“Are police officers going too far?” is the question that has recently sparked a lot of controversies over the issue whether police should be disarmed. In the belief that too many innocent were killed by armed police, most philosophers, including Dr. Luke Maring, have argued that police forces should not be issued firearms under all circumstances. In the article “Police Violence: A Right-Based Argument for Gun Control,” Dr. Maring states three premises in which first, citizens have a right against wrongful death, injury, and intimidation; second, the police violate that right because they use firearms and therefore third, we should disarm the police. This leads to a conclusion that if the police ought to be disarmed, then citizens should be disarmed as well. In this …show more content…
Many people agree with Maring that the armed police are violating citizens’ right against wrongful death and injury because a lot of innocent were wrongfully killed by them, but I personally do not hold such idea. How many is “a lot”? There’s an indisputable fact that our brain is negativity bias and we tend to pay more attention to negative news rather than positive news. That is why news like a guiltless person being shot by a police is more likely to attract audience, making them immediately jump to an assumption that a lot of innocent are killed and forget about what police forces have done to rescue the public. According to a statistic given by the Washington Post, of the 995 people shot by the police in 2015, only 94 were unarmed. Of those 94, 50 were deemed an immediate threat and 35 were actively attacking the police. That leaves 9 people we can make a case for being unarmed and, maybe, not dangerous. That is 0.9 percent. So if you were a police, would you sacrifice the safety of a whole public to save that 0.9 percent who might be guiltless? Or would you rather sacrifice those nine “innocents” to protect other