The police apparently have an unwarranted bad record over seas. State police are the best trained out there and are organized like a military unit. It's the local reserve officers that one has to sometimes worry about as they are part time police and not required to have the training regular officers have. Jurisdictions are set in stone - the only overlapping is state police and federal police and if that happens, it's always federal over state over local. As far as police shooting, if any shot is fired, another police force investigates and the officer is put on administrative leave until cleared so it is rare that someone is shot unless they did something stupid (like, pull a toy knife - the officer doesn't have time to determine that it's a toy). There's only a small percentage of people who carry guns - the vast majority are for hunting, sport, and home defense. Statistics are rather clear too. Places that changed their laws to allow concealed carry nearly always have a sharp decline in violent crime which, BTW, has been dropping in the USA since the 1970s even as laws were changed to allow easier access. Really, FBI statistics show that nearly 10 people are clubbed to death for every one non-suicide gun death. That is really the main issue as it is much easier to pull a trigger then any other type of suicide and the suicide rate has gone sharply upward. Gun crimes are also not scattered - they are heavily concentrated in a few very urban areas and usually related to gang and drug activity. However, most international visitors go to these large cities so that may not be important from their perspective. American cities are very dangerous places to be. The "well organized militia" feature is always brought up but there are arguments both ways. For instance, in the US Constitution, "the people" and "militia" are interchangeably used and it is mostly agreed that militia is defined as all able-bodied citizens. In the late 1700s through about the 1850s, states required regular people to assemble when called and bring a military grade weapon with them (in those days, a musket or rifled musket) along with lead and powder to be regulated (trained to the level of regulars). It never really worked, though - militia troops tended to run after a single volley and the cost to states was high so they opted for a state army of sorts (state militia, now National Guard which can be federalized) that was a select few so much easier to successfully regulate. That really is the current argument - follow the Constitution as written or change it without amending it left mainly on whim. Do we use the definition when written or a modern definition (language changes a lot)? Since both sides are fairly evenly divided, it won't change much in the foreseeable future. Plus, Americans have had a huge mistrust of government dating back to at least King George III - much of the Constitution is there to defend the people from the government and to defend minorities from majorities so we don't get something similar to the mob rule of the French revolutionary period. I know, that happened later but it is exactly what the founding fathers didn't want to happen. Any way, this argument has been going on since the 1960s and will probably still be happening in "Futureama"
times. It is more emotional then fact based so will go on.
