Rather than derailing the Happiness Thread I thought I would start this one.
Can a mod please move over the handful of posts please?
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My now retired old man, who for a period had his firearms ticket, has always said itâs a bad move.
He specifically said that the psychological profile required to be a competent armed officer was specific, that to make life and death decisions under intense pressure, surrounded potentially by the public was too much to ask of all officers.
To routinely arm would only increase incidents of people being shot, where it need not happen and put the public at greater risk. He was also concerned about the much higher potential for an officer being disarmed.
He has been out 10 years now though and GlosPol is not the Met. Times and threats change, as do perceptions. Take it as you will.
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Everyone is saying âoh itâs time UK Police got gunsâ 
when a gun wouldnât have changed anything in the scenario anyway
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Have to disagree there, if they had been armed he may well have been shot for a number of reasons.
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The first Taser discharge was ineffective and he was still closing them down, the cover officer wouldâve already had a weapon pointed at him and wouldâve been well within the law to shoot at that point.
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A marauding Terrorist with a rucksack on his back, whatâs the likelyhood of an IED? Again justifying taking the shot wouldâve been possible, even once he was down on the floor with his hands beneath him.
I think universal firearms training is long overdue, even if not universal carry. No messing about with pistols either, just train everyone in carbine and put lockboxâs in every response car for just this sort of scenario. (With ARV still taking all the declared calls as standard), but in situations like this where officers are going into a hot or even a warm zone to save life and limb that contingency should be available for them.
However this is a massive digression and if itâs going to be debated needs its own thread.
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This may be the case in London but there are many in the more rural police forces that would disagree. Yarp?
Well done to the two first on the scene for arresting the guy and the member of the public helping subdue the suspect.
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Iâd say the opposite. In London youâve got an ARV always fairly close. Out in more rural area they may be over an hour away. Weâre still talking about decent sized towns with no armed cover for at least an hour should the worst happen.
Now, well trained officers with access to something, kept normally locked up, itâs a good solution. I donât think routine arming is good. But routine access to weapons could be.
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To be honest, I hadnât really thought of that compromise. It does sound quite good in fairness. And I am very much an armchair commentator on this subject. 
In Wales there may only be one ARV on duty per force. Sometimes less. The Dyfed Powys force area only has 1296 police officers and covers only 500,000 people in some of the least populated areas of the UK. DPPF is tiny compared to the Met or GMP. I cannot understand why there is not an all Wales police force.
Any such proposal needs to correlate agianst actual incidents / geographical locations where the suspect(s) had firearms & the sue of firearms may have been required.
Trying to get statistics for one year, around the same timeframe. For example:
2024 - around 308 armed âresponsesâ by Hants Police, with 17,859 across Eng & Wales.
The datasets arenât easy to check against, as you need to drill down for actual usage, rather than possession, but I donât think usage is signifcant:
https://commonslibrary.parliament.uk/research-briefings/cbp-7654/
2025 - summary of armed police responses & discharging of their firearms (4!).
perhaps because of my engineering mind, but i too would want to âsee the numbersâ.
how many times would armed Police have impacted a situation which otherwise had a negative outcome?
in the latest case, yes the first TASER didnât work, but the outcome was the right one - the offender was captured and arrested.
while i appreciate a shot to the body would have offered the same result - an end to the police chase, the outcome is not âpositiveâ.
someone could have lost their life
the copper, has to deal with the mentally of taking that persons life - even if in a justified situation (not saying the above is or isnât, more hypothetically) a life was still taken.
the average âbobby on the beatâ does not join up with the expectation, one they they will wake up and before they got to sleep, they will have pulled the trigger in anger.
I also worry that it will have a knock on impact with the criminals.
look at knife crime and numerous reports highlight the blades teenagers are carrying. these are often easier to measure in feet rather than inches, some the size of a small sword (see zombie knife)
those carrying knifes have done so to âone upâ their potential opponent.
donât bother with a âlegalâ 3inch blade when your opponent in the next street is carrying something 9 inches long
The idiom âNever bring a knife to a gunfightâ is literally true in this case.
if the Police are known to be routinely carrying firearms, be it pistol or otherwise, then it will only increase the chances of the criminals doing the same - and sooner or later this will lead to a stand off and suddenly the Police are now not just waking up with the potential to be pulling the trigger that day, but have a far higher chance of being shot tooâŚ
and then there is the collateral damage - while i am sure the Police will only take aimed shots at the âbad guyâ those being chased could well be more care free about where their barrel is pointing
TL:DR i am against the idea that UK Police should be routinely armed
while i have no clue what the numbers are, there does not appear to be sufficient âneedâ given the occasions when a situation was significantly worse all because the police couldnât take down a suspect by the use of a firearmâŚwhile i accept it can take longer without, and am prepared to accept evidence otherwise, there does not seem to be enough reason to think it is required.
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The biggest issue we have with arming the police is the police donât want it⌠they struggle to keep numbers up as it is due to the ridiculous investigations that happen and the constant risk of prosecution.
Personally I think there is space for more less lethal options. Taser is great but very finicky on whether it works, the fall back at the moment is the ASP which means closing quarters and hoping the officer is strong enough to hit a person hard enough.
I think a baton round or similar in these situations may help. Interesting that they didnât consider using their spray against this suspect unless he had been sprayed and it was not effective.
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Another pragmatic point is the cost - every gun wound requires hospitalisation, extra expense for the NHS etc etc and that will have to happen every time a round is discharged. Perhaps looking at better tasers or even other non-lethal stun weapons as @bob1 says
Not so sure a baton round is good for an individual tgt - direct shot is (was?) not permitted, so it should be an aimed round to ricochet = potential for a miss or hitting an innocent person. Think there are âbean bagâ rounds that are supposedly less lethal for take down - but can still be quite nasty!
The obvious question for me - other considerations aside - is time: where does the time to train and constantly refresh the skills of currently unarmed police officers come from?
Think about how much time an Infantry Bn thatâs on work up to go on a crunchy tour spends on the range, on exercise, and on field firing ranges. And thatâs for a situations where, to be brutally frank, no one cares if you end up shooting the wrong person or 8 blokes fire a hundred rounds to slot one attacker.
Now, somehow you have to get PC Plod who has to deal with DV, all the normal community crime, driving their vauxhall Astra, all the paperwork, and all the other stuff thatâs part of being a beat cop, and give them another skill set that requires constant skills consolidation and training, so they can operate not in the no-one-cares wastelands of Afghanistan, but in Slough, or Nottingham, or Glasgow, where 99.9999% of the people within 500m of them are people they must not shoot.
To use that weapon proficiently, and also not shoot a dozen passers by in each contact, they need to spend, what, one day in 5 on the FIBUA range? Assault drills on a 6th floor flat, urban patrolling, VCP, counter-terrorism shooting, shooting into a car, shooting out of a car - where are all these previously undiscovered days where said plod is doing nothing coming from?
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Itâs the counties that have looked at this most closely, you have forces where overall staff numbers are pretty small so firearms support is even smaller (and often double hatting as traffic).
Even in London with its higher numbers help can be a long way away, look at the Hainault Sword attack it was 22 minutes from 999 call to him being in custody and there wasnât a firearms unit on scene at that point.
The safety of the police and the public shouldnât be based on âgetting away with itâ just because we get lucky doesnât mean that this h are being done properly or safely.
Itâs a 2 shot weapon with a less than 50% effectiveness in the real world, if that 2nd cartridge hadnât worked they were facing an armed man with a tin of PAVA (which already hadnât worked) and a couple of metal sticks.
What if that rucksack had contained a bomb?
Not really true, the last national survey had 55% of Cops willing to carry a firearm if it became a requirement. Less than 50% wanted routine arming then (that was 9 years ago), but itâs also a broad survey, we had people responding who hadnât been on the streets in years, if you were to survey actual frontline cops the number would be far higher.
While so agree that there is more room for less than lethal options the basic principle is that you shouldnât be going up against a lethal threat without the means to protect yourself reliably, AEP is good, but itâs not a magic wand.
What value do you put in the life of a police officer?
You can fire a modern AEP directly at someone and itâs the same physical force as a baton strike according to the boffins.
[quote=âangus, post:14, topic:17073â] The obvious question for me - other considerations aside - is time: where does the time to train and constantly refresh the skills of currently unarmed police officers come from?
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If itâs important you make the time.
In reality if you arenât training them as armed response officers or even as full AFOâs you are only talking a couple of weeks initial course (call it a week for weapons handling and a week for tactics (they would only need things like emergency search to contact), probably a week for enhanced first aid.
Refresher, you would be including firearms in the annual 2 days Officer Safety Training probably a classification shoot every 6 months and a couple of development shoots. Call it 5 days a year of additional training on top of the current 2 days OST and 1 days first aid.
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The same as any other human: utmost
In which case the cost to the NHS is irrelevant
Iâd beg to differ - if you can have the same outcome but for lower risk and cost, why wouldnât you? (Ie, non-lethal weapons that donât require medical attention (if they exist))
The whole point is risk management, why should police officers and members of the public be put into danger on the basis of cost.
At the moment we have a system that relies n Cops and have a go heroâs getting lucky, thatâs not lower risk itâs higher risk.
It also wonât always be the case that they will always be lucky.
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Thatâs not the only basis, thatâs just a drawback of it. Just an observation