And this is the problem with guns, imagine if the police didn't have any guns and they would have to approach him by first. Obviously they outnumber him but know (unless he has a lethal weapon on him) there shouldn't be any lethal force. Guns escalate the situation way too quickly to a life threatening one ...

That's how it works in the UK I think. Police don't regularly carry firearms and specially trained firearms officers are called in when necessary. I think the problem with this approach in the US is that guns are way more available and way more likely to used in a crime (I don't actually have figures on this but it seems a reasonable assumption).

Edit: Replaced incorrect use of 'weapons' with 'firearms'.

What you're saying is correct, but just to be pedantic: police in Northern Ireland are armed at all times, and are allowed to be armed even while off duty.

And yet practically no police use of firearms is recorded. They have to declare each time they unholster the weapon

Sure, I'm from NI so aware of that. It's a unique situation though and I thought it best to leave out rather than confuse my point that there are police forces that work without firearms.

I had the same thought, but felt it was best to be clear that the practice isn't unheard of in the United Kingdom.

Police carry weapons (truncheons, pepper spray, sometimes tasers), just not firearms by default.

Sorry, I was using weapon/firearm interchangeably by mistake. I meant firearm.

They still make mistakes ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Death_of_Jean_Charles_de_Meneze... ), but since it takes a little more work, I'll assume they make fewer mistakes.

> since it takes a little more work, I'll assume they make fewer mistakes.

To put this in context, over the four years from 2008-2012, police officers in England and Wales opened fire on 18 separate occasions, killing nine people.

In a country of 55 million people, that's about 5 shooting incidents, and 2 people killed each year.

http://www.channel4.com/news/police-fatal-shooting-trigger-h...

Police in Australia carry guns and yet suspects being shot dead is rare enough that when it happens it tends to be headline news (often nationally). Perhaps part of this is that civilians in Australia are far less likely to be carrying weapons themselves, so police do not have to be as cautious as in the US.

Ultimately, I don't believe the problem lies with the firearms but with the culture. As an Australian visiting or moving to the US, you will inevitably be reminded that if a US police officer pulls you over you should not get out of your car. I've had people tell me that if you do get out of the car, the officer will draw their weapon and take aim. Perhaps that is exaggerated, but to me that is an absolutely ludicrous reaction. It paints a picture of US police as having an extremely paranoid, "us vs. them" mindset. What I read in the news and have witnessed since I moved here seems to confirm that.

You would be amazed at the difference in reaction time if someone steps out of a car with a weapon drawn and the time it takes to bring up your own weapon.

If the US police were so gun happy I would expect way more people to be shot per year/day.

I understand the reasoning behind the action, but it's still not justifiable. Following that same reasoning we can argue that police should approach car windows with their weapons drawn and aimed. After all, if an officer approaches a car window and sees the occupant has a gun aimed at them they won't have time to defend themselves if their sidearm is holstered. Officers have certainly been killed by vehicle occupants, so this is not some invented scenario, either.

> If the US police were so gun happy I would expect way more people to be shot per year/day.

There are, though.

A couple of articles on the subject:

http://fivethirtyeight.com/features/how-many-americans-the-p...

http://fivethirtyeight.com/datalab/another-much-higher-count...

But if we use the FBI's number of ~400/year[0]it's still ridiculous. In the two decades between 1989-90 and 2010-11, Australian police fatally shot a total of 105 people.[1]

Looking at those figures, Australia has ~0.25 fatal police shootings per million people per year. The US has ~1.25 fatal police shootings per million people per year. Five times more. Perhaps I'm wrong, but I don't believe that's solely due to gun control policy in the two countries.

[0] http://www.fbi.gov/about-us/cjis/ucr/crime-in-the-u.s/2012/c...

[1] http://www.aic.gov.au/publications/current%20series/rip/21-4...

Having your weapon drawn right from the get go is not a good thing. It tends to make calm people nervous. As far as getting out of the vehicle most police don't like surprises so if things go step by step according to the person with the gun things go much better.

If you stay in the car you have a much easier time dealing with a person who can't easily get into your personal space and limiting the options you have to protect your self.

I understand the reasoning and this is why I'm saying it's an issue with culture, not with police carrying guns.

> As far as getting out of the vehicle most police don't like surprises so if things go step by step according to the person with the gun things go much better.

In Australia I can get out of the car and go talk to the officer and everything's fine.

In the US I can't - I accept that reality.

Both officers are carrying guns, though.

>unless he has a lethal weapon on him

And if he does? Your argument has excluded half of the (rather important) outcomes.

And the problem with police not having guns is amply demonstrated by the recent terror in France. The first police to respond were unarmed.

That doesn't appear to be true.

http://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/jan/08/ahmed-merabet-m...

> Merabet, who according to officials was 40, was called to the scene while on patrol with a female colleague in the neighbourhood, just in time to see the black Citroën used by the two killers heading towards the boulevard from Charlie Hebdo.

> “He was on foot, and came nose to nose with the terrorists. He pulled out his weapon. It was his job, it was his duty,” said Rocco Contento, a colleague who was a union representative at the central police station for Paris’s 11th arrondissement.

> Another policeman, 48-year-old Franck Brinsolaro, was killed moments earlier in the assault on Charlie Hebdo where he was responsible for the protection of its editor, Stéphane Charbonnier, one of the 11 killed in the building. A colleague said he “never had time” to pull his weapon.

See also the NYPD cops killed recently - definitely armed - who were shot regardless.

I was going off of reports such as this:

http://www.cbsnews.com/news/charlie-hebdo-french-satirical-m...

"the first two officers to arrive, who were apparently unarmed, fled after seeing gunmen armed with automatic weapons and possibly a grenade launcher."

CBS News isn't a reliable source.

This is also the same "source" which claimed that both suspects had been captured and a third killed according to "US intelligence sources" (still unnamed). Turned out that that wasn't true at that point in time or since then.

They're like the Daily Mail of the US, just peddle utter shit all of the time...

>CBS News isn't a reliable source.

This tells me nothing. Are the facts presented by parent's post false or not?

Yup, French police carry sidearms... And if that's not enough, during periods of elevated risk of a terrorist attack, you even get soldiers walking around with semi-automatic rifles in squads of three.

This interests me (in a slightly off-topic way): do the soldiers really switch their service weapons to a semi-automatic model in order to patrol, or are all the rifles within the military police (etc.) semi-automatic only?

Most military rifles are semi-automatic. Even with a fairly tame AR style rifle using automatic fire makes it a little harder to quickly engage targets and the recoil can be a little un-predictable even when just using burst fire.

In short most military rifles are single shot due to the fact that you may engage targets out to a few hundred yard to a couple of meters.

tldr; Automatic rifles for military applications, not all that great.

It's not military police, it's just plain ol' soldiers. Which kinda freaks me out, because I spend my time wondering exactly what their rules of engagement are, and how well they have been trained in them. At least they always have the safety engaged when I check...

Solders for the most part get much more time and training using firearms than police who tend to have a much wider range of duties to perform.

Most NATO militaries have increased the amount of training in urban environments. I'm pretty sure(or overly optimistic) they have decent training/drilling experience as the political backlash from having soldiers get way to aggressive in terms of resorting to military tactics vs police tactics.

They are much better marksmen, it's true. But police have waaaaaay more experience dealing with drunk idiots, mentally ill people, people doped up to their eyeballs on speed and so on. Deciding whether someone is one of these or a serious security threat is not as easy as it might sound, hence my curiousity vis-a-vis the rules of engagement...

The Australian military is generally lauded as being excellent at peace-keeping operations, yet during officer training, it was hammered into us that policing was a much harder operation, and that our hierarchy would never accept policing missions.

I suspect that you're mistaken on what semi-automatic means. Basically all of the rifles likely to be carried by law enforcement are semi-automatic, except for sharp-shooters, who my carry a single-shot with a floated barrel.

Semi-automatic is not automatic, and has no burst or rapid-fire mechanisms. All semi-automatic rifles shoot one bullet for each pull of the trigger, and in 2015, that's the norm for just about every patrol rifle in the world, except for those needing long-range accuracy, which is a fairly niche application nowadays.

The comment I responded to said that in addition to law enforcement, it's common for soldiers to patrol the streets, too, at times.

If I had to guess, I'd say they would prefer using the weapons they are accustomed to, which are probably not the same that LEO's use. Now I don't know much about the French military, but where I come from, I doubt the military even has appreciable amounts of semi-automatic rifles, as even the military police always use the same assault rifle everybody else does.

Just for clarification's sake, the rifles in question carried by the French army are almost certainly automatic-capable, but like most military organisations around the world, I would expect them to be configured in semi-automatic mode, as you will run through a full clip of ammunition in two short bursts if you're in automatic mode, and that will mostly be a waste of ammunition, unless you find yourself confronted with a massed charge. It would be difficult to believe that they weren't configured in semi-automatic mode in a friendly-territory urban setting!

Ah, my apologies. I read the comment backwards from what it was, so thanks for the clarification.

That said, I have no idea what the French Miliary use. I would guess a lot of H&K stuff. In the U.S. at least, swapping out from an M16 to an AR-15 is pretty natural, but I have no way of knowing what the transition is from or to in France.

What difference to you think it would have made if they had been armed?

In this case, since the OP is incorrect, and they were armed, absolutely nothing.