Us and them.

Comparisons are being drawn between an incident in Sussex where a gang of youths pelted a police car with snowballs, and the police seemed to take it in good part describing it as "harmless fun" and a similar incident a few days ago in Washington, where an off-duty cop drew his gun after having snowballs thrown at him. Is this an example of British commonsense as opposed to American hotheadedness, or is it more about armed police versus non-armed police? If our coppers had had guns, would things have turned out differently? We've talked about this before in connection with other things, but if you give people power, then they tend to use it - maybe in ways that you hadn't foreseen. And the moral of the story is....?