| November Paris Attacks2015-11-13 Victims: 543 (130 / 413) Tools: Bombs and Assault Weapons. |
🇫🇷 Paris, France: a series of shootings, bombings, including the Bataclan theatre shooting (that killed 90). 3 groups of men committed 6 attacks (including 4 suicide bombings). Despite gun-control and illegal bombs, they had assault weapons and bombs, who knew terrorists would disobey gun control laws? Despite Turkish, Iraqi, and Israeli intelligences all warning of an imminent attack on France months beforehand, they were ignored by the French authorities. | Cause: ☪️ Islamic Terrorism Motive: French ignored warnings 🚫 Strict Gun Control |
🇫🇷 Paris, France: a series of shootings, bombings was done in the name of ISIS/ISIL ☪️, including the Bataclan theatre shooting (that killed 90). 3 groups of men committed 6 attacks (including 4 suicide bombings). Despite gun-control and illegal bombs, they had assault weapons and bombs, who knew terrorists would disobey gun control laws? Despite Turkish, Iraqi, and Israeli intelligences all warning of an imminent attack on France months beforehand, they were ignored by the French authorities.
What can (or should) we learn from France and the Paris attacks?
They say experience is what you get, when you don't get what you wanted. Very few wanted this. But the truth is, you only get that experience if you're willing to be introspective and do an honest post-mortem, consider what just happened, and try to learn the lessons offered. So what can we learn?
(1) Enhanced security doesn't work well.[edit | edit source]
France was totally blind-sided -- despite one of the most extensive and ruthless police and intelligence communities on earth. Our NSA and FBI would salivate at France (or England, or most of Europe's) ability to spy on their own people. (Especially ironic was Europeans whining about our Patriot Act, while completely missing what their forces were already empowered with far, far, far more). And this attack was just months after Charlie Hebdo attacks, when we assume they were being especially diligent. If it didn't work there, without the constitution or public or history protecting their people from government spying, and many of the people involved already on known watch lists (and flagged for concerns) -- then what makes you think it can ever work here? With our much stiffer constraints?
In life, there's a first mover advantage. There's no way you can give someone a gun, a suicide vest and the motivation to use it, and think that domestic/foreign spying is going to be enough to reliably stop them. (If you don't know the rules, then stop playing the game).
(2) Gun control doesn't work.[edit | edit source]
Obama likes to say after every shooting in the U.S., "this doesn't happen in Europe", demonstrating abject ignorance. It happens much, much worse in Europe. Most of the biggest ones have been there. Thus gun control is at best a distraction, at worse a problem-magnifying deception.
Now, I'm not arguing that civilians with guns would have taken those guys out. The odds are low (but still significant) that they might have at least slowed them down and decreased the body count. (There are dozens examples of that happening in the U.S.). But that's almost irrelevant. There are two things we should learn:
- (a) gun control doesn't stop those that are motivated. Period. This was one of the most gun restrictive places in the world (automatic assault rifles in private hands is unheard of), and still that's what the terrorists used (along with long illegal suicide vests and explosives). It turns out suicidal terrorists (and most criminals) don't respect gun laws. Who knew?
- (b) imagine your wife and kids are near the incident, and you are away on a trip. Which would you rather have, a case where your wife had a gun, and was trained in how to use it -OR- a case where you/they knew if bad guys started going door-to-door killing people, that the cops with guns were busy/distracted elsewhere, and there was nothing they could do? Even if the gun did nothing, it can do something. So like it, or not, the gun offers some people, a little bit of security and empowerment, when society starts falling apart.
(3) Socialism / Social Programs don't work[edit | edit source]
Sometimes it's not you, it's them.
Senator Dianne Feinstein cluelessly said "when the gunman realizes that nobody else is armed, he will lay down his weapons and turn himself in, that's human nature." Ignoring that if she was dumb enough to actually believe that, she wouldn't have armed security, France was a gun free zone, how did that work for them? Others claim our problems are because of our lack of social programs, minimum wage, socialized medicine, and so on. But that only shows their complete lack of understanding. It's not you, it's them. Your actions are sometimes irrelevant.
France has everything the left wants for us. Much higher taxes, more gun control, many more social programs, socialized medicine, they work less hard, more Union, they get more vacation time, more maternity leave, they have many more laws regulating aspects of their employment, open Borders, and so on. How did that work for them? None of that makes a difference, because sometimes it's not you, it's them.
No matter what opportunities someone has, if they aren't willing to take advantage of them (and are going to blame you for not handing them more), then you haven't addressed the problem -- sometimes it's not you, it's them.
(4) Being nice to fanatics/psychopaths/narcissists, doesn't work.[edit | edit source]
France has far more muslims than we do, they've been widely anti-semitic, they criticize Israel, they decried the U.S. displacing Saddam, they are more secular, they had open borders and took in refugees (though not as many as other places). They've done almost everything the Islamicists and our leftist wanted for us. But as I've said before, for some, weakness is provocative.
It's not most people. But it is some. And it only takes some to ruin it for the rest.
A work friend was telling me, "I loved driving in the South. When there was a long line of cars, I'd zip up to the front, and they were so polite, they'd let me in, and save myself a bunch of time". Again, weakness is provocative. If you leave an open door, with a nice stereo and some cash behind it, some people will exploit it because they can.
You can't appease your way to winning a negotiation -- you can only talk yourself out of everything you had as leverage to get anything you wanted back.
The first thing you need to know in any negotiation, is what does the other person want. (What is their currency). In this case, it's like the joke with John Kerry trying to negotiate with Israel and Palestine. He asks Israel what they want, and they say, "peace". He asks Palestine what they want, and they say, "All the Jews dead". So John proposes to Israel, "certainly we can meet in the middle".
So there are many lessons offered. But the question is who will be intellectually honest enough to try to learn them, even when those lessons contradict with how they wished the world was (but isn't)?
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Tags: France Mass Murderers Mass Murders Global Islamic Terrorism Global Massacres
