Rapaire - indeed! I think it is one reason why the police are not armed in Ireland (Ok, they have batons, and I suppose that's an arm, at least I'd be arrested if I wandered round with one - I mean guns, of course). The police were ser up in the arly 1920s, and when it came to arming them, it was probably remembered that just a few years earlier the IRA (from whom some of the police came) had armed themselves by grabbing guns from the hands and barracks of RIC stations up and down the country. So I suppose it made sense, just after a civil war, not to tempt them again....
It's proved a happy experiment at any rate, and I believe that having an unarmed police force has kept at least a few people alive that otherwise might not have been, and sharpened the diplomacy skills of the police.