount of ammo just as easily.

The difference is strong regulations disallowing carrying/transporting loaded weapons and enforcing storage requirements as well as a very different gun culture without the emphasis on handguns for self-protection.

Ammunition is tightly controlled in Switzerland as far as I understand. Having guns is not that helpful without some ammunition. Most people are not going to be prepared to produce ammunition

You need a permit to buy ammunition in Switzerland, just as you need a permit to buy guns. But the permit is available if you do not have a criminal record. Ammunition is not more tightly controlled than guns, both are controlled, but not as tightly as in places like New York or California in the U.S.

There are also government subsidized shooting ranges that do not require these permits.

Buying guns requires a permit (and a background check and maybe a chat with the local police department) but to buy ammunition in Switzerland you don't need a permit. Just a clean background check that you can request online.

As for Switzerland: "military service is required; and military firearms are kept in homes—which historians credit for Germany never invading Switzerland during World War II."

Far smaller population than the USA, and loads more variables to consider when comparing the two. But at least one country gets it pretty Damn Right with Guns!

You're suggesting that police officers would face a significant danger merely knocking on the door of a gun owner's home, which is silly. Just because someone has a gun doesn't mean they're going to unload on anyone knocking on their door, much less a uniformed police officer.

Also: 2/3rds of Americans don't own a gun, and only 44% even live in a house with a gun.

Ever notice that only in a very small number of cases does a "swatting" result in any danger to the officers, such as the homeowner shooting an officer? The number of times this has happened is in the single digits. Hint: that's because there's little danger to police responding to these sorts of calls.

In fact, there's very little danger to police officers in the US, period. They have a murder rate lower than the general population, because people know that cops don't give a shit about when you or I are murdered (nation-wide the clearance rate for homicides is abysmal, one of the lowest in the developed world) but if a cop is killed, the killer will be correctly identified, found, and arrested within hours.

Being a cop in the US doesn't even rank in the top ten in terms of deaths on the job. Retail workers and cab drivers have a far higher homicide-on-the-job rate;

Pre-COVID the #1 killer of police, overwhelmingly, was traffic collisions, suicide, and heart disease.

During/after COVID, the #1 killer, despite police getting first-in-line access to the vaccine, was/is COVID. Completely preventable.

The reason these "swattings" are so dangerous is because police show up expecting a dangerous situation, confrontation, even though it's incredibly rare.

That's a solvable problem it would seem? It's either that or more discipline.

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