In the early hours of Monday, March 21, deputies and police in Gainesville were forced to shoot 16-year old Robert Dentmond after he refused to drop what was later found to be a replica assault rifle.
Hours before, Dentmond called 9-1-1 and said he was feeling suicidal and had a high-powered rifle in his possession. After arriving, authorities were forced to take precautionary measures after he began walking away from them into the apartments, failing to stop after multiple warnings.
Despite this, I can’t help thinking tragedies such as this might be avoided in the future if gun control in this country was tightened.
Last year, 1,145 people were killed by police in the U.S., 89 percent of them by gunshot: a rate of 84 deaths per month nationally.
While a small percentage of these deaths was avoidable, most of them were completely procedural, because the officers had to defend their lives and or the lives of others.
If firearms were not so readily available, however, many of these could potentially have been avoided, as the police would not have to use deadly force as often.
Take the U.K., for example, where there have been a total of 31 killings by law enforcement since the turn of the millennium.
Granted, the U.K. only has a population of 64 million, one-fifth of the population of the U.S., but as a nation it has experienced in the last 16 years only 2 percent of the amount of killings by police forces seen in the U.S.
Robert Dentmond’s weapon turned out to be fake, but the police had no way of knowing that, as it is completely plausible for someone in the U.S. to own a deadly weapon; it would have been dangerous for the police to assume otherwise.
A good friend of mine at UF, living on campus here, legally owns a 12-gauge shotgun, which he stores in the boot of his car. I still fail to see how or why this is at all necessary.
The potential to be able to go to a range with your own weapon surely is not worth the damage caused by so many owning guns: not when you can rent out firearms at the ranges for next to no money.
But far from attempting to tighten gun laws, Florida seems to be aiming for the opposite, with a bill being pushed to allow people to carry concealed firearms on college campuses.
The idea of people carrying around hidden deadly weapons in my university terrifies me, and when people tout the notion that this is merely for security, I think, “Is that not what we invest so much money and trust into our law enforcement systems for: security?”
The University Police Patrol Division has a total of 65 sworn officers, readily armed and extensively trained in weapon use.
The argument I always hear in response to this is law-abiding citizens would never use their guns irresponsibly. I don’t disagree with this, but if the police services had little or substantially less reason to believe anyone might actually have a deadly weapon on their person at all times, there might actually be less reason or need to use deadly force.
Subsequently, exemplary projects implemented to improve these statistics and minimize incidences of shooting a violent offender, such as the NYPD and Los Angeles police training camps — in collaboration with Scottish police — might see improved results.
Overall, we need not blame the police or the victims of many of these killings.
We need to instead explore all of the variables in place that aggravate the violence and increase chances of police shootings, and with a clear look into the issue at large, the preponderance of guns in our country reveals itself as a clear aspect of this issue in need of reform.
Joe Franklin is a UF student.
