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According to a media report, police Chiefs are on the verge of discussing the possibility of offering a gun to all Frontline officers in England and Wales, that would be a disaster.
The United Kingdom police service already have an armed response unit that is quite capable of dealing with any gun-related threats and that is the way it should be. We do not, and should not support any policy that sees more of our police officers carrying guns, it is counterproductive to good policing.
Having a police service, armed is not in the best interest of the UK citizen, we have seen what armed police service in the United States and Jamaica, to name two countries that believe that arming their police officers is a good thing. Firstly, it does not have any reduction in crime and the only thing that it would accomplish is that the criminal elements in those two countries have no compunction in killing police officers.
Too many police officers and citizens have lost their lives in countries where police officers are allowed to carry a gun and if we bring that kind of mentality in the UK we are gravely putting our police officers at risk. Of course, there are police officer in the UK that have been shot and killed and from statistics that I found it suggest that between 1909 and current 58 police officers were shot and killed in the UK in comparison to over 114 in the US, and yes the US is a much bigger country and one imagine that they would be more deaths, but one can only wonder would the death toll be so high if police officers did not carry guns.
In my opinion, many innocent citizens have lost their lives and I include police officers shot and killed by criminals and the citizens that have been shot and killed by police officers. Arming a police service, in my opinion, is giving them license to shoot first and ask questions later and we have seen that in the US and in the UK and the incident is the UK was not carried out by ordinary police officers. Yet a Jean Charles DeMenezes shot and killed by the London Metropolitan police having been wrongly identified as a fugitive in a bombing attempt. That was an unnecessary loss of a young life he was only 27 years old when his life was cut short and we cannot bring him back.