Chris

Good afternoon Will. You perhaps missed the post yesterday in which I specifically pointed out that I wasn't giving anyone the time of day due to other pressing commitments. That's easily done; it was a very brief post. However, if the lack of a quote box in my eventual reply gets you this cross, you should perhaps re-think your use of this medium to carry on discussions. I've seen far worse. As it happens I intended to address various posts I had earlier read and didn't have the time to fiddle about multi-quoting. Clearly you got the gist anyway, so perhaps you should wind your neck in a bit and stick to the issue at hand.

And on that subject - I have not insinuated anything about your understanding of 'policing by consent'. You yourself said in an earlier post that you 'don't get it'. Perhaps you would like to clarify that statement. In the absence of any clarification, I think it's quite reasonable for me to reply with the working assumption that when someone says 'policing by consent', you in fact 'don't get it'. It's not rocket science.

Both you and Daniel have made constant references to various foreign police forces and protest that they don't turn into oppressive maniacs just because they have guns. Frankly, I don't care what they do or do not do. My sole concern is the UK, because that's where I live.

You refer to the tools necessary to do the job, rarely required but good to have when the time comes. My view, as one who consents to being policed, is that lethal firearms are so rarely required that the streets are safer if they are not being carried about in numbers. I've come across statistics for the number of officers shot with their own weapons in various other places online over the past couple of days. I suspect you have too, so I'm not proposing to go digging for them again now.

Further, with reference to your German anecdote yesterday, I like living in a society where lethal force cannot be applied, or threatened, where there is not reasonable excuse to do so. I don't care whether that's how they do it in Germany. It's not how we do it here. And, though it has been said over and over again this week, no amount of firepower would have prevented the ambush which resulted in the deaths of the two PCs this week. Whatever routine arming *might* be a solution for, it *isn't* a solution to the kind of situation that we witnessed this week.

Gunchester, I expect, is so called for the same reason as Shottingham gained that nickname a few years ago. It's a specific place with a specific problem. Increased use of armed patrols, plus other tactics I'm not qualified to speculate about, might well address this specific issue in these specific places. Routine arming of the police, which by definition would include foot patrols in leafy suburbia and the outlying villages as well as the problem zones, would not solve the problem.

Unarmed police who have access to firearms units where required is as far as I'm concerned a far more intelligent response to the question of where, when and how lethal force should be available to the police. It might not be as straightforward as simply giving every officer a gun, but it is safer.