Gun Enthusiasts

Horrific news from Cumbria, in a disturbingly familiar pattern:

Twelve people were killed by a gunman who went on the rampage across Cumbria in north-west England.

Taxi driver Derrick Bird shot dead a colleague in the town of Whitehaven, before driving through the countryside apparently targeting people at random.

No-one really knows why yet, and my feeling is that we won't ever get a full answer. To a certain extent, I don't suppose it matters - there's no justification you could make for it anyway, and sometimes it really is as simple as someone just snapping.


Obviously, there are going to be broader consequences than just the tragedy itself. Judging by the likes of Hungerford and Dunblane, it seems likely that the weapons Derrick Bird used are going to be found to have been owned legally, and a change in British firearms law seems a probable response.
And then there's arming the police. Gadget already has a post on this, which I highly recommend you read. This should come as a surprise to no-one, but I disagree with his conclusions. The thinking is that if the officers who had responded initially had been armed, they could have stopped Bird before he killed anyone else. I realise I'm thoroughly unqualified to offer an informed opinion here, but I don't know that that's true. Even in countries where police are routinely armed, shootings like this tend to play out in the same way; the gunman kills most, if not all, of the victims in the time it takes for the police to pull together an organised response, is ultimately surrounded, and kills himself. That's been true of the most well-known spree shootings in both the US and Europe. No doubt cleverer people than me have been working on ways to stop that from happening, but by itself I don't see that routinely arming police officers is going to help.
The other problem, to my mind, is that it's not a proportionate response. I know it sounds callous, but this kind of crime is rare in Britain. Off the top of my head, the last shooting like this was in 1996, and before that 1987. They're shocking and tragic and they grab headlines, but they're also isolated incidents. Arming every British police officer as a precaution against a crime that happens on average maybe once a decade, and a precaution that's by no means guaranteed to be effective, seems rather to be overreacting.
Plus it's a risk. Despite what lovely Miss Scott taught me in primary school, I don't believe it's true that you can always trust a policeman, with the possible exception of asking for the correct time. British armed police do not have a great record, all things considered. And it's worth noting that those are highly-trained officers who are called out to firearms incidents hundreds of times a year. A handful of murders unlawful killings controversial incidents across twenty plus years is a handful too many, but it seems to me that it's exponentially less than there'd be if we issued every police officer with a pistol and some perfunctory training. Unless you're firmly in the Black Bloc, it's not a stretch to say that police are people too. People get nervous, people get scared, and if you introduce guns into that equation, some of the time people get shot.


Special relationship or no, Britain isn't America. We don't have gun crime on the scale that mandates armed police. Of course, there's a part of me that'd like coppers to be carrying guns around, on the basis of 'coolness'. I call this part of me the War Nerd, after the eXile columnist of the same name. This is the same guy that would rather British police had big scary muscle cars or sleek Italian things instead of Vauxhall Vectras, too. The same guy who thinks a UAV that can dismantle an entire Waziristani village in the blink of an eye is awesome and not just an instrument of state terror. Probably there is some subtext here. And it's all part of the human condition, I suppose. This is pretty repugnant, though, so I try to keep the War Nerd on a tight leash.
The better part of me is proud that generally, our police don't need guns. I'm proud of our police for being able to ...well, police this country with only 'an aluminium expandable stick, a few grams of pepper and some handcuffs'*. Nazis are always talking about the need to preserve the traditional British way of life, whatever that means. I reckon we can do without casual violence, binge drinking and xenophobia, but to my mind, one British tradition that needs preserving is unarmed police. For one thing, it baffles the Americans no end. Arming police makes them less approachable, more distant, more hostile, and it's another unwelcome step in the direction of militarising law enforcement (and we know what can happen when you send an army to do policing).


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