3 ms·
Minor nit: the UK police, where -- with few exceptions -- the police does not carry guns at all Firstly, some UK police forces are routinely armed -- the Nucle
by cstross 14y ago
Minor nit: the UK police, where -- with few exceptions -- the police does not carry guns at all
Firstly, some UK police forces are routinely armed -- the Nuclear Police and the Transport Police who patrol airports pretty much always carry automatic or semi-automatic weapons. (The first cop you see entering a British airport concourse will probably be carrying an MP5.)
Secondly, all UK police forces have specialist Armed Response Units, and all UK police have radios: if an armed incident is reported (including knives, not just guns and bombs), the armed units will turn up to handle them.
British police officers who carry guns are required to put in range time more than once a week and are trained specialists. Their usual tools are a Glock-17 and an H&K MP5, plus body armour, although specialist snipers are also on call.
So: while ordinary police patrols are "unarmed" (as in: they wear anti-stab vests and carry batons, pepper spray, and in some cases tasers -- just no firearms) any incidents that involve weapons will be responded to very rapidly by marksmen.
The policy difference is simply that British police forces treat firearms use as a speciality, and cops who carry guns need to be trained to a high level of proficiency. Given that the average American police officer draws and fires their gun in anger once in their career, if that, it follows that they're either under-trained or a huge amount of training is wasted on people who don't need it. The argument for arming them -- that it's a big country with a lot of violent armed criminals and specialist backup may not be available in time -- doesn't apply in the UK (small, dense country, very few firearms in private hands, relatively easy to summon armed specialists as needed).
- peteretep 14y agoAlso routinely armed: police in Northern Ireland.
- nknight 14y ago> The first cop you see entering a British airport concourse will probably be carrying an MP5. Last week, a friend told me that when he flew into Amsterdam some years ago, there were people with automatic weapons standing around, and he was told it was routine. Can I ask what the hell Europe is expecting that the US isn't? Because aside from some deployments in the immediate wake of 9/11 (which I vaguely recall were such a joke that the rifles weren't even loaded), we don't do that here.
- pavel_lishin 14y agoWhich US airport are you talking about? I've flown out of Newark and La Guardia a few times in the past year and a half, and I've seen uniformed people with machine guns each time. Hell, I've seen policemen with machine guns in the subway. (I'm not a gun person, by the way, so maybe "machine gun" isn't the right term, but it's definitely the kind of gun that doesn't require you to pull the trigger per bullet fired.)
- nknight 14y agoSFO, SJC, SEA, PDX, ORD, ATL, DEN. Never touched the New York area. TSA everywhere, but nobody carrying anything remotely rifle-like.
- maaku 14y agoYou'll see them more often in New York or D.C. I've even seen them at SJC once. They come out at one of the color-coded terror alert levels, but I forget which.
- alephnil 14y ago> Can I ask what the hell Europe is expecting that the US isn't? Probably terrorist attacks like these: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rome_and_Vienna_airport_attacks http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rome_and_Vienna_airport_attacks
- cstross 14y agoAirport police in the UK carry H&K MP5s, with a selector for single-round or three-round-burst fire only - no fully automatic rock'n'roll. The reason is that a semi-auto carbine with sights is much more accurate than a pistol (especially if shooting across a crowded airport concourse), and rifle ammunition is out of the question (to easy to penetrate multiple partition walls and kill bystanders). So, pistol ammunition but a more accurate gun. As for what they're expecting? This is a genuine Scottish tabloid newspaper cover from a couple of years back: http://current.com/entertainment/wtf/88862229_i-kicked-burning-terrorist-so-hard-in-the-balls-that-i-tore-a-tendon-in-my-foot.htm http://current.com/entertainment/wtf/88862229_i-kicked-burni... There have been attacks on British airports in recent memory: not often, but often enough to justify the permanent armed police presence. And then there are the security nightmares everyone in the security biz remembers, such as the Lod Airport massacre: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lod_Airport_massacre http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lod_Airport_massacre