In Iceland, When Police Kill a Gunman, They Apologize

[bemildred]

Icelandic police shot dead a man who refused to stop firing at them with a shotgun in the capital of Reykjavik earlier today -- and then they apologized. It was the first time that anyone in the country was killed by police gunfire.

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One factor may be that only SWAT teams of the kind called in for in today's shooting are allowed to carry guns; the rest of the police don't. So the average officer -- let alone a neighborhood watch character such as Florida's George Zimmerman -- can't shoot anyone because they aren't armed. And one reason they don't need to be armed is that the homicide rate in Iceland is so low -- on average, fewer than 0.3 per 100,000 of population, compared with 5 per 100,000 in the U.S. In 2009, according to the Global Study on Homicide, just one person was murdered in Iceland.

In an article for the BBC, Andrew Clark, a law student from Suffolk University Law School in Boston, described his decision to write his thesis on Iceland's low violent crime rate after visiting the country's capital in 2012. He found that Icelanders happily pick up strangers in their cars and leave their babies unattended in the street. To a Londoner, New Yorker or Bostonian, that's unheard of. He concluded that the biggest reason for Iceland's low violent-crime rate was social equality. Rich and poor go to the same schools, while 1.1 percent say they are upper class, 1.5 percent lower class -- and the rest in between. So there's less resentment and anger.

Another point might be that although there are a lot of guns in Iceland (Icelanders like to hunt), buying one requires stringent checks, including a medical exam and a written test. That may prevent people from buying and using guns in a fit of anger. It might also explain why very few of Iceland's very few homicides involve firearms.

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http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2013-12-02/in-iceland-when-police-kill-a-gunman-they-apologize.html

[Blue_Tires]

1. Wow...Iceland may just as well be another planet...

[kristopher]

2. I'm pretty sure we're the anomaly. nt

[xocet]

3. It is just another manifestation of American Exceptionalism. n/t

[bossy22]

4. its hard to compare the u.s. to iceland

Which has half the population of the state of Vermont.

[bemildred]

5. The OP says Iceland is a "weird place". I think the USA is a weird place.

I was born and raised here, and it's always seemed pretty weird here to me. Not that there are not worse. But why is a place where everybody gets along and sticks together - they don't sell each other out - a "weird place", that's what I want to know?

[geek tragedy]

6. isolated and lacking diversity.

it's not weird per se, it just doesn't resemble any other society on the planet.

There are smart phone apps where people look each other up to make sure they're not blood relatives before hooking up.

If we took the most liberal half of Vermont, sawed it off and set it afloat in the Atlantic, had it speak its own language, have everyone belong to the same ethnic and religious group, with strict immigration restrictions, after a few hundred years I'd imagine we'd see the same dynamic.

By the same token, change Iceland's location to having a land border with Russia and we'd be having a different conversation.

[bemildred]

7. Yeah, it's the social equality, like it says. We should try that, and stop calling it "weird".

We are the ones that are weird, there is nothing normal about endemic intra-societal violence, especially in a competitive environment where you have to rely on each other.

[geek tragedy]

8. Social equality and social homogeny.

90% Lutheran, all speak the same language, same race, same nationality, same ethnic group, same culture.

Sameness makes equality more plausible--no one suffers cultural or linguistic or legal obstacles to success.

It's very hard to extrapolate a pristine laboratory like Iceland to a big, messy, diverse place like the US, or the rest of Europe for that matter.

Large, culturally diverse economies are bound to have intrasocietal conflict--not everyone's cultural ideas and language and customs and values can prevail in government and business given such diversity. There are winners and losers and resentments. Some places (Canada) do a better job of managing it than others (the United States) but even in social democracies like Scandinavia one finds violence and discord not present in Iceland.

[bemildred]

9. Let's try the social equality and see how far we can get.

Social homogeniety is not a goal I can get behind.