hi clo,
'your 'right' to carry puts your life in greater danger!'
may be true. prevalence of guns (concealed or otherwise) makes every encounter a high risk event. intuitively, i might have guessed that concealed guns are more dangerous than visible ones. but regardless of the dangers of either, where guns are common, i guess the police treat people as if they have them whether they do or not. hence the increasingly frequent accounts of unarmed people being shot.
my contention - the current interpretation of the second amendment dooms america to this issue. this is a scalia-made problem, based on the heller decision. little restriction means mass dissemination of guns. law enforcement operating guidelines reflect the risks of widespread citizen ownership of weaponry. if they are fearful, police are going to shoot first, ask questions later. the police culture is to answer to a jury rather than your maker. i see how that culture has evolved. it's a matter of survival.
'if you're black...'
the media seems to get itself involved when there's a possible racial component. they tend to inflame the issues involved. perhaps deliberately (scuse the cynicism but excitement sells ads). maybe just due to a quantum effect - observation changes reality. so this is bound to skew the perception of television viewers which the numbers may or may not support.
for myself, i think the correlation is tighter with poverty than skin colour. black people are disproportionately poor, so they are doomed to interact with the police more often than other groups. but poor non-blacks appear to have a fairly similar experience with police.
anyone who encounters police and their operating guidelines frequently is at greater risk (see Scalia, above). the guidelines are written to protect the police from risk. frequency also exposes a person to the nervous trigger issue: some cops are scared and make mistakes. actual racial animosity looks infrequent to me, although there are examples of police shooting incidents in which it looks like racism is a component. hard to prove, of course.
the scalia and alea gun prevalence and poverty argument also makes sense of the fact that black law enforcers are sometimes involved in shooting black civilians.
| 
