I'm happy to continue this as a volunteer police officer in the UK. We're known as Special Constables!
It's mostly about talking and calming situations down, for us as Specials we aren't issues tasers like our regular officers so it's prevalent that we can use our voice in order to deescalate situations. I don't think we should get guns, I feel that our officers trained specifically for the role are more than capable. We don't tend to have much gun crime here, yes you hear of the few that happens but mostly it's knife crime in the UK. I know some of our officers believe we should be armed but the few I talk to believe that we should continue with the tradition that we have in which we aren't armed by default.