From today's "5 myths about police militarization"
5 myths about america's police
Funny how the truth shows up in the strangest places
5 myths about america's police
Funny how the truth shows up in the strangest places
3. With more criminals wielding heavy-duty weapons, police must militarize to catch up.
Multiple studies, including from the Justice Department, have shown that the guns used in homicides, including the killing of police officers, overwhelmingly tend to be small-caliber handguns. Moreover, gun ownership has increased over the past 20 years — the same period in which both the violent crime rate and the killing of police officers have been in decline.
One version of this argument advanced recently by Vox and the New Republic is that we can’t demilitarize the police without gun control. But even if it were true that criminals were arming themselves with bigger guns, it isn’t clear that gun control would demilitarize the police. First, gun-control legislation would probably not do much to keep guns out of the hands of violent criminals, particularly in the short term. Second, the argument assumes that the law enforcement community would accept such a bargain. That seems unlikely. Polls consistently show that large majorities of police officers oppose gun control, although big-city chiefs and the heads of some big police organizations support such policies. The NRA in particular includes a lot of cops in its membership and recently ran an article in favor of police militarization in its flagship magazine.
New gun-control laws may have other merits, but it’s unlikely that they would slow down the militarization of U.S. police.