THE attacks in Nottingham demonstrate the need to arm British police with guns, according to a former head of counter-terrorism with City of London Police.
Kevin Hurley told GB News: “One thing it tells me is this is that we as a public are still very vulnerable to these types of situations because of the fact that our police are not able to take decisive action immediately when confronted with these people actually in action.
“And the reason for that, of course, is our normal patrolling response police do not carry handguns as they do in every country in the world, apart from Iceland and Norway – even in sleepy New Zealand the police are now armed.
“That’s the reason why when they had that terrible attack by that right-wing activist in Christchurch, police were able to stop him and deal with him immediately…because they had the confidence to do so because their firearms with them.”
In a discussion with Patrick Christys, he continued: “We actually make ourselves less safe, because we still possessed with this idea of Dixon of Dock Green bobby on the beat. We all forget that Dixon of Dock Green in the film was shot dead.
“If we want our police to be able to react quickly and stop us all being harmed and this kind of threat, they need to have the appropriate equipment to do that. And that means a pistol.”
He added: “The bottom line on it is there are very, very few armed police patrolling on our streets, the majority still remain unarmed and in the end when someone runs amok in our shopping centres, in a school, on the street like this, I would like to think the first police officer on scene, she can pull out her gun and she can shoot them to stop them, to protect the rest of us because we still slavishly believe the world is as it once was.
“It’s not. The demographics are different, things are changed. We need our police to be able to take, in extremis, decisive action to stop these mad attackers in their tracks.”
