Shortly after the Rodney King debacle, the City of Los Angeles knew they had an excessive force police problem. So they launched an investigation to determine how bad it was. The expectation was that the distribution of problem officers would follow a “bell-shaped curve”, with a few incorrigible jerks at one end of the curve, a few angels at the other, and most of the officers in the middle, needing some training to get better.
That’s not what they found. Of the 8500 LAPD officers, it turns out that 99 percent of the reports of excessive force were made against fewer than 100 officers, with 90 percent of them having only one or two accusations, while only 18 officers accounted for many accusations each. So the curve of bad vs good cops was extremely lop-sided, with all the bad ones at one end, and everybody else off the scale to the good. This statistical distribution is called a “power curve”, and it looks more like a letter L than like a bell.
This distinction is very important, because more training will not turn the really bad cops into good ones, and the good cops don’t need more training. The real solution is to get rid of the bad cops, and let the good ones do their job.
We have a similar situation today with gun control. The overwhelming majority of gun owners are the good ones. They don’t shoot up schools; they don’t leave their guns where kids can get at them, they obey the gun laws in their state. THEY don’t NEED more laws, or more restrictions.
There is a tiny fraction of a percent of gun owners on the “power curve” end of the curve who DO shoot up schools, or terrorize shopping malls, etc. They are ALREADY BREAKING the existing gun laws. More laws won’t help them be better gun owners, because they won’t obey them, either. The solution, as with the LAPD, is to get rid of the bad ones, without disarming everyone else.
This is easier said than done.
In the case of bad cops vs good cops, getting rid of the bad ones just involves firing them. And you know who they are, because they’ve already singled themselves out by their performance records. Gun owners are a lot harder, because the bad ones are mostly not repeat offenders. Very few have records of any kind, much less records of violence, armed crime, terrorism, or even of mental instability.
But some do. Instead of spending huge amounts of money to pass extreme and possibly unconstitutional gun laws, which will only be obeyed by the good gun owners anyway, spend the same amount of money to locate and treat, or even incarcerate, those with known mental health problems that may manifest as gun violence and killing.
That sounds good, but the problem is, it is essentially unfair to place the burden of America’s epidemic of murder on a small fraction of the population, most of whom are not part of the problem. Especially when they haven’t done anything yet. In other words, it’s profiling, an unsatisfactory solution, but the only one that fits the facts.
Or is it? Both the Profiling solution and the Training solution are based on a “top down” model: Those on top, the government, impose preventive measures from above, either on the whole population, or on a part of it. But there’s another way, the grass roots solution. Arm everybody. The 99+ percent who follow the rules will be no more dangerous armed than disarmed. The dangerous fraction of a percent will quickly announce themselves. I believe this was part of the rationale of our Founding Fathers, when they wrote the Second Amendment to the Constitution.
Has this solution ever been tried? YES! In both Israel and Switzerland, everyone is required to serve in the military, where they receive training in the proper use of fully automatic assault rifles. In Switzerland, all citizens are required to keep a loaded assault rifle in their homes, ready for immediate use. In Israel, the country is flooded with fully armed, active duty soldiers of both sexes, everywhere and at all times. Both countries have remarkably low incidences of armed crime. Israel is surrounded by sworn enemies, yet the incidence of armed terrorism is amazingly small. Why? Because everyone makes it their business to be watchful, all the time, and there are always armed protectors around.
President Trump’s idea of arming teachers is a good one, but it doesn’t go nearly far enough. If terrorists, or even homicidal maniacs, can’t attack schools, they’ll go somewhere else. To truly prevent mass shootings, only a universal, armed citizenry will do.
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