Inevitable. Peroid.

Idiot/Savant gets all hyped up about arming police.

An unarmed police force polices by consent; they have no option but to seek the active cooperation of the citizenry. An armed police force polices by fear, using the omnipresent threat of lethal force to “induce compliance”. Oh, they might not be sticking the gun in your face right this second, but its visible presence means the threat is always there – a fact that Key himself acknowledges when he calls armed police “intimidating”.

Well, that paragraph explains a whole lot about Mr Harbrow and how he has such a wildly different view of the world to everyone else – he lives on cloud cuckoo land.

Unarmed police do not police by consent – they police using the force of the authority given them by the government, and the government gets it’s authority from the people. All police in societies like ours (armed or not) do try to work with people when posible, because it makes their jobs easier.

However police spend much of their time dealing with people who do not give consent to being policed – that’s their job. Police do not run down and tackle fleeing criminals by “consent”, they do not arrest drug dealers by “consent” and they do not put people in the cells or take them before the courts by “consent”.

Then there’s the irony of saying “Oh, they might not be sticking the gun in your face right this second“. Well, funny story. If you refuse to submit to the authority of the New Zeland police when they suggests you comply, and if you take your refusal seriously enough (say, start swinging a baseball bat) you may just find that gun sticking in your face anyway. Now. In New Zealand.

This is not a good move for our police force, and it is not a good move for our society. And our Prime Minister should be doing something more about it than just wringing his hands and calling it “inevitable”. He has a Parliamentary majority, and if necessary, he should use it to bring the police to heel.

While I agree with Malcolm’s unquoted earlier point about arms no solving the latest assault, the incident does demonstrate the increasing brutality of the criminal element of our society – not just in terms of the brutality of the assault, but also that it is senior, experienced staff who are on the receiving end, not just some rookie who’s no idea how to deescalation a situation.

To people who don’t live among fairies in a hole in the ground that suggests that the “escalation” argument (that is, if police arm, so will the crooks) is null and void – the crooks are arming themselves anyway. And while a machette is not as dangerous as a firearm, no one should really suggest that we ask the police to face one with anything less than lethal force.Do we bring the police to heal, or the criminals?

Seriously, is that even a question?