This is a price the US pays for the right to keep and bear arms. US cops have to assume that everyone is armed. That leads to a paranoid style of policing. As gun laws have become less restrictive, cops have armed and armored up.

That doesn't explain the first ~230 years of US history though, where police weren't this way and we had the same Constitution.

I suspect this fear of guns largly explains the additional risks police face.

assuming everyone has a gun and is willing to use it, raises the stakes of every encounter. so instead of a police encounter starting at a very low risk level (casual conversation), it starts a very close to deadly force risk.

This causes both sides to be a lot more tense, with a lot less room for mistakes. It also makes any encounter feel very risky.

I don't think people having a gun prevents police from starting an encounter at a casual level. But the assumption everyone is out to harm them, and has the means to do so, does.

At the range nearly all casual police interactions like traffic stop happen happen at (<20ft), a knife has to be treated just as deadly as a gun. So even if you remove the guns you'll still have to treat everyone as a deadly threat under such a model.

If everyone is really armed, that's the single biggest reason why standard doctrine should be de-escalation first.

But US Cops always escalate instead. They want the fight, they aren't looking for safety.

There’s not much to back this up, at least that you’ve included as reference.

The bigger issue that comes to mind and that you can actually look in to is the practice of teaching police departments about “Killology”. This is (or was) a kind of seminar that taught departments this mindset of “everyone that an officer interacts with is a potential threat”. Add this to the “super criminal” bs that was popular in the 80s/90s, the constant right-wing fearmongering about dangerous criminals in blue cities, and the militarization of police, and it feels more like they’ve been primed for violence from the power structure more-so than any actual threat from the public.

> As gun laws have become less restrictive...

Do you have a reliable citation for this claim? [0] I disbelieve that this has been happening in any substantial way in the US. I expect that at very best, they've stayed roughly as restrictive as they have been for quite a long time.

> US cops have to assume that everyone is armed.

Weird. In San Francisco, California (a city of roughly 800->900k), the regular CompStat reports [1] have this to say about the number of incidents of firearm violence (whether fatal or non-fatal) in the city:

* 2022 -> 185 incidents

* 2023 -> 162 incidents

* 2024 -> 132 incidents

* 2025 -> 101 incidents

For fun, you can slap this pretty fucking shitty Power BI dashboard [2] around to compare those numbers to the number of times cops have either threatened to shoot or have shot someone each year.

Weirdly, I'm having great difficulty finding the city's officer injury reports. In the absence of those reports, I'll assume that policing still doesn't crack the top ten most hazardous jobs in the US, and that it's still roughly as hazardous as being a groundskeeper or professional athlete.

[0] If your supporting evidence is "spooooky ghost guns", I'll laugh my way out the door.

[1] <https://www.sanfranciscopolice.org/stay-safe/crime-data/crim...>

[2] <https://www.sanfranciscopolice.org/your-sfpd/published-repor...>

Even if the right changed, the main actual causes of police caution would remain:

- a land border with a large continent that has a lot of guns and violence and criminality

- millions and millions of existing guns, the criminal holdings of which would not decrease following a change in the law

- subcultures that glorify violence and teach it as a path in life, particularly how to be a man and what sort of man to be attracted to