Metropolitan Police admit to IKEA Shoot to Kill Policy

Wish I was armed ...

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Our police are carrying guns again.
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I don’t feel any safer.
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For a couple of days they were not. Over a hundred fire-arms trained London policemen refused to carry their weapons after two of their colleagues were suspended for shooting a man outside a pub five years ago. The man was armed solely with a chair leg in a plastic bag and was shot in the head because he turned round in a threatening manner.
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Not for a second would I suggest the two policemen involved woke up that morning with the intention of murdering someone. The question is were they trigger happy or were their procedures at fault. This is even more important since the shooting took place as there are a lot more police marksmen on the streets of London after 9/11. As the old saying goes 'when you have a hammer all problems look like nails', when you have a 'Heckler and Koch HK5 all problems look like potential targets'.
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Did I say police marksman? It's kind of difficult to apply that term to men armed with submachine guns. The word 'marksman' implies a one-shot one-kill mentality; somebody on top of a building somewhere, armed with a rifle topped with a telescopic sight the size of canoe. Men standing around in public places armed with SMGs don't convey the same kind of connotations. SMGs are not exactly designed for accuracy; their strength is laying down area fire at a rate of 600+rpm. Seeing policemen so-equipped lolling around crowded Westminster or the West End I wonder just how many friendly fire casualties there would be if one of those guys cut loose. Come to think of it, don’t the policemen themselves represent a potential source of weaponry to potential terrorists?
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Even when the IRA was at its peak we never saw anything like this in London. We had armed police, sure, but they sat in vans driving around London ready to be called in, SWAT style. Now they can be seen on every street corner in parts of Central London.
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This isn't about our security. It's about fear. Fear and pretending to do something about the causes of fear. In four short years we've moved to a society with blatantly armed police asking for identity papers in all sorts of unlikely situations. Soon we'll have identity cards and those old war movies set in Occupied Europe will look a lot less old-fashioned.