What is "the police" on the level of countries? There is no majority that agrees that, e. g., the NATO can serve as the police. It feels like on this level, we live in an anarchy with only very few actors who don't really want to live together. So maybe nukes are an option, although I don't like it.
A safe community isn’t one where people are held in check by police. People are not roving around thinking “oh I’d break and enter and murder and rape but for the fact a police officer might shoot me.”
People in such a community lack guns but they do have things like a working public health system, decent education, daily encounters with other people that are positive and so on.
The threat of police shootings is not what makes a safe society safe.
Constructive, open and fair trade is the equivalent at an international level. Cooperative and trusting. Not staring down the barrel of each other’s guns.
That's also not necessarily the point I'm making. Suppose you are in a society where a small part of people are bad actors, for whatever reason. They will break and enter, murder, and rape. You want to protect the rest of the society against these bad actors. You can now equip everyone with weapons so they may defend themselves. That also enables the bad actors to use said weapons because we don't know who really know who is a bad actor (at least not the ones that didn't commit any crimes yet). Or you give weapons only to a small part of society, where you enforce strict gun laws.
The alternative is to reduce the number of bad actors and this is, in part, fulfilled by the conditions that you are describing. But how do I reduce the number of state leaders that are willing to shoot each other? I guess it's what you are saying, namely constructive, open, and fair trade. But we're not really making progress in that direction it seems.
Except this isn't borne out in the data. Look at deeply conservative places where guns are literally everywhere, and you'll see very low crime rates compared to cities with strict gun control.
And why? Well, as a criminal, I'd be loathe to try something when there's a good chance the victim is armed.
In your perfect community scenario, a single armed criminal would wreak havoc, completely unopposed.
Source: https://ajph.aphapublications.org/doi/10.2105/AJPH.2017.3040...
Why do Canada and Europe have dramatically lower violent crime rates despite having a mostly unarmed population?
You're naive. The police (or whatever you call it) is meant for inward force projection of the state. Your security is not the main concern.
Besides the police works too slowly to truly protect you when SHTF. Sometimes even a minute or two is the difference between you being alive or dead.
I was once involved with a project that returned determination of land ownership from people's physical custody to the courts and the resulting drops in assault and homicide rates (for the entire country) was in the double digits over a period of months.
If you re-read what I've wrote carefully you can observe I didn't refer once to my lived experience.
This is especially true when you are likely to have guns in the home. I'm countries with virtually no private ownership of guns, it is extraordinarily unlikely to be in life threatening danger in your home.
> This is especially true when you are likely to have guns in the home
Citation needed, because I highly doubt you're correct.
