The Madison police department has around 300 operations officers, but only about 200 assault rifles to go around. The argument basically goes: shared weapons are substantially less effective by every measure, so every officer should have his or her own. Unwilling or unable to allocate the roughly $120,000 that the purchase would require, the government has worked out a wonderful little loop hole: just let the officers buy their own rifles instead. From the department of course, the pay can come right out of the paycheck of anyone who signs up.

The debate gets easily distracted by the words “police” and “assault rifles.” There’s an easy gut reaction to this, the strawman around which both sides like to dance and jab, getting in their emotionally satisfying if intellectually empty blows. Police equipped by the hundreds with assault rifles? It’s an easy irrational jump to the nightmare visions of Beirut, Rwanda, Sarajevo, to draw on that patently American distrust of giving power to authority. But of course there’s the opposite dance too, the one that begins by asking if you really want the police to be outgunned by the criminals, and concludes with asking why you hate America so much. Both of our cliched debaters are missing the point though. The real argument shouldn’t be over the weapons, it should be about the ceding of employer responsibilities to employees.

I showed up to the first day of my first job at the ripe old age of seventeen, ready to stock staples and pens for Office Max, but was told that I had to purchase a pair of khaki pants, white button-down shirt, and a tie. Not ten minutes into my first job and I was already in the hole. Bad example? Well, perhaps I was just an ill-dressed teenager. A friend of mine though wasn’t allowed to start a construction gig until he purchased his own toolbox with a list of tools provided by the company. As far as it pertains to a police officer’s job, a gun is a tool, a tool with a particularly grisly purpose, but a tool nonetheless. If it is required to do the job right, it should be provided by the employer, end of story. Precedents to the contrary start to take you right back to truck systems and sharecropping.

Officer purchases are attractive as an easy solution, but easy solutions have buried costs. Once established, the precedent of officer purchases incentivizes the stripping of police budgets to bare bones. What happens over the next couple of years as some of those 200 already-purchased rifles break or need replaced through normal wear and tear? Why in the world would the department or city council ever allocate funds again to purchase rifles if they’ve already managed to get officers to start paying for their own? Do not establish a mechanism in which the employer tangibly benefits from shifting its responsibilities to its employees.