I'd kinda hoped we were done with the police-violence debate, and yes I realize I'm being somewhat hypocritical since I'm the one making a new thread, but I kinda think today's comic and Tailsteak's comments are overselling it a bit. While police train extensively for violent conflicts because this is the worst possible scenario, it's a kind of thing that I believe MOST cops would much prefer to avoid. When I visited the police-station in my home town (a city of about 130,000) the officer showing us around said that in 25 years on the force he'd never once had to fire his gun at a person. When I was looking up statistics for police violence in some of the older threads one site estimated shootings as high as 1000+ events per year (compared to the more official numbers of a few hundred). That seems like a lot but we live in a country of almost 300 million people with (depending on the source) 500,000-1 million cops.
Police-shootings tend to make the news a lot, and losing someone is a personal tragedy, but in a country where on an average day 2,500 people will die of one cause or another, death-by-cop doesn't even register as a blip on the radar. For a murder-oriented-profession, the majority of cops spend an awful lot of time not shooting people.
In keeping with my preference for individual rights and my distrust of the government to do things well, I tend to favor limited gun regulation and the right for law-abiding citizens to own and carry firearms. The best arguments I've heard for gun control are the "guns are only useful for violence" one- yes I can smash someone's head in with a TV or run them over with a car, but those things have other purposes as well. Sport-shooting is a thing, but it's kind of a minor industry, relative to other forms or entertainment.
And the second argument is the suicide one. AFAIK the majority of suicides in the U.S. are still done with a firearm. Other countries have similar suicide rates from other methods (tall buildings, drinking drano, etc) but lower suicide rates overall because people don't have as easy an access to guns. On the one hand my instinctive reaction is that this is really an argument for better mental health-care, but when something like 2/3rds of approx. 40,000 deaths every year are from people sticking a gun in their mouth and pulling the trigger, that's an issue.