If You Wouldn't Want To Be Policed By The Army, Then Don't Arm The Police

I for one am delighted that ever fewer Police Officers wish to have anything to do with firearms. More armed Police would by definition mean more guns on our streets. And the legal and cultural differences between this country and the United States (which has always been the model for the arm-the-Police lobby) are such that a Police gun would far more often than not be the only gun present.

(Incidentally, I tend to be quite sympathetic towards Second Amendment defenders in the totally different American context, since their enemies are so clearly motivated by snobbery and by a sort of WASP or Irish self-loathing based on the wish that their own backgrounds were more exotic and Politically Correct.)

Going about tooled up does not befit civilians employed to do full-time what we should all do, and be entitled to do, for free if the necessary circumstances arose. And the copying of American policing methods directly from the television screen has done immense damage over the last fifty years, removing the Police from their proper business of preventing crime by patrolling the streets on foot, and instead making them the merely reactive occupants of enormous, gaudily-adorned motor vehicles with blaring sirens and blazing lights.

Such vehicles would rarely or never be seen in suburban or (especially) rural America, but are increasing the only visible Police presence at all in suburban or (especially) rural Britain.