Should the british police be armed

@pdockal Actually we do have that right, in law... but under strict laws!

The wish to do so is a different thing, though. Most Britons do not want to be anywhere near guns; and would rather see fewer not more, weapons generally in circulation.

Nor is there any sentimental worshipping of being able to own and use a gun, let alone of private arsenals of implements designed solely for killing.

It is legal for civilians to own certain types of guns in the UK, under very strict controls; but there is no widespread desire to do so. There are now calls for putting cross-bows under the same restrictions as guns, after two murders by cross-bow. The number of licensed sporting or agricultural firearms owners is probably a very tiny proportion of the entire adult population.



Sporting target-shooting uses small hand-guns or shotguns (the latter for clay-pigeons and, under strict controls, bred game birds). Farmers use shotguns for justifiable pest control. Plain rifles are the preserve of deer-stalking and lawful culling of large animals. No assault-rifles and the like - no civilian needs or wants those.

Farming pest-control legally includes shooting dogs attacking livestock, even if the beloved pets of irresponsible owners. Domestic dogs savaging farm animals is a genuine, nasty problem.

It is highly illegal as well as immoral to go out and kill any furred or feathered creature gratuitously.



Collected antique guns are not "safe" to use and I think have to be sealed. If you make a model gun it should be inoperable - even if a largely-ornamental, miniature replica of an 18C warship "cannon" or WW2 railway-mounted, heavy siege-gun. (An operable model comes under the firearms licensing laws.)



The Police firearms units are numerically small; any shooting by a police officer is subjected to very close scrutiny to establish if lawful and justified or accidental, or might be manslaughter or murder. This is probably even more so after a man was shot and only then found to have been innocent and his wrapped "weapon" was part of a table.

Occasional weapons amnesties net a surprising number and range of weapons, and some of the firearms in them might have been war "souvenirs" or long-unused sports guns once owned by deceased relatives!


A few criminals in Britain obtain guns illegally, but although the figures for "firearms offences" look alarmingly high those are for a range of related offences, not only attacks. The number of murders and attempted murders by shooting is, thankfully, very, very low indeed.

Terror attacks in Britain over the last fifty years have mainly used bombs, vans and knives.

There have been about five random multiple shootings in the same time, with the attack on Dunblane Primary School the worst by number of victims and the sheer gratuitous cruelty of randomly killing young children in their school.

Criminal attacks do not bring forth calls for arming anyone and everyone, rather the opposite - calls for even tighter controls on owning guns.

.......

So yes, Britons have a theoretical right "to bear arms".... most of us just don't need or want them.

@ArishMell

If you think so
But you have no clue about the 2nd amendment because your culture has ALWAYS been under strick rules weather it was you KING or parliament
Our founding fathers understood that being armed makes it more difficult for others to persecute the people
Doesn't matter how you try to spin things
Doesn't matter how you try to justify strict rules

To clarify if i wanted a concealed carry pistol permit for ..... protecting my family ... i can get one in your country ??????

@pdockal Sorry - I have no idea what you intend by that.

I was telling you what happens in my country, not opining on what happens in yours.

I was not trying to "spin" or "justify" anything - though I will say I have guns and have no wish or need to own a gun.

Laws in a democratic country tend to reflect their own society's, and British society has never wanted to be armed.

No you cannot carry a gun around in Britain merely for the sake of it, even if fully licensed. You can own a gun for specific land-management, sporting or antiques-collection reasons, but not wander around the streets with a pistol casually stuffed in your coat pocket.

If you were to shoot a burglar face-to-face inside your own property you may be able to use "self-defence" as defence in Court against whatever charges are laid against you (two wrongs don't make a right). This was established after a farmer was charged with manslaughter after shooting an intruder with his home - and it is important to note that the widespread support for him was on the basis of self-defence, not for anyone being able to shoot anyone else.


I appreciate you find it hard to comprehend, but among the differences between the American and British cultures is that the latter has no popular desire to own firearms, outside of those specific exceptions.

Nothing to do with the King (who does not run the country, as you should know), nor Parliament, really.

Nor with your nation's "second" or any other of many "amendments" whose existence shows that your Constitution can be amended by due and proper process, as times and needs change.

So can our laws, by due and proper process.

Simple as that.

If there was a demand for everyday gun ownership in the UK there would be campaigns to the Government for that, but if anything the campaigns are for tighter gun controls; and indeed tighter controls on other types of weapon. Not looser ones. Even the sporting gun clubs and their legitimate trade suppliers are not proposing casual arming.

There is just no appetite here for turning the country into a private arms-race.

We enjoy our freedom to live with very little risk of being shot or of shooting anyone else!

@ArishMell

Your explanation actually puts my country down ..... private arms race .... really

@pdockal I am sorry if you felt that, but I am afraid that is what could happen if Britain, or any other similar country, relaxed its firearms rules. It would not be an "arms race" from mere bravado, for most gun-buyers anyway, but a vicious circle of mutual fear.


I set out a couple of years or so ago, to gauge approximate gun ownership in the USA, where I know it is a very sensitive political topic. At the time the NRA was being blamed, possibly unfairly, for encouraging gun violence; and I was discussing the whole topic with an American on another forum.

I found:

- The NRA's own publicity shows its membership is a tiny fraction of the adult population, paying surprisingly low subscriptions; but it has large political campaign funds. I judged it as a sporting-guns club that might not attract casual gun-holders, and certainly not the wrong sort.

- Of general gun ownership, no proper figures are available but surveys had found only about half of American households have at least one legally-held gun. So millions of Americans are not armed, despite the impression of a pistol next to every food-mixer.

So that enlightened me on two aspects of how we foreigners are lead to imagine American life - mainly from US-made films and TV dramas glorifying violence, real News events that naturally highlight more bad than good, and witnessing your domestic political arguments over gun laws.

And on SW, by a Utah-resident PM correspondent who says murders by shooting are so common they rarely make the national news. He reckons shootings in his town (I do not know its name) are almost routine, mainly between rival gangs dealing in drugs as they have no other way to make any money.

Even so, I have read, and am inclined to believe, that more of the gun deaths in the USA are accidents or by negligence, not crime. America is certainly not Mexico, Haiti or Columbia.

'
The British equivalent of the gangs have very few guns between them, fortunately; but they can easily obtain knives; and knife crime including actual stabbings is a real problem in some areas here.

The Police and criminologists say the "self defence" claim is the most common excuse for carrying a knife as an "offensive weapon". (An item that even if not manufactured as such, is a potentially lethal implement carried as a weapon.). They also found that the carriers are more likely to be attacked. That's probably because they move in violent circles, and I suppose that even if they normally carry the weapon hidden they might show it to their pals, and word gets around. I think they live in a mixture of bravado and mutual fear on top of entrapment in the "drugs [anti-] culture".

There have been one or two shootings between these types on British city streets, and in one case at least, inevitably a "drive-by" shooting murdered an innocent passer-by, not the intended one. Even if killer had shot the intended person, and that person is some rival criminal, the crime is still murder, of course.

...

A friend, Nick, related a very strange experience when he and a friend visited America to attend a symposium that had nothing to do with weapons.

A local attendee invited them to his family's farm for a meal, and I think they stayed overnight there.

Their hosts showed their gun collection to the two Britons, who were surprised by the number - over twenty. The farmer replied, "Oh, that's nothing - there are plenty of people with far more than this!"; and invited them to try a few on the farm's private range.

Next day Nick tried to buy some cans of beer and replacement ammunition in the local shop.

The drink, no - he could not prove his age because he had left his passport with his hosts and the cashier could not understand how his UK Driving Licence gives the date-of-birth, slightly disguised.

The ammunition? No problem. Yet he was a foreigner with no gun licence in any country, unable to prove his age when buying rifle rounds in a small local shop that probably sees few American and almost no foreign, tourists!

@ArishMell


Blah
Blah
Blah

Until you live here your clueless

@pdockal That's right, insult me. What good does that do - to either of us or to the forum? NONE!

@ArishMell

you insulted first
so i thought turn about was fair play

@pdockal I apologised for what was unintentional as I'd not made myself clear. I was predicting what might happen in a country like the UK relaxed its firearms laws to the extent that guns are easily available and almost household implements.

That information about gun ownership in the USA came from American sources which I decided honest and which showed the country is not as gun-totin' as foreigners often see it - but I have seen many posts on SW asking why so many random shootings, far more than anywhere else.

There have been about 4 or 5 such acts in as many decades in the UK, though the recent stabbings of the girls and adult tutors in a children's dancing club, are no different in principle from the shootings in Dunblane Primary School in 1996, by a man who had also murdered his mother.


What followed the Southport atrocity was its exploiting by a liar or liars on (anti)social media, to foment riots. These were not organised in any formal way but the rioters gathered via exchanging the lies between themselves on the same sites whose owners will not take their share of the responsibility. It was this rioting that inspired this thread.

I cannot remember if such media existed in any serious way in the 1990s, or if it did I do not know if it carried so much poison as it does now, but there were no riots after the Dunblane shootings.

Though there was a parallel to the Southport crime in the 12th Century, when a boy went missing in the English town of Norwich. A writer of the time alleged with no evidence at all that he had been murdered by crucifixion by Jews - instigating the gullible to attack Jews for no reason.

The OP asked about arming the British Police... to which the usual answer is a resounding "NO". There are armed police units but called in only when the offender is armed, and they still try to end the incident with no-one injured or killed.

@ArishMell

All good
Good luck

@ArishMell
We have to give credit to British society itself for being the stellar example of how a civilized society is expected to evolve and subsequently behave within a civilized Nation.

When you debate the rational thought process of an American who's lived his life in a less-civilized cultural environment than what Great Britain otherwise demonstrates to the world, you are comparing apples to oranges. To enter into any discussion about 'why' Americans carry guns in the USA while British police themselves are not armed, is therefore a mute point.

You will never be able to make rational sense of why the cultural standards enjoyed in your country are not enjoyed world-wide, when the example you focus on is the un-civilized cultural standard that is tolerated by those who live in the USA and who pay that price for the perceived benefit of being called "American".

One cannot survive as a citizen in the USA without having access to a firearm for their own basic survival, though arming oneself to keep hearth and home protected from your neighbors who decide that you have what they want, guarantees nothing in terms of keeping your family safe when you get a phone call from the local police in the middle of your day, informing you that your 6 year old daughter in grade one just got assassinated along with 30 other of her classmates by some ex-US Marine who was having yet another nasty PTSD episode, but who had legal access to an assault weapon nonetheless, which he purchased from the local gun shop up the street from where he lives because he was a qualified buyer and posed no threat to society.

And besides, the assassin IS a US military Veteran and therefore scores more points for personal integrity than those lazy slogs who got themselves a 9 to 5 job as a civilian in a tight job market, but will be pretty much viewed for the rest of their lives as sitting on the sidelines not giving of their service to the US military during peace times. Shame on those civilian slogs for keeping the US economy buoyant during peace times.

You cannot expect American police to 'not' carry guns in the performance of their day to day duties as an American police officer, because of the violent cultural environment that has become the standard across the USA from coast to coast, where every single person driving on the road or walking on the street is considered 'armed' until proven otherwise. That's how the American police approach American society, where everyone is armed and dangerous until proven otherwise.

As noble as it's been for British police to set the world example by not carrying firearms in the performance of their police duties, the time has come where an unarmed British police officer is now part of the problem.

This will come to fruition when acts of violence are in progress by those desperate foreigners who've managed to get themselves an American-made firearm which is now used to commit a crime in Britain. But unfortunately, the British police are unable to stop him on the spot because they are only armed with a whistle and a billy-club as per the British standard for domestic policing practices.

It is all well and good for the local police to call in the British 'special forces' when someone is committing a crime who's also armed with a louder whistle and much bigger billy-club than the local police are, but when a stellar civilized society is anticipating their police to come running to their rescue and the 'bobby' who shows up in response does nothing when he gets on scene except to make a call back to his station commander to send in reinforcements, preferably someone on duty who's been issued with a suitable gun and don't forget to bring bullets, then civilized British society is showing signs of failure.

This failing British path will ultimately follow the same path that American society has witnessed in their own cultural demise, which pretty much began for them in the days and years that followed the vast lot of them fleeing the King of England in the first place. Who they were fleeing was a guy who reminded them of themselves because they replicated who he was in their new American society.

@swirlie By no means all Americans think they have to own a gun, though some do seem to own sizeable arsenals, including weapons that have no conceivable civilian use.

It is a very sensitive topic within US society and politics, and one that only the Americans themselves can, and have any right to, deal with.

I happened to come in this evening part-way through a programme on BBC Radio Four about the matter of school vouchers in US schools. I had not heard the first half so don't claim to understand that, nor why it might be of interest to Britons. However, I thought it chilling that when one mother interviewed named her worries about whether her autistic son could cope with what are called "public schools" in the US*, she mentioned "school shootings" first.

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*I added the explanatory clause because a "public school" is a private (fee-paying) one in the UK. The adjective is historical - such schools were established when the only alternative for parents was to hire individual, private tutors, in the centuries before the State education system.

@ArishMell

Coming from you, this one quote of your's is probably the funniest statements I think I've ever heard you write! But I do understand your point. Truth is, you are correct in what you've written.


True, this is an American-grown issue of sorts, but it is noteworthy to learn that Canadian travel advisories have been in place for over a year now, warning Canadians to curtail travel to anywhere in the USA unless it is absolutely necessary to travel there, sighting the very strong probability of gun violence suddenly erupting anywhere in the USA without apparent reason or warning.

So, I'm not sure I'd agree with your quoted statement whereby you've stated that "only the Americans themselves can and have any right to deal with".

I think that since Canada is the USA second-largest trading partner globally, this issue with guns in the USA makes America's gun problem, also a problem that Canada has an equal right to deal with, considering that ALL guns that enter Canada are smuggled into Canada from the USA.

And now you say that only Americans themselves have any right to deal with? Don't think so ArishMell! What you have to understand is that Canada's current gun problem is supported by the USA, which now makes America's gun problem Canada's gun problem.


In both Canada and the USA, the term "public school" means the opposite to what it means in Britain.

In North America, the public school system are mass education schools that are paid for by the taxpayer and are open to everyone to attend. In Canada, it is a legal requirement for parents to ensure that their children attend primary school for 8 years which is achieved through the public school system and further education beyond that becomes optional when a child reaches 16 years of age. At 16, a kid can drop out of high school if they choose, noting that the high school system also forms part of that 'public school' system which is paid for by the taxpayer.

The public school system therefore ensures that everyone can and will attend school to at least the age of 16, regardless of their family's financial status in life.

That is what the American woman you mentioned was referring to when she sighted school shootings that take place in American 'public schools', which are schools that are open to everyone.

She was not referring to 'private schools' (privately funded) which otherwise have paid security staff on the premises and which is wholly paid for by the parents of the students who attend those private schools and not paid for by the taxpayers.

@swirlie what

@Zeek01
Do you speak English?