Is the Commons’ Sergeant-at-Arms normally an armed person or is this peculiar to Mr. Vickers?
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Who but a Canadian would bring a spear to a gunfight?
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To be fair, a spear gives you more options in that situation than a sword.
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Let’s hope the gun stays in the lockbox! No need to weaponise the position as the contingencies have shown to work.
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So, yes, he’s armed. His job is more than just ceremonial.
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They do have armed security officers, but apparently not enough to fight a battle and provide personal protection to all MPs. Also I can’t imagine them being able to carry their own guns in Parliament.
Not always; but given the speed with which our Cold War era “Continuity of Government” shadow-apparatus of secret executive orders and gigantic bunkers got Really Damn Creepy; and the overt intimidation and suppression that gets ramped up when governments do get serious about crisis planning(ie. the WTO is in town, the RNC/DNC is in town, let’s basically impose martial law for blocks and blocks in all directions); I’m not sure that it’d be such a bad thing if we were more accepting of that approach, especially for problems that (unlike, say, public health, or hydrology) don’t actually have pretty good answers if you would just stop ignoring the scientists for a few minutes…
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Historically speaking, a lot of people. Most of them didn’t survive Europe’s golden age of imperial expansion; but many spears were brought to many gunfights in the process.
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The adrenaline rushing through the viens of those spear-bearing MPs must have been thick in the room. I wonder who the leader was? Who picked the first spear?
Cory’s choice of a William Golding’s Lord of the Flies photo (from the film) to accompany this article borders on profound. How quick we revert. How little separates us from brute force.
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Casey Ryback, “Nah. I’m just a cook.”
“Canadians! Thousands of them!”
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Luckily order was restored quickly enough to prevent an outbreak of cannibalism.
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The secret bunkers led me earlier to a thought of crowdsourced seismic imaging. Think an array of geophones. Each one is an individual with a seismic microphone in their basement or garden, streaming location-tagged and GPS-timestamped data to an analytic computer. From that, seismic tomography can show what is happening underground even if the building site itself has three layers of barbed wire and shoot-to-kill guards. Just live close enough and you can be one of the eyes to see.
(Same approach can be used for hydrophone arrays in coastal areas. By extension, with some more preprocessing to limit the data volume, with exactly the same approach passive time-of-arrival radar arrays can be crowdsourced from low-cost private nodes for airspace awareness.)
If the govt does not have secret bunkers to hide their sorry arses in, and the pricks it is made from are aware of that, they will have their own necks in the stakes like every other civilian and be less unlikely to actually make an effort to prevent a possible war.
Should they have frozen in place and waited to die, then? Being prepared to defend yourself against clear and present violence isn’t even within sight of Lord-of-the-Flies-style savagery.
Unfortunately they let him back out.
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Up here we refer to it as Plan Eh?
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I don’t know if spears would have helped, the attacker was familiar with the use of such weapons.
I think it indicates they’re aware there isn’t much you can do about crazy lone wolves without reducing -everyones- freedoms.
Please remain sane, Canada.
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It’s not just Canada, it’s Earth.
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