A bit of excitement, police with machine guns have just sealed off our street!

[nickymanchester]

We're just over visiting our DD. She lives in a street full of terraced houses and three police SUVs have pulled up and blocked the street.

Then five policemen got out and suited up. They have the lot on - helmets, machine guns etc and are standing outside a house about 50 yards down the street.

No idea what is happening but this is really just an ordinary street - not used to seeing machine guns round this way!

Bit of Saturday excitement. Poor hostage though. I hope they're ok.

Gutted I missed this

@TellMeDinosaurFacts

Ex -copper DH says they will likely have been a Heckler & Koch MP5s which are capable of being fully automatic so are classed as sub-machine guns. (Well, that's what armed response use in our area anyway).

(Reaching significant levels of pedantry I know but I so rarely have any shareable knowledge! )

Thanks for that Dinosaur

Reaching significant levels of pedantry I know but I so rarely have any shareable knowledge!

Not at all, it was really interesting to hear from someone with actual knowledge

We're two houses on a quiet country lane. NDN has three teenage sons who like to live on the wild side. Three police vans and dogs turned up last year and were there for an hour, we could hear the dogs scurrying about the house and bedrooms from our side. Left eventually with a big brown paper bag.
NDN who is lovely, said they were looking for a friend of her sons who had gone missing. course they were.

This happened in my village a few months ago. Turns out a kid was playing cowboys in the street with his gran, someone drove past, saw a woman with a gun, but didnt see the child, and phoned the police 😳

Most exciting thing on our actual street is being evacuated when there's a new hole.I
My neighbours are in their 80's in four surrounding cottages they never do owt.

We had armed police come into our house a few years ago. We weren't in trouble but there was an incident in the neighbourhood and they all trooped through the house and into the garden.

They were all really well built like a rugby sevens team

@Hoppinggreen

Exciting and I hope everyone is ok but I doubt they are machine guns

Yes they are. UK police politely call them "carbines" to protect delicate public sensibilities.

www.eliteukforces.info/police/CO19/weapons/

Only on this site could a thread about a live armed police operation be derailed with squabbling about the type of guns 😂

Hope everyone’s ok, OP.

We had "Police Interceptors - Live!" in our back garden last year. Taser, very big Alsatian, helichopper...

They swear far more in real life than they do on the telly 😁

@SeaToSki

Machine guns are fully automatic, so they can reel of hundreds of bullets without pausing or the trigger having to be pulled for each bullet. They are mostly mounted to vehicles to carry the ammunition or take two people to operate, one to hold the gun and one to carry and feed the belts of ammunition.

Semi automatic guns are the next level down and can fire bursts of bullets with one trigger pull. Most police forces and many armed forces carry these guns as they are more portable because you dont need a box of ammunition for each time you fire. They have large capacity magazines and the operator carries multiple refills in their pockets or strapped to a vest thingy

Then there are ordinary guns which require a trigger pull for each bullet fired but can have a magazine with multiple bullets

Then there are bolt action guns (mostly rifles) which require each bullet to be loaded and fired individually

I hope I got that mostly correct!

This is the beauty of Mumsnet. Just finished lunch and now know far more about light weapons than I did before it.

@SeaToSki

Sorry - @borntobequiet although thanks to @SeaToSki too!!

Had a next door neighbour once that was a bit unhinged and I suspect possible involved in drugs. About a week before I moved out a Police van pulled up out the front of his place with a number of armed police officers and one of those mini battering rams to knock his front door down if needed (disappointingly they didn’t have to use it). He got hauled off in handcuffs and while on the one hand I was disappointed I never found out what he was charged with I was pretty relieved not to live door to him anymore.

So I just read my post to DH and he said I got a load of it mixed up and its more about how the gun is cocked and not number of bullets fired ! SoI googled it and got even more confused, 😱. So please take what I wrote as an indication that a gun that looks like a machine gun is probably not one unless you have wandered onto a fully fledged battlefield!

@Hoppinggreen

Exciting and I hope everyone is ok but I doubt they are machine guns

No, UK police don’t use machine guns.

@SeaToSki

Machine guns are fully automatic, so they can reel of hundreds of bullets without pausing or the trigger having to be pulled for each bullet. They are mostly mounted to vehicles to carry the ammunition or take two people to operate, one to hold the gun and one to carry and feed the belts of ammunition.

Semi automatic guns are the next level down and can fire bursts of bullets with one trigger pull. Most police forces and many armed forces carry these guns as they are more portable because you dont need a box of ammunition for each time you fire. They have large capacity magazines and the operator carries multiple refills in their pockets or strapped to a vest thingy

Then there are ordinary guns which require a trigger pull for each bullet fired but can have a magazine with multiple bullets

Then there are bolt action guns (mostly rifles) which require each bullet to be loaded and fired individually

I hope I got that mostly correct!

👏👍 especially liked the ‘vest thingy’ 🤣

A group of friends and I rarely go out. Since gradating from uni and getting boring jobs and kids and husbands, we've moved to boring small towns and become the boring in bed by 10pm brigade. A couple years ago though (right before covid lockdowns) we decided to go clubbing in one of the small towns to celebrate a 30th birthday.

At about 2am we're coming out of the club and we see the whole road is filled with police kitted out in riot gear with what looked like huge machine guns. They just stared at us as we walked past them all. We walked to the car park down the road wondering what was going on. We assumed it was some sort of training exercise as the police didn't look to be doing anything and surely if there was some sort of mad man on the lose the police wouldn't have let three women walk alone to a dark car park on the outskirts of the town? There was nothing about an incident in the news the next day.
It made our lives not quite so boring for the next few months and we still wonder how frequently the police walk around the small boring town with large machine guns at night.

How exciting

House next door (well known drug dealers) was surrounded by armed police with big guns a few years ago. They shouted at everyone to get in. They surrounded the house for a few hours in the pouring rain then went in and that was it no one arrested no items I could see being bought out (messaging neighbours they couldn’t see anything either)

Next doors business ventures continue

No sure why people are being so picky about the term "machine gun"? UK specialist firearm officers do indeed carry weapons that can be used in full automatic mode (never used as would empty magazine in a few secs) or 3 burst shots or single shot mode. The commonly used MP5 is indeed classed as a Sub-machine gun.

Once I was leaving my house to walk to the station and there was a row of police crouched down on a side street. They had a battering ram with them. They then half crawled, half ran to a small block of flats nearby and shouted police then bashed the door in! I suspected drug dealing or similar. I always have a nosey when police are around.

One time I was being taken somewhere by police (victim not perpetrator!). They put the lights and sirens on to get through traffic (middle of London). That was quite exciting, everyone was looking and probably imagining I was a major criminal my life is a bit sad! Lol.

Happened in my quiet suburban road, massive drug bust. I missed it.

My immediate thought when I hear machine gun is to picture The Mask shouting "a Tommy gun".

@TheQueef

I thought armed response units had semi/auto weapons?

I read somewhere that they don’t. They have to purposefully fire each round.

I do hope the person taken hostage is being well cared for - they will have been in prolonged fear for their life. And I hope the perpetrator is banned from coming back and banned from keeping a weapon, too. Too often the police seem unable to act until something happens, by which time a murder can have occurred.

Just to offer a vaccine)guns link for the poster whose excitement was limited to a jab, DD2 has had her 2 doses of Moderna in the US (very) deep south at a repurposed local leisure centre. Both times armed police were marshalling the parking and armed military were administering the vaccine. She counted 12 firearms. I was underwhelmed when I went for my second Oxford AZ this week at a local pharmacy and nobody was carrying...