Guns and Police

My wife told me about an incident she read about. Seems someone fired at a gun at the big Portland airport. Naturally everybody gets excited. It got me to thinking and I realized that the decrease in the level of support for the police may have led to an increase in crime, but it almost certainly led to people being more afraid. Not much on average, maybe a fraction of a percent (assuming you could even put a number on the amount fear you are carrying around), but that's on average. There are going to be people who are affected more strongly and some of those may feel the need to go out and buy a firearm.

Firearms are inherently dangerous. Any time you have firearms, there are going to be 'incidents'. Hopefully there won't be many and no one gets seriously injured. Of course, it isn't the firearms that makes things dangerous, it's the people handing them. Even without any firearms there are going to be 'incidents' involving dangerous objects like knives, clubs and rocks. Like I said, it's the people handling them that makes the objects dangerous.

I don't know, but I suspect that most accidental gun 'incidents' happen to new gun owners (I'm not even going to consider non-accidental incidents). All experienced gun owners probably had an incident in their past. If they were lucky nobody got hurt. Also if they were lucky it scared them enough to get their attention and taught them to be more careful in the future.

So we get a relatively quick change in support for the police, the level of crime goes up, people become more afraid and a bunch of people go out and buy guns. So now you have bunch of new gun owners so it should be no surprise that the number of gun incidents goes up.