MANCHESTER, England - The gun startled John Moss.

He had never seen one in broad daylight before, not on the streets of south Manchester. That the weapon in question, a 9 mm Glock semiautomatic pistol, was being carried by a police officer on patrol and not a criminal made its presence, if anything, more jarring.

"I am not in favor of all police officers being armed," said Moss, 40.

"I don't know much about America - only what you see on the telly - but that's the direction they're going," Moss said. "I think that violence promotes violence, and if you find the police carrying guns, they'll be more accessible, and more crimes will be committed with guns."

By putting armed officers in two of its most violent neighborhoods, Manchester's force has become one of the first in England to give guns to officers walking the beat.

The new patrols represent an effort to address a vexing problem: how to deal with increasingly vicious criminals in a nation where much of the public, and most officers, have opposed the routine arming of the police.

"The public has a cozy image of the firm, fair and friendly police officer," said Mike McBride, the editor of Jane's Police and Security Equipment, an annual compendium of police equipment around the world.

"It's a fallacy that we've got an unarmed police service," McBride said. "It's just that we haven't routinely armed police officers before."

Like other police forces in England, Manchester's has used guns since the 1980s. But it has deployed them reactively, giving them to selected specialists for specific operations and instructing officers to use them only as a last resort. It began the new armed patrols - a pilot program - as part of a multipronged effort to rein in some of the city's most violent gangs.

"The use of guns, and the access to guns, is much more widespread than in the past, and the criminals are prepared to go to far more risks," said Chief Superintendent Adrian Lee of the Manchester police force.

In recent months, two suspects have fired machine guns in the street, 20 to 30 rounds each time.

On another occasion, a 70-year-old woman was shot and wounded in the cross-fire of a gang-related melee.

But even Lee is vehemently opposed to the routine arming of his officers. "It ups the ante, doesn't it?" he said. "If we armed every police officer in south Manchester, the public would get the message that it's a very dangerous place and that the only way to deal with it is guns. And if we're armed, then more criminals are going to say, 'We need guns too.'"

Ian K. McKenzie, a principal lecturer at the Institute of Criminal Justice Studies at the University of Portsmouth, said, "People in England do not want Charlie Burglar going around with a gun in his pocket in the expectation that he'll meet armed officers."

By American standards, gun-related violence here is almost invisibly low.

Last year, 7,362 crimes involving firearms were committed in all of England and Wales. In 2000, according to the most recent figures available, armed officers were sent to respond on 10,915 occasions, although their guns were not necessarily fired or even drawn. English police officers fired their guns seven times all of last year, killing three people.

The figures do not include Northern Ireland, where gun violence is more common and the police are routinely armed.

The figures are rising, and officers around the country say they are worried about the emergence of a new type of armed criminal. These men carry semiautomatic pistols and machine guns smuggled from Eastern Europe or reactivated from legally obtained decommissioned American guns. They have little compunction about shooting.

Armed robbery in London nearly doubled from 2000 to last year, and shootings between criminals are rising, too.

A number of high-profile incidents, including one in which a would-be robber tried to snatch a diamond necklace from Liza Minnelli as her car was stopped at traffic lights in west London, has focused attention on violent street crime here.

Even so, there is a cultural and historical opposition to the routine arming of the police. Britain has no notion of the right to bear arms. Britain's gun control laws, among the strictest in the world, were tightened significantly in 1996 after a man shot and killed 16 children and their teacher at a primary school in Dunblane, Scotland.

There are differences, too, between American and British perceptions of the role of the police in a democracy. British officers like to point out that their work is done "with consent" - meaning by the grace of the public they serve - and their approach has traditionally been cautious rather than confrontational.

In nationwide surveys of police officers, a wide majority have always said they do not want all officers to be armed.

But the figures vary from force to force, and in the most recent survey, conducted by a group that favors increasing the number of armed officers, almost half of the officers in the Metropolitan Police, London's force, said they wanted to carry firearms.

"At the moment, the offenders have superior arms to the police, and that should never happen," said Norman Brennan, a London police officer who campaigns for a more extensively armed force and has been involved in several operations in which a criminal was armed and he was not in his 23-year career.

"We should start recruiting officers with the right temperament to be able to carry a firearm," he said, "because in the next few years this is the only way we'll be able to handle the increased threat from terrorism, armed robberies and criminals shooting each other."

But Commander Alan Brown of the Metropolitan Police said the answer was not widespread arming but strategic deployment of trained armed officers.

"If you asked some of our officers, they'd say that they'd like to be armed," Brown said. "They'd be the last people I'd ever give a gun to."

The Met, as the force is known, has a number of armed options at its disposal, included armed response vehicles, in which officers with semiautomatic pistols and rifles drive around London's meaner streets and respond to reports of armed incidents. A specialist unit is available for operations including surveillance and siege. Officers at London's airports are routinely armed.

Although firearms officers are retrained for three days each month, several incidents last year raised questions about how effectively the Met responds to armed criminals. In one instance, a 29-year-old man brandishing a cigarette lighter shaped like a gun was shot and killed by the police.

"There needs to be a clearer policy on how policing is done and how arms are being policed in society," said Peter Squires, who teaches criminology at the University of Brighton.

Squires said he worried that the Manchester operation might be the thin end of a wedge that would result in a wholly armed police service.

"So far, these sorts of operations have been localized and specialist and short-term," he said. "But the idea that we're willing to countenance it on a more routine basis is another incremental step in arming the police. Now some people are saying it's inevitable."