> The first cop you see entering a British airport concourse will probably be carrying an MP5.
Last week, a friend told me that when he flew into Amsterdam some years ago, there were people with automatic weapons standing around, and he was told it was routine.
Can I ask what the hell Europe is expecting that the US isn't? Because aside from some deployments in the immediate wake of 9/11 (which I vaguely recall were such a joke that the rifles weren't even loaded), we don't do that here.
Airport police in the UK carry H&K MP5s, with a selector for single-round or three-round-burst fire only - no fully automatic rock'n'roll. The reason is that a semi-auto carbine with sights is much more accurate than a pistol (especially if shooting across a crowded airport concourse), and rifle ammunition is out of the question (to easy to penetrate multiple partition walls and kill bystanders). So, pistol ammunition but a more accurate gun.
As for what they're expecting? This is a genuine Scottish tabloid newspaper cover from a couple of years back:
There have been attacks on British airports in recent memory: not often, but often enough to justify the permanent armed police presence. And then there are the security nightmares everyone in the security biz remembers, such as the Lod Airport massacre:
Which US airport are you talking about? I've flown out of Newark and La Guardia a few times in the past year and a half, and I've seen uniformed people with machine guns each time.
Hell, I've seen policemen with machine guns in the subway. (I'm not a gun person, by the way, so maybe "machine gun" isn't the right term, but it's definitely the kind of gun that doesn't require you to pull the trigger per bullet fired.)
You'll see them more often in New York or D.C. I've even seen them at SJC once. They come out at one of the color-coded terror alert levels, but I forget which.
Last week, a friend told me that when he flew into Amsterdam some years ago, there were people with automatic weapons standing around, and he was told it was routine.
Can I ask what the hell Europe is expecting that the US isn't? Because aside from some deployments in the immediate wake of 9/11 (which I vaguely recall were such a joke that the rifles weren't even loaded), we don't do that here.