kilon wrote:Strangely enough, the beheading didn't seem crazy to me (even though there is every reason to). What I thought was crazy was how the killers would just talk to people filming it, and the armed cops took 20 (TWENTY!!) minutes to get there.
Yes, it is great that in the UK you don't (didn't?) need your regular cops to carry guns because gun control is pretty good over there. But this just took way too long. What if they wanted to do more harm? They had virtually all the time in the world.
And no, I do not agree with gun legalization. That is (partially) what doomed the US.
It's necessary to take into account that London's roads were mostly designed when there were like 8,000 cars in Britain. Now, there are much more. It's also necessary to take into account the sheer number of people in London. It had a population of ~8 million in 2011. To put that into perspective: your region/country/conglomeration of states (i.e., the Netherlands, whatever you would classify it as) has maybe 16 million people total. Hell, Sweden has like 9 million people. You're talking about a capital with the population of an entire country here. It does not matter who you are, or how important it is -- it is nigh-impossible to get across London quickly. It's simply too congested, a living city that refuses to draw to a halt for two lunatics. 20 minutes, in this context? Not ideal, no, but fully understandable. Especially considering specialist officers (i.e. carrying guns) had to be dispatched. It's all very well to grumble and say 'twenty minutes, they could have killed a hundred people in that time', but realistically, considering it was unexpected and considering how understaffed police in general are in this country, it's difficult to get even that quick of a response.
As to whether our cops should carry guns on normal duty? No. I think not. We have maybe one incident like this every three to four years, in which maybe one or two people die (our last terrorist attack of this media scale was the 7/7 bombings, which aren't even in the same category and wouldn't really have been helepd by armed police anyway since no one saw it coming. And the last time armed police were in the media was maybe Raoul Moat?). To say we suddenly need our police to carry firearms because two religious extremists crawled out of the woodwork is... well, I'm not going to say foolish, but I would say it's an over-reaction that borders on hysteria. It would be an extreme change to our way of policing, and you'd need a lot more than two nutters to justify both it, and the costs of equipping and training those officers to handle live firearms. Moral implications I know nothing about, but it'd be impractical in the extreme at a time when our economy is ill-suited for soaking the cost.
As for the whole gun legalisation thing... I'm not going to get on that, since it tends to attract a bunch of really annoyed Americans.