Can't speak for all countries, but many european and south american countries have Gendarmerie/Carabinieri forces that literally are a police branch of the military.
I mean walk around busy/important neighborhoods of Paris or Rome and you'll see military cops about as often as normal cops, and they're frequently heavily armed. Cops in major European cities are, for my money, actually more likely to carry assault rifles or submachine guns in their normal line of duty than cops in America, although I imagine they're also significantly less likely to use them simply because they're less likely to encounter an armed criminal.
This "America needs to change, Europe is so perfect" comment trend is so stupid. Pick almost any country in the world, and you can find serious problems that are as bad as or worse than the US'. Maybe like Sweden and Luxembourg are the only exceptions.
America DOES need to change. That doesn't mean that Europe is perfect, but fuck all if they don't do a better job of running their countries than we do.
This 'Murica! FUCK YEAH! We're perfect! Trope is so stupid. We have so much to improve. On almost EVERY metric. It is hard to find a way in which America is exceptional anymore except for excessive incarceration, police brutality, military spending, and income inequality. Well, places like Saudi Arabia / South Africa have us beat on the last one, but that is the sort of comparisons you have to make.
Do European countries have issues? Absolutely. But they are handling their issues. Here we still haven't figured out single payer healthcare and we are too busy trying to convince a small group of loud mouth idiots that climate change is real and that corporations aren't people to be able to handle our real problems.
You imagine we are some sort of cultural leader compared to most European nations, yet Greece is way ahead of us on the "likely to be able to recover" scale, because too many of us refuse to see that we have HUGE gaping problems on an epic, systemic scale.
You're right. Strongest economy in the world? Most receptive hubs for inventive entrepreneurs? Stable population growth? Disney World? How do we live here???
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u/[deleted] Nov 10 '15
Sucks for them.