Gun Culture and Anti-Government Extremism
http://billmoyers.com/2014/08/26/cops-gun-culture-and-anti-government-extremism/
Police violence in America differs from that of other wealthy democracies in two important ways. First, police in the US kill exponentially more citizens than they do in other countries. The other salient fact is that exponentially more American police are killed in the line of duty than their colleagues abroad.
According to an analysis of FBI data by USA Today, at least 400 Americans are killed by police every year. But that’s a low-ball figure: “The killings are self-reported by law enforcement and not all police departments participate so the database undercounts the actual number of deaths. Plus, the numbers are not audited after they are submitted to the FBI and the statistics on ‘justifiable’ homicides have conflicted with independent measures of fatalities at the hands of police.”
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Police in the US also face a unique challenge — and singular threat — from anti-government extremists. No other police force in a functional democracy has experienced something like the Bundy Ranch standoff in Nevada in April, where federal agents found themselves outgunned by heavily-armed militias — which included well-trained military veterans — holding the strategic high ground.
As the Southern Poverty Law Center noted last week, a new report from the Department of Homeland Security found that, “after years of sporadic violence from domestic extremists motivated by antigovernment ideologies, there has been ‘a spike within the past year in violence committed by militia extremists and lone offenders who hold violent anti-government beliefs.’” Last month, a survey of 364 officials from 175 law enforcement agencies conducted by the National Consortium for the Study of Terrorism and Response to Terrorism (START) found that members of the Sovereign Citizens movement are now considered to be the greatest terrorist threat faced by law enforcement. Third on the list, after Islamic extremists, were members of militia and “patriot” groups.
