>>>I don't get it. Are the criminals just nicer over there? If the cops didn't carry guns over here, there would be a big shortage of cops.
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>>I think it's largely a historical/cultural thing. The history of the U.S. is rooted in guns. Kids are raised on the romance of the old west with it's belt notches, and the gangs of the roaring 20's and depression 30's.
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>>I'm not an expert on English history, but it seems to me that they don't really have the same sort of historical fixation on guns in general.
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>It's swords for them! People get all twisted up over guns here, why I don't know. It ain't the gun that's the problem. It's the person holding it. I've been carrying one for thirty years and it's never killed anyone, nor has it shot anyone, even though it has been shot at six times.

Of course it's the person behind the gun, but on the other hand, suppose in an imaginary U.S. nobody but police officers and the military had been allowed to have a gun, say starting 100 years ago. Do you think the homicide rate attributable to folks with guns would be up, down, or unchanged today? My guess is down. The problem is nobody wants to tackle the problem head on. The attitude is, since we've always had guns, we should continue to have them.

I'd have thought that the last thing, as a police officer, that you'd want, is citizens running around with guns. How do you tell which one of them is going to be the problem later on?