“A former Texas police officer is causing a stir in jolly Old England. After leaving his job in Garland, Texas, and moving with his British wife and their three children to Reading, Ben Johnson took a job as a British bobby — and had the audacity to suggest that he might want to carry a gun while on the job.

“We should value the lives of police officers enough to properly equip them and train them to do their job,” Garland told the Washington Post, “even if that means getting rid of some old-fashioned notions.”

The “old-fashioned” notion Johnson is talking about is the very intense — and irrational — belief held by virtually all British people that guns are bad — period. According to the Post story, “Johnson’s case has caused a media furor [in England], partly because an American — a Texan no less — is claiming he feels less safe as a police officer in Britain than he did on the beat in the United States, which is routinely portrayed here as a gun-drunk Wild West.”

Two police officers have been killed with firearms and two more were stabbed to death in Britain in the last five years. During that same period, 44 officers received nonfatal firearms wounds. The most recent killing of a police officer occurred in November — a mother of three who was responding to an alarm in Bradford.

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