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!

Quote Originally Posted by fetishdj View Post
[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?