Not Calm, Not Carrying on: Britain Deploys Military, Closes Parliament, Cancels Changing of Guard

Breitbart ^ | 05/24/2017 | Victoria Friedman

[mewzilla]

There’s no reason not to trust them with loaded weapons when the threat is real.You won't get an argument on that from me. God bless all who serve.

[Winniesboy]

There’s a lot of history behind this. When establishing the world’s first modern police force from the 1840s, Peel and his successors were always insistent on the distinction between the new British police and the armed police forces of the European continent. Those were organised along military lines - indeed were often part of the formal military structure - and were unmistakably instruments of State control. The British police, by contrast, were to be a civilian force, accountable not to the state but to the local community through ‘Watch committees’. The absence of arms was in part a symbol of this civilian status. The police could always call on the armed services - the local Yeomanry - for support when necessary, which it rarely was.

Despite all the fundamental social changes since that time, something of that ethos still survives, particularly in the attitude of the police themselves to the armed/unarmed dilemma. And it has to be said that armed attacks on police officers in Britain are still extremely rare. There have been only four in the last seven years. And the presence of armed police could not have prevented either this or the Westminster attack, although it could have saved the one officer who was personally targeted.

[Sam Gamgee]

OK, well that is interesting. So it isn't necessarily a function of extreme anti-gun culture in Britain?

[Winniesboy]

No, it precedes any gun control legislation by over half a century. And by the way, I wouldn’t agree that there’s an ‘extreme anti-gun culture’ in Britain. It’s just that gun ownership, use, and interest and guns has always been a minority concern, mostly confined to sporting guns and those used for rural vermin control - and these two categories have never been banned, and are as widely owned now as they have ever been. By contrast the handgun, as a common household article kept for the defence of self or property was never part of the culture as in the U.S.