If "lunging" was the only thing knife welding psychos could do the world would be much nicer place.
(There used to be an excellent police blogger who talked about doing this from firsthand experience, but he was de-anonymised and his blog taken down).
Yes, talking people down works in every situation.
Not to say that guns work every time but if someone has the intent to get all staby It's time to go lethal.
I think it would be eye opening for everyone to get a taste of how things can go wrong in police situations themselves.
Believe me no-one wants to try and tackle a knife wielding suspect with a baton, at that point you're using defensive tactics and your partner will use their CS/PAVA to try and disable them.
Fortunately, in the UK, the vast majority of people with knives aren't actively homicidal at the point at which the police turn up.
Nightjack was amazing, the Times is in my permanent bad books for their nonsensical justification for outing him. He thoroughly deserved the Orwell prize that he won for his blogging.
For others reading this, there are a lot of good videos on the net showing examples of it.
The qualfiied officers are Authorised Firearms Officers who will also stand up the equivalent of SWAT teams as needed for each constabulary.
London has Specialist Firearms Officers as well who are a standing set of SWAT type teams. Several have written some very good books about their experiences, Steve Collins especially.
The main thing in the UK is that armed officers who discharge their weapon, let alone kill someone, face extremely rigorous scrutiny by an external agency. This combined with no specific legal protections means that a police officer shooting their weapon is very rare, it happens a handful of times across the UK each year.