Forget 'defund the police'. the US needs more cops

More cops? Better mental health? Just fewer bloody guns? Seeing others as people not NPC's? Opinions vary.

[article] you find that America loses around 45,000 people every year to gun violence. It’s a tremendous waste of life, resources and potential, and yet we’ve simply become used to it.

For 2024, the latest complete year in these figures, U.S. firearm deaths broke down as follows:

    Suicide: 27,593

    Homicide: 15,364

    Legal intervention by law enforcement: 636

    Unintentional/accidental: 450

    Undetermined intent: 404

    Total: 44,447. Pew Research Center

The data suggests a mental health crisis, not a gun availability crisis.

I would like the author to explain how more police officers are going to prevent suicides, since the data shows that to be the largest segment of the problem.

[Q] Does the number of police officers in a community prevent suicides by firearm ? is there any correlation between more police officers per citizen in a community, and fewer suicides ?

[duck.ai] There’s no convincing evidence that communities with more police officers per resident have fewer suicides—by firearm or overall. Research hasn’t established police staffing density as a suicide-prevention measure. Police can intervene in individual crises, but that doesn’t show that simply increasing the number of officers reduces community suicide rates; studies of law enforcement’s prevention role also identify substantial evidence gaps. [National Institutes of Health]

Evidence is stronger for targeted steps that reduce access to firearms during a suicidal crisis—such as secure storage and, where legally available, extreme-risk protection orders. That evidence supports those specific interventions, not higher police staffing by itself. [RAND Corporation]

[article] The reason why it happens in the Land of the Free, according to Gladwell, is that the conversation around guns has become fatally tangled in falsehoods and misunderstandings. “A conversation becomes dishonest,” he writes, “when either side pretends something is consequential when it is not, avoids the right conclusion just because it is difficult, or through laziness or indifference blinds itself to the truth.”

Agreed.