Am I the only person wondering why, on Bird's 4 hour rampage, there was seemingly no attempt to place police-roadblocks to stop him, or at least police marksmen helicoptered in to stop him continuing to kill? Surely after the first few deaths, when police realised roughly what they had on their hands, and started telling people to keep indoors etc., they should have thrown the dice and attempted to put a swift stop to further killing by Bird.
Meanwhile: It's still pretty easy to get a gun in Britain: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/crime/7798318/Cumbria-shootings-puts-spotlight-on-Britains-gun-laws.html http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/uk/crime/article7142983.ece . We now know that Bird had his guns LEGALLY. It's time to ban the kind of 'sniper rifle' he apparently had, & drastically to tighten up access to shotguns. #Banthegun
What I want, is a country where the police are ready to take down lunatics with weapons, but where it is very rare that any lunatic will have a lethal weapon (at least, a gun), because we are successfully preventing them from having any legal access to them.
Comments
you really should wait for all the facts to become apparent before going for your politicians soundbite. The 'sniper rifle' was a .22 vermin gun, fitted with a telecopic sight. These can be fitted to most sorts of rifle. Maybe we should ban these sights rather than the rifles.
Apparently the police helicopter was in for routine maintenance. One can imagine the confusion in cumbria, the police where undoubtably inundated with calls from various locations at various times so his actual whereabouts were very hard to pinpoint. Now bring in the idea that you want a police helicopter to bring in a police sniper to take him out, one, it has to put it in a situation whereby a positive id has to be made, so probably close enough for him to fire back....or worse a case of mistaken id by the crew.
Two, shoot lunatics...are you serious?
Quite a right wing response, I'm shocked by it, Rupert
GS
>"Firstly i should state my total sympathy with the injured and their families, the families of the dead and also the family of the perpetrator."
Exactly the kind of predictable stuff one would expect from a politician. Please say something substantive.
>"you really should wait for all the facts to become apparent before going for your politicians soundbite."
It's so easy to snipe at politicians, isn't it? But we still haven't had anything substantive from you.
>"Apparently the police helicopter was in for routine maintenance."
So what? There are loads of helicopters in Cumbria. The Mountain Rescue helicopters, for instance. They should have immediately commandeered one of those. In fact, as soon as they knew that the police helicopter was going in for routine maintenance, they should have arranged a contingency for that in advance.
Thanks for writing something substantive. Shame it doesn't help your case.
>"Quite a right wing response"
Nope; just an honest response. There is no monopoly on wanting to protect the public for rightwingers!
>"I'm shocked by it, Rupert."
Then you should get out more.
We have listened to sex workers and based our policy on their views, have we not?
Should we not also listen to the Police, I mean the real ones on the front line, the ones who, like sex workers, put themselves on the line?
Preventive action to stop real and present dangers of violence is part of what good policing and indeed the ethic of violence-minimisation requires. Occasionally, the most non-violent action one can take is using force to prevent a criminal from violating others.
What the authorities should restrict, is access to ammo. The ammo should only be available within the grounds of shooting clubs, or available under license which must be granted for the particular purpose. This purpose could possibly be supervised by a member of the police if it is a non-club related activity.
Then we could own weapons legally like now, but possessing ammo would be illegal unless within designated controlled areas, or for licensed and overseen activities.
It would be fairly simple for the Police to have powers to randomly search people after engaging in shooting activities, to see if they are carrying ammo, and if they are to take away their license.
This would possibly have prevented what happened, as Bird would not have been able to use his firearms in the way he did, without any ammo.