Headline in the WSJ this morning: “Low Tech Attacks Hard To Thwart”
(In reference, of course, to the three recent terrorist attacks in London.)
The problem is not that Islamic terrorists have resorted to “low tech” attacks. The problem is that England has removed from its citizens the ability to defend themselves.
Give Britons the right to carry concealed, and I’ll bet the “drive a truck into a crowd and then start knifing people” attacks would have been stopped in their tracks. A couple of concealed carriers would quickly put a stop to the carnage at London Bridge. This is not to say that there wouldn’t have been casualties, but years of reading “Armed Citizen” columns here in the US suggests that our generally-robust 2nd Amendment protections (at least in the non-stupid states) frequently have a significant effect in lowering the total body count. I have in mind an attempted church massacre in Colorado Springs some years back where an alert security officer stopped the murderer in his tracks. More recently was the attempt by radical Islamists to assassinate blogger Pamela Gellar and journalist Robert Spencer Dutch politician Geert Wilders when they appeared at a gathering in Texas. But my all-time favorite was the Appalachian School of Law incident in 2002, where the two concealed carriers who ended up stopping the rampage had to go back to their cars to get their guns because of the school’s (obviously ineffective) gun-free zone policy. Clearly, armed citizens can make a difference, and do when they can.
While it’s unlikely that armed citizens could have stopped or mitigated the Ariana Grande concert bombing, police profiling and bomb-sniffing dogs would likely have put paid to it, or at least would have seen the bomb go off outside of the arena. Again, there likely would have been casualties, but significantly fewer of them.
The Mayor of London, whose response to the latest tragedy was yet another riff on “We need to get used to a certain level of violence”, is an ass. So is the Prime Minister, whose first reaction was that more Internet regulation was needed (a typical statist response from a typical statist politician, one each). Wringing your hands and/or clamping down on freedom of speech are not useful options in a putatively-free society. You know where the problem is, why not admit it and focus the crackdown where it needs to be focused? Stop whinging about civil rights applying to people who would take your civil rights away (and are succeeding admirably, to date).
Let your people defend themselves. It’s a basic human right, whether Europeans want to believe it or not. A lot of those people fought back. Think how much more effective they would have been with concealed weapons and training in their use. And then ask yourselves why we don’t tend to see this sort of thing happen in the US — at least where we aren’t hobbled by blue state gun restrictions and “gun-free zones” (AKA “victim-rich zones”). The answer is because Europe is much easier pickings and the radical Islamics are already well on the way to taking it over.
Apologies to my European friends, but y’all need to take the blinders off and start fighting back.
[Edited to correct my misremembering of who was targeted at the Garland, Texas conference.]