Even March 15 cannot justify arming of police

people see or have access to a gun, their behaviour becomes more aggressive.

A review of more than 50 published studies reported that just the sight of weapons increases aggression in both angry and non-angry individuals. In one study, drivers with guns in their cars were significantly more likely to follow another vehicle too closely, make obscene gestures, or both. In other studies, having a gun was associated with more aggressive thoughts and more hostile views of the world.

Cops, like the rest of us, have brains that link weapons with aggression too, and despite the firearms training that is supposed to mitigate the risk of an armed police officer getting trigger happy, there have been too many deaths – about 40 – in the past decade from police gunfire.

One of these was just two weeks ago, when a Tauranga man was shot dead by police after he riddled a police car with bullets.

Another was David Cerven, the unarmed 21-year-old killed in 2015 after pretending to wield a gun in Myers Park, Auckland.

Barrister Nicholas Taylor, a specialist in firearms law, said the scene immediately before the Cerven shooting was chaotic, and that ‘‘there was a cowboyish attitude, the talk of ‘tooling up’, and the spraying of rounds’’.

Of course, most trained police officers aren’t like this, but if lethal options of policing are instantly at hand, they are more likely to be used instead of the many other policing tactics, such as negotiations, dogs, handcuffing or other restraints.

In their response to the police’s new armed response teams, those roaming, gunned-up units now being trialled in three districts, researchers from Victoria University’s Institute of

Criminology laid out the evidence against this approach.

Mutual escalation was one – the idea that when police carry guns, criminals think they need to as well, resulting in more shootouts. The more criminals respond violently, the more police think they need to arm themselves. And on it goes.

There is no better example of this than the US, where 36,000 Americans die each year from gun violence, generating a growing call for removing firearms from the police altogether.

But the researchers argue that ‘‘disarming an armed police force is much more difficult than not allowing arms to be routinely used in the first place. Once the genie is out of the bottle, it is hard to put back in’’.

These experts concluded that based on the evidence, ‘‘cops in cars with guns makes communities less safe, not more’’.

March is nearly here. We’ll commemorate the 51 lives lost and hundreds of lives forever damaged due to the accessibility of guns. We’ll reflect on the changes made since that bloody day, including new restrictions on gun ownership and perhaps a national firearms registry if the Arms Legislation Bill is passed, as planned, by March 15.

Maybe for a few days police will routinely carry guns to help ensure our Muslim communities feel better protected over the anniversary weekend.

And hopefully, we’ll remind ourselves that we cannot, step by step, cop by cop, justify having guns as a part of the experience of living in New Zealand.