Ducking for cover

[ffutures]

I walked in to work today and noticed that two of the police I passed a couple of streets from Marble Arch were carrying machine guns, presumably as part of the big pre-Olympics security exercise that's going on this week.

For some strange reason I don't find the idea of police carrying machine guns even slightly reassuring, because if they have to use them either they or someone else will be putting a lot of lead into the air, with no guarantee where any strays will end up, and little chance that the police actually have much experience under real urban combat conditions. Yet another reason for me to be SERIOUSLY annoyed by the Olympics...

Comments

[alexmc.livejournal.com]

There are some royal "palaces" towards Green Park which usually have police with sub machine guns.

I agree that it is disturbing, but it might not be the fault of the Olympics.

[ffutures.livejournal.com]

Possibly, but I walk in that way 2-3 times a week, 3 weeks out of 6, and I've never seen it before.

[pauldormer.livejournal.com]

Back in the IRA bombing campaign in the early nineties they put a cordon round the City - lots of plastic barricades that got christend the Ring of Plastic. I remember going into the City on a Friday night to get to the Barbican and seeing a policeman walking along with a machine gun. (Well, an automatic rifle is probably the correct term, but I'm no gun expert.)

[ffutures.livejournal.com]

This was fairly short so I'm guessing it was an assault rifle, e.g. not very accurate at long range. Really not a fan...

[jonnynexus.livejournal.com]

It's probably a Heckler and Koch MP5, which is generally a submachine-gun, but in this case is a semi-auto only variant:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heckler_%26_Koch_MP5#Semi-auto_only_variants

The police went for the semi-auto variant precisely because police should be firing single shots, not spraying lead around.

[karohemd.livejournal.com]

Pretty much what I just wanted to post but for some reason LJ ate my comment. :(
It probably looked like this.

[isfdb.livejournal.com]

That's what I recall them having last time I visited New Scotland Yard. (Strangely, there was no such visible armament at MI5.) For SOME places I can see a justification, but I too would worry if they appeared commonly on our streets.

[ffutures.livejournal.com]

Yes, that looks about right.

[davidbrider.livejournal.com]

Yeah, I remember shortly after the 9/11 attacks I was in London and saw some rather heavily armed police and found it incredibly disturbing...

[ffutures.livejournal.com]

Same here.

[nelc.livejournal.com]

I saw a couple patrolling around the short-stay car park at Birmingham Airport a few weeks ago. I'm a bit bothered by the fact that I kind of forgot about it until now.

[ffutures.livejournal.com]

I saw them at airports in 2000 and 2001, before the World Trade Centre. I suspect that they are now more or less standard equipment.

[landsmand.livejournal.com]

This probably isn't that reassuring, but the good news is that the cops don't carry automatic weapons - their MP5s and HK416s are strictly speaking only self-loading; i.e. they won't fire either burst or fully automatic. Thus there's a limit to the absolute volume of fire they can generate.

Of course, a cynic might reflect on the marksmanship standards suggested by the apparent 9-hits-out-of-13-rounds-fired statistic associated with the point-blank shooting of a Brazilian electrician on a Tube train.