According to The Guardian’s live blog covering the rioting in Britain, sales of aluminum baseball bats have risen dramatically in the days since the riots began, but clearly it’s not the rioters who are buying them—they’d just nick them, of course—but the shopkeepers.

One thing that’s frightening to contemplate is how much worse this would all be if firearms were legal in Britain. It’s one thing for rioters and looters to improvise clubs, quite another with an army of wild boys armed to the teeth moving through the nation’s city centers.

Thank you Chris Campion of Berlin, Germany!