Police need ten rounds to stop deranged man.

A man shot dead by police as he brandished a sword was justifiably killed, an inquest jury has ruled.

Ten rounds to stop a disturbed citizen is not good enough. It only reinforces the argument on weapons that both the civilian administration and police ignore. It goes to the heart of reasonable force and effective deterrents and covers all who legitimately carry weapons for the defence of the people.

A recent programme on the Vietnamese war concluded that the American Armalite (AR 15 –M16) could not compete with the more robust AK47. The statement used was…”it cannot be said that the Armalite lost the Vietnamese War for the Americans, but the AK47 definitely won it for the Viet-Kong”. One of the major reasons was the calibre of the bullet. The M16 was a smaller, but with a higher velocity round which hits you with the same impact of a hypodermic needle, whereas the Kalashnikov hits you a lot harder even though it was not travelling as fast. From a soldier’s point of view, you need a weapon that inflicts the most damage, I.E. can stop the enemy even though it does not kill them – get squeamish folks but this is realism. Don’t even cloud the issue with the Annie Oakley bits about shooting someone two inches about the knee or in the left arm – that’s fantasy land into which the Procurement Office has dived.

The carbines and small arms of the police are, as is proven in this case, insufficient to deter a deranged or even overly agitated person. The police are armed, in certain instances, with a high calibre weapon for stopping vehicles by puncturing the engine, not that I am advocating the use of such a weapon against people, but I would have no qualms about shooting a terrorist with one. To downgrade the British Armed Forces from the substantial and proven Nato 7.62 to the completely ineffective 5.56 was either a case of gross incompetence or down right corruption. Having test fired several weapons for other Governments, I know where my suspicions fall.

This leads me to my conclusion. Not a single police officer has ever been charged with weapons offences when a citizen has been killed, yet every soldier has to reacquaint himself with the Rules of Engagement every time he goes to pull the trigger. The cases of soldiers being imprisoned for shootings in Northern Ireland are legend, even though over 600 soldiers were killed doing their duty – a statistic that MP’s like Shahid Malik of somewhere in Yorkieland seems not to know – the burden on them appears to be more Draconian than on the lesser well trained civilian policeman. So if the policeman is poorly trained and issued with inadequate firepower, how disconcerting must it be for a soldier, who is highly trained, to be issued with a weapon that probable cannot save his/her life? Letter to your Member of Parliament, please.