The Normal Streets In Normal Times

As a comment on an earlier post puts it, those who are objecting to the Pope's Teaching on capital punishment are from, "the only advanced Western country where the police have to be armed to the teeth to patrol the normal streets in normal times. The only advanced Western country that still retains capital punishment even in theory. Violence begets violence, state killing begets street killing." 

Quite. 

There are routinely armed Police for various reasons elsewhere in the West, of course. But they are not armed like that, nor are they remotely as trigger-happy. It is possible to see something similar in the military adage that if you fight alongside the Americans, then you are at greater risk from your own side than you are from the enemy. Well, if even the State, "the government" can kill you.

I am always baffled at people who profess to favour only the most limited government, yet who support capital punishment. Or nuclear weapons. There was none of that with Enoch Powell, who steadfastly opposed them both, even to the point of voting Labour on the nuclear issue in 1987, his fourth Labour vote at a General Election.