Paris killings

Yes, I second that wholeheartedly.

We've also been running down our armed forces over a number of years, especially under Labour, but even now under the Tories.  Heaven forbid what would happen to our ability to defend ourselves against such brazen global terrorists should Comrade Corbyn ever get into power.

Concur with that.

It's any easy thing to say, but not so easy to put into practice when a friend's daughter is lying in hospital in critical condition with gun shot wounds, having attended a rock concert as part of a birthday event with her friends who are now for the most part lying in a morgue.

ROFL covers it pretty well.

Lets question it, then. Here's the Bataclan timeline:

9:40PM: original attack, automatic weapons used to shoot many people.
9:45PM: or earlier: some of those still uninjured were taken to the stage area to be used as hostages.
12:20AM: armed police stormed the place.

What that timeline should tell you is at least three things:

1. The police left people with serious gunshot wounds to die for two and a half hours, well beyond the critical hour for delivering emergency first aid and hospital emergency treatment. It's effectively certain that many of those who died there just bled to death due to lack of basic measures to stop blood loss. Many others could undoubtedly have been saved by emergency surgery. For some of the time there would not have been armed police there but not for the whole period from 9:45 to 12:20. The police had the weapons, they decided not to use them to save those who needed urgent medical attention.

2. Some apparently survived even so. Which implies that either the attackers did not visit the injured to ensure that they died by cutting an artery or did not do a fully thorough job of it. The time delay between ability to enter and doing it gave them ample time to do this if they chose to do so.

3. The elapsed time for the initial firing there was so fast that no response team could have reached the scene in time to stop that except due to chance of actually being in the building and able to hear the sounds. 999 response time is too slow to have stopped the initial attack even if the armed team was a couple of streets away.

It's also worth considering what happened in Paris, a place with many armed police, to the attackers who struck at the restaurants. You know, the ones who attacked, and shot a hundred or so people, then drove away before the police were able to stop them? At least that saved many lives, allowing medical attention to be delivered to those who had been shot.

There's more to it than having police with firearms. They have to be part of a system with a response time of less than a minute, and in reality less than ten seconds in many cases, from first shot fired to officers opening fire. They then have to be willing to rapidly use those weapons.

I only know of one railway station - Liverpool Street, which often has travel police officers armed with carbines on the concourse - and some airports that have police with a credible response time expectation of less than 30 seconds from first shot fired to armed response opening fire. And for the airports the distances involved mean I'm not sure they could make it, Liverpool Street is smaller. Even for Liverpool Street I'm not sure how the response would work after an explosive vest or other bomb was first detonated next to the officers on the concourse, one of the more obvious responses to the threat they pose to the success of the attack.

So far as "several years goes", you really seem to have no idea of even quite recent history. Do you really have no knowledge of the hundreds of bombs that the IRA placed in London, to the point that suspect device alerts because of them became just a routine fact of life during the few years at the peak of their campaign? And none of the more spectacular big bombs that did things like destroying the Baltic Exchange? If you really don't know about these hundreds of bombs, you can find a list of many that exploded before they could be stopped here. A critical difference is that the IRA often chose to try to minimise loss of life in its UK campaign, or to use carefully timed warnings to catch first responders as they reacted.

Now, I don't know about you but my own experience includes:

1. Living in London and commuting during much of the IRA bombing campaign there.
2. Walking past the World Trade Center shortly after the first bombing, it interrupted power to a network server I dealt with also. I was working in a building roughly at the junction of Rector street and Broadway, the first one outside what would be the exclusion area after the second WTC attack, though I wasn't clear if it was actually inside.
3. Having throat irritation after the second WTC bombing for a couple of days until the rain washed that out of the air, then smelling burning for two and a half months whenever the wind was from that direction, until they excavation work had reached the bottom of the rubble. I was about five miles away, still in NYC. I wasn't still at the Rector Street building, I hadn't worked there for a few years. The company relocated to Boston. Until about five years before I got there its office was mid way up one of the WTC towers.
4. I used to regularly eat lunch in a restaurant across the street from the WTC for many years, perhaps two or three times a week.
5. Using the pistol range at the HAC barracks in Central London. An IRA bomb exploded in the main building during someone's 21st birthday party.

So, the key element of the discussion is that the solution you have proposed is irrelevant to the problem that you're pitching it to solve. It can't have any substantial expect due to the response times involved and even if it could, a change of tactics would be the solution.

Simplistic solutions that don't actually do anything to solve the problem are not the way forward.

james: you've rather misunderstood my point. As should be clear from the fact that the existence of a much larger / greater proportion of armed law enforcement resource clearly did not - and never does - stop the initial atrocities at the point of them happening (although it is possibly still too early to say whether the bombers who failed to gain access to the Stade De France were in anyway affected or not by any presence or not of armed law enforcement: I make no judgement of that either way since it is probalby too early to know one way or the other). So that could hardly be the point I was referring to when drawing parallels.

As to your other points: I am fully aware of the IRA atrocities , both mainland and in NI, having spent most of my formative years and adult life living with that as a backdrop to life in the UK and like most people having a piece of my heart torn out on every new atrocity; a good portion of the latter period of that was spent living in London, and a good bit of it commuting in London. Without wishing to reveal too much, but given that you have chosen to take what I view as both a slightly patronising and slightly aggressive approach to me in your post, my other half is also a police officer of many years standing (unarmed). Not that that should affect things one bit. I have been a long term advocate of a (largely) unarmed UK law enforcement (with the continuing exception of the PSNI of course) feeling that it best embodies the spirit of Peel, and of policing by consent ('by the people, for the people').  Regardless of the fact that we are pretty much out of kilter with every other major European democratic nation in that regard. However my views have started to evolve - without being set in concrete because its not black and white - particularly since the type of threat has changed, and perhaps most notably following the atrocities in France in January (and the way events unfolded).

Regardless, today was set aside as one of contemplation so I will leave my thoughts at that and not engage in what I never intended to be some form of almost personalised dialogue.