Heat

On Friday, a Bradford policewoman was shot and killed, and another wounded, while attending a robbery taking place in a travel agent's shop. Since then the media hasbeen buzzing with calls for the police to be allowed to carry firearms as a matter of course.

In July, a young Brazilian man, Jean Charles de Menezes, was shot and killed by police in what looks like a massive error of judgement by the firearms officers responsible. In the weeks following the incident, the media was buzzing for controls on police use of firearms and decrying the "shoot to kill" policy allegedly in place.

I have struggled to come up with solid references, but I have heard it suggested a number of times that police injured in firearms incidents are very often injured by their own weapon.

If police officers always carry firearms then the number of incidents where there are guns present will increase from the current low level in the UK to near 100% of those attended by police. I think we can postulate a number of rules here...

• Where there are no guns, nobody will get shot.
• If the good guys have guns, someone might get shot, and that someone might be a criminal, a police officer or an innocent 3rd party (the last two due to an accident or the theft of a gun).
• If the bad guys have guns, someone might get shot, and that someone might be a criminal, a police officer or an innocent 3rd party.
• If both the police and the criminals have guns, the chances of someone getting shot will certainly increase.
• If all police carry firearms, there will be an increased chance of someone like Menezes being mistakenly shot.

Furthermore...

• The UK does not employ capital punishment (although there is currently some talk of the death penalty for "cop killers") and opposes it in other countries (though rather weakly in the case of the USA).
• The UK believes in the court system and the doctrine of "innocent until proven guilty" — even if someone has a smoking gun in their hand and a corpse at their feet, they must be tried. This is important. Our "killer" may have (foolishly) picked up the gun of a suicide, be acting inself defence (though possibly using undue force) or, indeed, be a cold-blooded murderer.
• The police are there to protect the public.

Regardless of the other points, this last point is probably the most important. It may be used as justification for providing the police with guns and other new powers. It can also be used as the basis of some cold, heartless number crunching...

IF
    the number of people killed if the police all have guns
IS GREATER THAN
    the number of people killed if the police do not all have guns
THEN
    giving guns to all the police does not protect the public

I suspect that conclusion will, for the next few years at least, be true. And personally, I feel a whole lot safer if the bobbies I see around the place are not packing heat — it tells me that they are not planning to get into a firefight, and that reassures me.