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Comment by Dylan16807 | Hacker News Reader

> in the US it is rather normal for people in authority to kill someone when the target is running away or convicted of a crime

Oh shove off.

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It seems to be quite a common perception of the US here in the UK. It's a shock seeing police with guns in the US and there's lots of articles like

http://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2015/jun/09/the-counted-p...

"England/Wales: 55 fatal police shootings in the last 24 years" "US: 59 fatal police shootings in the first 24 days of 2015"

I've commented about this before[0] but figured I'd add: it's not the fact that police carry guns, it's the way that they use them. To paraphrase my other comment, Australian police also carry guns and yet the number of people shot dead by police is 0.25/million people/year compared to 1.25/million people/year in the USA.

Perhaps this is driven by the large amount of gun ownership and gun crime in the US, but I suspect it also comes down to cultural differences between police in the two countries.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8890386

> Oh shove off.

Perhaps not "rather normal" but normal enough that Police are rarely prosecuted when it happens and judging by comments here and in other places, people seem divided about whether they even should be.

How do most US citizens look upon the death penalty, then?

It's split like many social policies.[1] Many Americans are not in favor and nineteen states as well as all of the territories and possessions do not even have a death penalty as part of their statutory regime. Many other states have executed 1 person each since 1976 so they are almost non-executing states.

[1]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capital_punishment_in_the_Unite...

Let them believe what they want. Europeans come to the US and are worried they will be carjacked. Seriously.

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