[in front of a protesting crowd, two characters are talking]
[blue, serious] Violence is never the solution
[purple, smug] Agreed, let's disarm the police
[blue is now shown angrily gesticulating, sweating bullets]
NO,
NOT
LIKE
THIS
this post was submitted on 04 Mar 2026
649 points (95.5% liked)
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Not at all. This article with a spreadsheet by Mother Jones show that there's been about 1128 mass shooting deaths in the US since 1982, using active shooter incident data. And this paper by The Lancer estimates about 30800 deaths by the police since 1982 until 2019. Adding the data from Wikipedia for police killings from the last few years (2019-2026) gives us about 38028 people killed by the American police since 1982, so I was a little off. Even so, taking all that into account, police in america is 33 times deadlier than mass shooters.
Wake up to reality, kid. Your pigs are worse than people who go to schools to kill children because they're omegasuicidal.
Those statistics can't be directly compared to each other because the number of mass shooters is significantly lower than the amount of police interactions with the public.
It's like saying more people die in crashes with combustion vehicles compared to EVs. Of course that's true because there's more combustion vehicles on the road.
You need a ratio to do any comparison here.
we're not calculating how much more dangerous a cop is compared to a mass shooter.
It showcases that Americans are more likely to be killed by a police officer than a mass shooter. and that police must change in a very fundamental way, from abolishing to defunding it and definitely disarm them from lethal weapons, and make it illegal for them to misuse force (criminal prosecution for assault with no police immunity)
Then why, in your very next sentence, do you compare how dangerous a cop is to a mass shooter?
I'm not saying you're wrong at all, I'm saying the figures being used don't support that assessment. They're just numbers without any meaningful context to compare them with.
But, it's true, Cops kill more people than mass shooters. not per individual.
something must be done, ending qualified immunity is barely the beginning.
Qualified immunity is only protection against civil litigation.
How do you feel about doctors killing 50-100x as many Americans per year as cops do?
Do you make the same calls to abolish medicine and hospitals?
it means you're an idiot. the cops aren't preventing death with limited success, they are the ones killing people.
Abolishing cops (use funding for actual community) will lower the amount of death they cause. Abolishing doctors (already a thing given it's provatised and therefore not even in the same conversation) will only increase death.
Please take a chance to think before you type
What question are you answering with that?
"it means you're an idiot."
or
"it means you're an idiot."
it means your comparison is disingenuous, and either you're a troll stupid enough to call that a "gotcha" or just plain stupid.
imagine the statement of "going too fast is dangerous and causes a lot of death", and someone replies "well, you're using a phone that moves information packets at nearly the speed of light? should we ban phones?"
Lots of people want medical practice to be changed. If you're fat, a woman, a POC, a trans person, or neurodivergent, you'd know why a lot of those people just don't fucking trust doctors at all.
I haven't heard a single person call for doctors to be abolished, despite them being 50-100x more deadly, and yes, despite them being just as bigoted as cops, as you rightfully point out.
Cops kill people directly, doctors usually don't. That's the difference. My comparison between cops and mass shooters was about how many people they kill directly. Doctors don't usually murder people.
So intent is the main thing, for you? One malicious murder is worse than a hundred negligent manslaughters?
Is there not more intent to murder involved in a mass shooter than a cop shooting someone trying to shoot the cop? Or are you one of those people who thinks that cops only sign up to be cops because they'll have a better chance to kill people, and every single death-by-cop is murder, even in self-defense?
Cops have a less dangerous job than pizza delivery. Yes, per capita. And COVID or a cop’s own bad driving is more likely to kill them than someone with a gun.
If you wouldn’t accept a pizza delivery kid blowing someone away because they reached into their pocket, you shouldn’t accept it from a cop.
Depending on your definition of "less dangerous," yeah. Doesn't really refute my argument, though. Did you want to divert the discussion with that Red Herring because you realized you were wrong or did you just want to talk about something else today and didn't realize that's outside the scope of this discussion?
Straw-man.
I’m not aware of any definition of “less dangerous” that involves the more dangerous job having less deaths and injuries than the less dangerous job.
Want to slow your roll and figure out if you’re talking to the same person before going off?
Not at all. If your argument is that cops should get to have guns and shoot people because their job is dangerous, so should pizza delivery drivers, who are more likely to get assaulted than cops.
I personally think "likelihood of being attacked" and "ability to defend themselves" should also be included in the definition we're working with. Like if Person A is attacked 5 times a day and defends against them without injury 4/5 times, but Person B is attacked 3 times a day and is not trained or equipped to defend themselves so they're hurt 3 times a day, which person is in the more "dangerous" position?
Fair enough, I didn't (and routinely don't) check usernames before responding. Sounds exhausting. Pedantry accepted though; feel free to redact the part of that comment that involves my asking if you realized you were wrong and replace it with something about you realizing they were wrong. Better? You ready to respond to my pointing out that you're doing a Red Herring now, or is there some other pedantic thing you want to focus on to distract from the broad strokes of you screwing up?
Yep, I also believe delivery drivers should be allowed to carry a gun. Same with taxi cab drivers and other people who are more likely to be (successfully) attacked and hurt or killed than cops are.
See how using a straw-man argument can make for an awkward situation where you fleshing out your attack into a(n implied) question about their real position can make you look like a fool?
This is about both of those as a collective, not per capita. The context is pretty clear here.
The context here is throwing out numbers unrelated to each other and coming to conclusions based on feelings.
Making it a per capita ratio is how you add the context.
When we're trying to do an Apples to Apples comparison, implying cops are more deadly than mass shooters, context is important.
Put a kid in front of a mass shooter, they'll shoot them.
Put a kid in front of a cop, they'll shoot them 0.00001% of the time (citation needed, feel free to do the math on total police encounters vs. shootings of children).
That's bad, but to state or imply that they're even close to as bad is ridiculous and makes people interested in police reform look ridiculous.
Context doesn't bring dead people back to life. Reducing higher numbers of dead to a "per capita" statistic is straight up lying to dismiss the pain of communities destroyed by police violence.
Unless they're black and holding something, on which case it becomes 100%.
You cannot reform the police. If you heard what they say about civilians in a daily basis you'd be demanding all of their heads on pikes like everyone who wants ICE to be abolished and every agent trialed for crimes against humanity.
True, but refutes nothing I said.
I don't think you know what "lying" means.
A straight up lie. See earlier point about ridiculous arguments.
You definitely can. Virtually all societies have improved their police over the short and long term.
No I wouldn't. I generally do not call for the execution of assholes, let alone displaying their corpses to out-do them on cruelty.
Look up Tamir Rice.
Rread this article about how the police works internally by an ex-officer. There is nothing that can be done at this point to reform the American police other than a complete do-over.
I'm well aware of Tamir Rice. You're completely unaware of how statistics work.
Unless you think Tamir Rice is 100% of black children holding things, and no black child has ever held anything before nor will hold anything again? That's your position here?
So your counter to my statement of fact that law enforcement has been reformed over time is some interview with a single guy, and your re-statement of an impossible to prove or disprove position?
M8, are you intentionally wasting both of our time? What are you trying to accomplish by such obvious bad faith tactics?
Yea you're just bad at statistics. Which is not mutually exclusive with ACAB btw.
Like this is the reason math teachers don't accept just the answer. One can arrive at the correct answer while still being terrible at math.
You're saying "bad at math" and "hive mind" and whatever else, but you aren't actually supporting your argument. What is your argument? How are they wrong? Give supporting evidence or you are going to be ignored. If you have no supporting evidence then you fail.
You didn't listen to your math teacher and youre not listening to me. So no. Brat.
Not each individual police officer, police as an institution is more deadly than society’s baseline rate of mass shooters. Surely that was obvious from the context.
Buddy ACAB all the way. But you and everyone upvoting you are shit at math. Hive mind af.
edit: Especially your bit about the AR15. WTF does that have to do with your stats? 90% of the police shootings I see are with handguns.
What I meant with that is that all the gun control push to ban AR-15s because they're used in active shooter incidents from liberals is bullshit because there is a much bigger problem of police violence in America that suburban liberals refuse to address because they benefit from it.
Also, you posting an AI overview immediately makes me think you're posting in bad faith.
I'm literally just agreeing with the guy saying this is a bad use of statistics. Glad to see the reddit hive mind is alive and well.
I think you’re responding to the wrong dude. I’m not OP.
You replied to me and are defending OP so don't complain that i'm throwing salt at your math skills.
The fact that your NOT op makes it worse. Means I nailed it with the hive mind accusation.
You defs missed the part about getting the right answer with the wrong math. I'm not arguing that police aren't deadlier than shooters. I'm pointing out the math he used to back it up is bullshit.
Ehhh, I’m gonna trust the guy who quoted actual sources and not the guy who literally pasted “AI Overview” into his comment lmao
So if I hadn't been honest you would have trusted me? Very telling hive mind mfer
Why is the number of mass shooters and police themselves relevant here? We're talking about the deaths the respective groups caused, and you haven't provided any counter-evidence/stats for that.
First off because I'm not disagreeing with his thesis. I'm agreeing with the commentor, who also neglected to disagree with his thesis, who said his use of statistics were flawed.
As to your first question.
He's comparing total deaths from shooters and police.
But if you add up the total number of individuals that have committed mass shootings it's gonna total like what 1000? 2000?
Meanwhile there's at minimum 700,000 police officers in the USA right now (not including ICE-PIGS).
So his number of 33x more deadly is not accurate, because if the USA had even half as many mass shooters as police the death toll from mass shooters would clearly be larger.
Hence why it's a bad use of statistics.
...
American's culture of anti-intellectualism is one of the tools the elites use to control the populace. If we can't even have an adult conversation about math than how are we going to unite against our oppressors?
You can say that individual police members aren't more likely than mass shooters to kill people, sure.
However, it is still true that the police is that big and they still killed much more people.
Not what I said. Americans really do read below the 6th grade level.
you're using statistics to absolve an evil institution.
Absolve? lmfao hive mind idiots. No wonder Americans let this happen to themselves.
You’re the one defending our pigs
Exactly. Good luck Americans. The rest of us won't miss ya.
And now you're victim blaming. What is wrong with you?
Talking to americans causes brain damage.