On Jan 7, 5:54*pm, Jeremy Double wrote:
On 07/01/2011 15:36, wrote:

On Fri, 7 Jan 2011 07:23:36 -0800 (PST)
*wrote:
I don't dispute that mistakes happen, but that is exactly my concern:
another mistake might happen. *The OP asked, "If a uniformed presence
discourage one islamist from killing one person is that not worth the
effort?" *I would have to say no. *I do not believe the risk of
another terrible mistake is worth taking for the hope that lots of
uniforms and guns at railway stations might perhaps deter a bad person
from doing a bad thing.

If its a choice of one civilian dying because of a mistake or dozens dying
because of a bomb the choice is a no brainer. Anyway , I don't see what
your problem is - almost every other country in the world has armed police
as the norm, even fluffy liberal sweden.

On the contrary, I think that an innocent person being deliberately shot
without warning by the police is one of the most serious things that can
go wrong in a democracy.

There's a great difference between somebody being deprived of their life
by a deliberate act on the part of an agent of the state, and someone
being killed by the actions of a criminal.

With respect to the arming of the police, my preference would be for the
smallest possible number of guns to be around in Britain: if there's no
gun then there's no chance of anyone being shot by mistake. *If more
police are using guns regularly, then there will be more shootings by
mistake.

See for instancehttp://www.sonomacountyfreepress.com/police/08_toomany.html

Apart from anything else, arming all the police "ups the ante" and makes
them more likely to be targets for criminals.


Also, people have a misguided notion that, at times of dissent, the
people become violent against the state. In fact, the state becomes
violent againts the people and does whatever it can to intimidate them
(as the police have demonstrated only too clearly in the last couple
of months).