I love to hear those students squeal, it's a shame these slugs ain't real.

Police will have the right to fire rubber bullets on student protesters as they prepare for huge London demonstration

Now I'm torn between the civil liberty issues and the opportunity to see a bunch of 'entitled' scroungers going down in a hail of rubber bullets.

Police are prepared to use plastic bullets for the first time on the British mainland if student protests planned for tomorrow erupt into violence.
Scotland Yard revealed yesterday that the baton rounds have been authorised for a student fees march in London amid fears it could be hijacked by anarchists and troublemakers.

So where do I stand on the use of baton rounds? The right to protest should be sacrosanct. The police should certainly not be allowed to shoot peaceful protesters with anything, yet they say they don't intend to do that. They will only use rubber bullets if everything kicks off and the lives of police officers are in danger. Rioting is different to peaceful protest so maybe that is ok?

What about the next big planned demonstration? When we are a little more used to the police being armed with baton rounds and we have seen them used responsibly to protect the lives of officers, will we complain if they say they now intend to use them where there is not necessarily danger to life, but only property. Will we begin to accept a slippery slope? You didn't complain about this so you can't have a problem with that.

The police are already routinely armed with batons and tazers, neither of which the public are allowed to own. Some would say they should be routinely armed with guns.

Further arming of the police serves to distance them from the general population even more so than they already are. An army of robocops with potentially lethal weapons do not police by consent.

I am sure that if I forgot to engage my brain, I could easily sit and watch a news report of anti cuts protesters being mown down by police with baton rounds, with glee. I hate them. Their only purpose is to take money from the pockets of the likes of you and me, to have spent on themselves. They are perfectly happy for this to be done by force. They fully beleive that if you try to resist your hard earned money being looted for the greater good, you are an evil person and it is acceptable for force to be used against you to make you comply. I would shed no tears for these people. Something in the back of my mind says they should have a good taste of the government force that they are happy to be used on others.

But the police say they don't intend to use these wepons on protestors, only serious troublemakers who threaten the lives of officers.

The police are well armed enough already to be able to deal with splinter groups of so called anarchists. They don't need bigger weapons, they just need to use the ones they already have. Policing of the recent riots and the last student protests was so haphazard that many of the miscreants went unchallenged. This failure need not be met by arming the coppers with weapons never before used on the British mainland, it needs to be addressed with better organisation and firm desicion making. It's no good filming the rioters and then arresting them a week later in thier beds, the damage has been done by then.

It wouldn't concern me greatly to see the likes of Occupy LSX or students who want a handout being cracked down on hard by the police, only one day, people who think like me, who have had enough of their money being looted to pay for the feckless may rise up in numbers.

The police will shoot you regardless of your politics. We shouldn't be allowing them the tools to do it.