🦖Professional Boiwife🦕

This homeless person is making me uncomfortable. Should I call [a man with a gun]?

My neighbor is having a loud party. Should I get [a man with a gun] involved?

There are some teenagers skateboarding. Do you think [a man with a gun] would get rid of them for me?

I'm sure the [LACK OF GUN] will ensure that the cops treat the mentally ill person with respect and dignity, and they won't do any violence to them at all! The key thing that makes cops a dangerous threat to marginalised people, after all, is [POSSESSION OF GUN]!

Which, no, that's obviously stupid.

The problem with calling the cops isn't "they carry guns"; that's just a condition which makes the problem worse. The problem with calling the cops is that they are trained to see every disruption of the status-quo as TERRIBLE CRIME, and trained to have no empathy for anyone they can frame as a criminal

And their response to "crime", whether they have a gun or not is threats, escalating to violence, and often ending in incarceration if the violence stops before it becomes murder.

I've seen Americans post before "lol how do the cops in Britain arrest people if they don't have guns I'd just leave" and it's reflective of an absolutely insane cultural blindspot.

Cops here are generally physically powerful people, trained to hurt you, carrying batons and pepper spray, and sometimes a taser. They don't need a gun to brutalise you.

I'm really glad our cops aren't generally better armed, because this does make them somewhat less likely to outright kill their victims, but I really would like y'all to remember that police violence is not a byproduct of giving them firearms, but of the mentality they are indoctrinated with.

quotes taken from the source