Killing vs. Tweeting in England

The English legal system stood down for 20 minutes as a British soldier was run down and hacked to death on a London Street.  The unarmed police waited for the armed police. 

Meanwhile two men "tweeted" uncomplimentary comments about the practitioners of Islam who committed the murder.  Police reacted swiftly and arrested the tweeters.

The brutal murder of an off-duty soldier by two Muslim activists continues to dominate the news in Great Britain. The scene was utterly bizarre: in broad daylight, in a busy section of London, the two Muslims apparently ran the soldier down with a car, within a block or two of his barracks, and then attacked him with knives and a meat cleaver. They attempted to behead him, apparently not quite successfully, as hundreds of passers-by looked on. No one stopped them–private ownership of firearms being illegal in the U.K.–but three random women, who have been extravagantly praised for their bravery, tended to the soldier’s body and engaged the murderers in conversation, in hopes of diverting them from killing anyone else. This went on for quite a while.

I was puzzled by early reports which indicated that police were present at the scene from the beginning, but also suggested that the killers waited for something like 20 minutes for policemen to arrive, whereupon they attacked them. It turns out that the reports were not inconsistent. There were policemen on the scene from the beginning, but they were unarmed:

Although other bystanders watched in horror and police waited helplessly for armed officers to arrive, Gemini modestly insisted her [sic] and her mother were not heroes and had done what anyone else would do.

The idea of policemen in one of the world’s major cities “wait[ing] helplessly for armed officers to arrive,” while murderers parade up and down the street soaked in blood and the body of a half-beheaded soldier lies in the street, is almost unbelievable. And yet that is the state of law enforcement in Great Britain. The average American household is better armed than a London policeman, and as a result, it was left to a few women from the crowd of bystanders to try to deal with cleaver-wielding murderers.

But that doesn’t mean the British are entirely lax with respect to law enforcement. No, not at all: it just depends which laws you are talking about. If you mean laws against carving up innocent people on the street with knives, well, the Brits have a problem. But if you complain about such an outrage on Facebook or Twitter, you’re going to be crushed by the full majesty of the law.

Well, it is a lot less risky to arrest a tweeter than a killer.