Demilitarization of the Police Requires Demilitarization of Civilians | Benjamin Studebaker
http://benjaminstudebaker.com/2014/08/15/demilitarization-of-the-police-requires-demilitarization-of-civilians/
The recent clashes between demonstrators and police forces in Ferguson, Missouri over the death of Michael Brown at the hands of police forces has many calling into question the slow, steady rate at which police forces in the United States have become militarized. If we want to stop and potentially reverse this trend, we need to understand its underlying cause–the simultaneous militarization of the civilian population.
For a police for to be effective, it needs a large advantage in military power over the population it is policing. When citizens contemplate committing crimes, they need to know that they are not going to be able to defeat the police in combat, and when police officers contemplate engaging with dangerous criminals, they need to believe that they are very likely to succeed and to survive.
In countries where the police do not have this military advantage, police officers themselves become afraid of criminals and refuse to engage with them. The Central American refugee crisis is a poignant example of this. In some Central American countries, gangs and paramilitary forces have weapons and training that make them capable of successfully defeat police forces in combat and regularly killing police officers. As a result, the police pull out of gang-dominated areas. The civilian populations living in these areas become subject to expropriation by the gangs. Organized crime is more successful than individual crime because organizations can pool individuals, finances, and weaponry, giving the criminals who comprise them a greater chance of successfully winning fights with police forces. This intimidates police officers into inaction or accepting bribes. True, sustainable victory for these organizations only comes once the police force has been corrupted and subdued.
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Americans often despair of doing anything about the number of guns in the country, claiming that it would be impossible to successfully regulate them, but Britain’s history shows that this reasoning is wrong. After World War I, Britain was inundated with surplus weapons. Yet, over the past century, Britain has taken a series of effective steps to take these guns back from citizens and criminals alike. The statistics are irrefutable:
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= new reply since forum marked as read
Oh bullshit. Police need to try some kindness and need to be subservient, not the other way around.
Have you not been paying attention?
And, really, because I'm dying to know how you're going to spin your response.
I anticipate something along the lines of: "The NRA is very clever with photoshop", or, "That image is all over the Internet", or, yada yada "GUNZ and then yada yada "Small Penis"!
disarm the people, leave the police armed and everything will be hunky dory...
Perhaps Mr. Studebaker forgot the precipitating cause of the protests was a police officer shooting an unarmed citizen. How exactly will that be helped by creating more unarmed citizens while police still have "a large advantage in military power over the population it is policing"??
Of course it should be pointed out Mr. Studebaker doesn't like democracy but sophiarchism
in other words, the unwashed masses are incapable of electing a good government so the elites will elect one of their own to make sure things get done right. But don't worry, said leader will sign a contract to protect the rights the elites deem important
This sounds like an Onion piece. 
militarization...I want my....I want my....I want my APC
Don't forget to snatch up those mean ole sniper killer deer rifles!!!
Really quite sad, that is how I feel:
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(Texas border "militia"
Just really sad.
Hmm, it will come to me
When you Google Image search "correlation not causation", the first result is the lemon chart.
The desperate person calls it an "NRA provided chart" or some such, how typical.
Anything that causes shriveling becomes an NRA talking point.
Here is the actual Google search that created the lemon chart:
http://tinyurl.com/n35v45v
There are others and clearly, the point is that such simplistic devices as are used by the OP are filled with error and fallacy, they would cause a grad school student to fail statistics if used to support a thesis.
Unless that thesis had to do with propaganda.
Or chocolate.
I don't want to say why, but it's not unrelated to an inability to refute facts presented and then defended to him.
I don't expect any responses by that member to replies in this thread.
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