Edit: Replaced incorrect use of 'weapons' with 'firearms'.
To put this in context, over the four years from 2008-2012, police officers in England and Wales opened fire on 18 separate occasions, killing nine people.
In a country of 55 million people, that's about 5 shooting incidents, and 2 people killed each year.
http://www.channel4.com/news/police-fatal-shooting-trigger-h...
Ultimately, I don't believe the problem lies with the firearms but with the culture. As an Australian visiting or moving to the US, you will inevitably be reminded that if a US police officer pulls you over you should not get out of your car. I've had people tell me that if you do get out of the car, the officer will draw their weapon and take aim. Perhaps that is exaggerated, but to me that is an absolutely ludicrous reaction. It paints a picture of US police as having an extremely paranoid, "us vs. them" mindset. What I read in the news and have witnessed since I moved here seems to confirm that.
If the US police were so gun happy I would expect way more people to be shot per year/day.
> If the US police were so gun happy I would expect way more people to be shot per year/day.
There are, though.
A couple of articles on the subject:
http://fivethirtyeight.com/features/how-many-americans-the-p...
http://fivethirtyeight.com/datalab/another-much-higher-count...
But if we use the FBI's number of ~400/year[0]it's still ridiculous. In the two decades between 1989-90 and 2010-11, Australian police fatally shot a total of 105 people.[1]
Looking at those figures, Australia has ~0.25 fatal police shootings per million people per year. The US has ~1.25 fatal police shootings per million people per year. Five times more. Perhaps I'm wrong, but I don't believe that's solely due to gun control policy in the two countries.
[0] http://www.fbi.gov/about-us/cjis/ucr/crime-in-the-u.s/2012/c...
[1] http://www.aic.gov.au/publications/current%20series/rip/21-4...
If you stay in the car you have a much easier time dealing with a person who can't easily get into your personal space and limiting the options you have to protect your self.
> As far as getting out of the vehicle most police don't like surprises so if things go step by step according to the person with the gun things go much better.
In Australia I can get out of the car and go talk to the officer and everything's fine.
In the US I can't - I accept that reality.
Both officers are carrying guns, though.
And if he does? Your argument has excluded half of the (rather important) outcomes.
http://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/jan/08/ahmed-merabet-m...
> Merabet, who according to officials was 40, was called to the scene while on patrol with a female colleague in the neighbourhood, just in time to see the black Citroën used by the two killers heading towards the boulevard from Charlie Hebdo.
> “He was on foot, and came nose to nose with the terrorists. He pulled out his weapon. It was his job, it was his duty,” said Rocco Contento, a colleague who was a union representative at the central police station for Paris’s 11th arrondissement.
> Another policeman, 48-year-old Franck Brinsolaro, was killed moments earlier in the assault on Charlie Hebdo where he was responsible for the protection of its editor, Stéphane Charbonnier, one of the 11 killed in the building. A colleague said he “never had time” to pull his weapon.
See also the NYPD cops killed recently - definitely armed - who were shot regardless.
http://www.cbsnews.com/news/charlie-hebdo-french-satirical-m...
"the first two officers to arrive, who were apparently unarmed, fled after seeing gunmen armed with automatic weapons and possibly a grenade launcher."
This is also the same "source" which claimed that both suspects had been captured and a third killed according to "US intelligence sources" (still unnamed). Turned out that that wasn't true at that point in time or since then.
They're like the Daily Mail of the US, just peddle utter shit all of the time...
This tells me nothing. Are the facts presented by parent's post false or not?
In short most military rifles are single shot due to the fact that you may engage targets out to a few hundred yard to a couple of meters.
tldr; Automatic rifles for military applications, not all that great.
Most NATO militaries have increased the amount of training in urban environments. I'm pretty sure(or overly optimistic) they have decent training/drilling experience as the political backlash from having soldiers get way to aggressive in terms of resorting to military tactics vs police tactics.
The Australian military is generally lauded as being excellent at peace-keeping operations, yet during officer training, it was hammered into us that policing was a much harder operation, and that our hierarchy would never accept policing missions.
Semi-automatic is not automatic, and has no burst or rapid-fire mechanisms. All semi-automatic rifles shoot one bullet for each pull of the trigger, and in 2015, that's the norm for just about every patrol rifle in the world, except for those needing long-range accuracy, which is a fairly niche application nowadays.
If I had to guess, I'd say they would prefer using the weapons they are accustomed to, which are probably not the same that LEO's use. Now I don't know much about the French military, but where I come from, I doubt the military even has appreciable amounts of semi-automatic rifles, as even the military police always use the same assault rifle everybody else does.
That said, I have no idea what the French Miliary use. I would guess a lot of H&K stuff. In the U.S. at least, swapping out from an M16 to an AR-15 is pretty natural, but I have no way of knowing what the transition is from or to in France.