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An armed population would not improve the UK government in any way.

I would even suggest that despite the USA having guns, their government is just as bad. I'm not sure that plans to develop a new airport runway would be 'stopped' by civilians turning up armed.

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The US obviously has much, much, much stronger free speech protections. The extent to which that’s preserved by threat of an armed populace seems pretty tricky to figure out.

I agree I wouldn’t propose arming the UK public as a solution here.

> The US obviously has much, much, much stronger free speech protections.

Does it? I don't know enough about the subject to say one way or another.

People are frequently jailed in the UK for saying mean things on the Internet. This does not happen in the US. Even cases of people making specific threats against government officials are incredibly hard to act on.

> People are frequently jailed in the UK for saying mean things on the Internet.

I'm not sure that's true.

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