Firearms, knives, police and fellons

[fetishdj]

One other point I would like to make about the British police carrying firearms; and it is that in the short time they have done so they have carried out far too many mistakes. There have been several times that more than one officer has fired at a supposed gunman, and when it has been one firearms expert there has been more than one shot fired, proving yet again overkill, and trigger happy police.

I was out in Belfast with the Special Forces; we were carrying at the time Belgian 7.62 FNs. They were more powerful than most assault rifles that the armies of the world have now. If you could see and aim that far with the naked eye, this weapon had the killing range of 5 miles. Put 6 people 6feet apart and with one shot you would kill them all, it would go through a half inch of steel at 100 yards and 6 feet of packed sand. I like others in my section and battalion kept my rifle loaded but ready at a seconds notice. We had no need to ask for permission to shoot, it was written in black on a yellow card for us to read, and it was in our pockets at all times. I cannot remember a time when we abused the card and fired the weapon without being fired at first, and the reason was, that weapon was part of us, we trained with it and we slept with it, and we respected the firepower we held in our hands.

The police however don’t have this luxury, and are a very unstable to be using a firearm, unless you have a certain mentality in the army, you will not get to hold a position of responsibility with a firearm.

Regards ian2411

[This is relevant.... just bear with me...] One of my essays subjects was on the inclusion of IT in schools and one journal article I read referred to the Labour government's IT education policy which was, in effect, to get computers and interactive whiteboards and all that sort of stuff in to every school. The article was looking at the effect of that policy 10 years after it was implemented and made the claim that while it had been successful in getting physical hardware into the schools a lot of it was lying about unused or not used to its full potential because there had not been a conconimant training budget to go with the hardware budget. Teachers were therefore either unwilling to use the computers or did not understand them enough to use them effectively. Can you see why this may be relevant?

I reckon that what may have happened is that the police have been given a massive budget for ballistic hardware - and the way these things tend to work, this money would have been specifically earmarked for that purpose only. So, every police force in the country has a surfeit of firearms. However, I wonder if there has been an adequete training budget to go with that?

[DuncanONeil]

This is foolish! I had occasion, recently, to discuss with an officer the length of time a magazine can remain loaded before the spring begins to lose its effectiveness. His response was that it was not an issue. He was required to go through firearms training three to four times each year.
But then again in WWII it took 15,000 rounds to kill one enemy soldier, in Vietnam, 50,000. And now the estimate is 250,000. One could claim that the military is getting worse at its job!

[This is relevant.... just bear with me...] One of my essays subjects was on the inclusion of IT in schools and one journal article I read referred to the Labour government's IT education policy which was, in effect, to get computers and interactive whiteboards and all that sort of stuff in to every school. The article was looking at the effect of that policy 10 years after it was implemented and made the claim that while it had been successful in getting physical hardware into the schools a lot of it was lying about unused or not used to its full potential because there had not been a conconimant training budget to go with the hardware budget. Teachers were therefore either unwilling to use the computers or did not understand them enough to use them effectively. Can you see why this may be relevant?

I reckon that what may have happened is that the police have been given a massive budget for ballistic hardware - and the way these things tend to work, this money would have been specifically earmarked for that purpose only. So, every police force in the country has a surfeit of firearms. However, I wonder if there has been an adequete training budget to go with that?