As Car Bombs Become Prevalent in America

As car bombs become the weapons of choice in America, perhaps we should insist that cars be registered and their owners licensed.
Oh, wait...

A Lesson Unlearned: From Luby's Cafeteria to Fort Hood

Eighteen years and two weeks ago, tragedy struck Killeen, Texas as a single vengeful killer armed with two pistols murdered 23 people and wounded 20 more customers eating lunch in Luby's Cafeteria. Last week, a different single vengeful killer armed with two pistols murdered one civilian and 12 soldiers and wounded 30 more at neighboring Ft. Hood, less than eight miles up U. S. Highway 190 from the old Luby's site.

While the two killers had nothing in common other than hatred for America, the victims shared sad similarities: victims of terrorists and victims of the law. The loss of life, the tragic losses suffered by their families, the life changing wounds of those whose lives were made worse, much worse, by laws that forced them into harm's way.

Among the dead at Luby's that day were Al and Ursula Gratia. Their daughter, Dr. Suzanna Hupp, was with them when the restaurant was attacked while they were eating. But for a Texas law that required that she leave her personal pistol outside in her car, that forbade her from carrying it into the restaurant, Dr. Hupp would have had the ability to defend her parents, herself and the others from the erratic but deadly attack by George Hennard in the second-worst shooting rampage in American history.

Dr. Hupp, reacting instinctively to the first shots, reached into her purse for her pistol.

It was not there.

Complying with Texas law of the time, she had locked her pistol in her truck parked outside. She watched in shock as her father attempted to subdue the shooter and was shot dead. She watched as Hennard repeatedly reloaded his pistols and resumed shooting. She watched as her mother, comforting her dying father, was killed.

Dr. Hupp escaped death that day and vowed to make a difference, promising herself to never again be a victim of senseless slaughter. A year later, she led the effort to change Texas law so that today more than 200,000 law-abiding Texans can protect themselves and others by lawfully carrying concealed pistols. There have been no mass shootings in Texas since… until last week.

On Thursday, Dr. Nidal Malik Hasan walked into a processing center in the middle of Ft. Hood, and opened fire against its 300 occupants with one of his two pistols, stopping to reload at least five times. Forty-two of his targets were soldiers, each of them trained with firearms. Of his 300 potential victims, dozens were experts with rifle or pistol, but in accordance with current law none of the 300 were allowed access to weapons on base, not the military weapons with which they'd soon be deployed in Iraq or Afghanistan nor their personal guns. Though knowledgeable, skilled and responsible, they were made defenseless by the law. While their leaders trust these men and women to wander the world with weapons that can level a building, they don't trust them with a handgun at home.

Interestingly, the first responder at Fort Hood was a woman armed with a pistol. Civilian police officer Kimberly Munley, who just last month finished an 80-hour course certifying her as a firearm instructor for her agency, was directing traffic when the call to respond came, "shots fired." She followed a strategy developed after the Virgina Tech shootings, another mass shooting in a state sponsored "gun free zone." Rather than waiting for backup or overwhelming responding force, Officer Munley rushed with her partner to the sound of guns. Within seconds of arrival, she shot the killer four times and stopped the death clock.

Ron Borsch, police trainer at the SEALE Regional Training Academy in Bedford, Ohio is an especially vocal proponent of training for active shooter incidents. He stresses the training that Officer Munley followed so well: get in the fight, don't wait; locate and immobilize the shooter; seconds count to save lives. This new strategy is replacing the old mindset to contain the problem while waiting for SWAT to actually take action, a disaster at Columbine, a disaster at the Amish school in Pennsylvania, a disaster at Virginia Tech.

Missed by the press, ignored by politicians, mass shootings now take place almost exclusively in "gun-free zones", areas where law abiding citizens are disarmed by force of law. The crazies have proven to be remarkably adept at attacking these soft spots. They've proven equally adept at collapsing at the very first armed resistance.

It's time we follow the Israeli model, proven effective in a nation also at war against enemies that strive for terror. Like Israel, let's arm our military, whether on base or off, on duty or not. Let's enable them to protect themselves against the further attacks which are certain to come. Let's empower them to help defend the rest of us.

Let's recognize the truth that Ron Borsch teaches: seconds count and only an immediate response will stop the death clock. At a minimum, interrupting the active shooter will slow the rate of killing and allow time for responders to arrive. In the best case, the death clock will be stopped.

Let's heed the example of the New Life Church in Arvada, Colorado, which, when threatened, called for volunteers from among its congregation to help guard its flock. Church member Jeanne Assam, a CCW holder, answered the call and later answered the challenge when a deranged visitor opened fire. Ms. Assam stopped the death clock and is credited with saving countless lives.

Let's learn the costly lessons of Killeen spread over two decades, where now the spirits of 36 unnecessarily lost lives speak to us, asking that we quit playing political games with so-called gun control and start treating the lives of our friends and neighbors as extraordinarily valuable, not to be wasted by leaders who are more afraid of the people they lead than the people they fight.

RELATED LINKS: Female Church Member with Personal Pistol Kills Assassing, Saves Lives
Ten Years Later, It's True: After Guns Have Been Outlawed, Only Outlaws Have Guns
Terrorists in America Switching to "Plan B"?
Is Virginia Tech Education's "9/11"?
Texas Learns 9/11 Lesson From Virginia Tech

Let's arm our military… or at the very least let's arm our women.

There Are Only Three Reasons to Explain Why These Men Haven't Come Forward

These are the men the FBI would like to talk to concerning their "unusual behavior" on Washington State Ferries the past two months or so. They are not accused of any crime. All the FBI would like to do is have a conversation.

They have not yet come forward to identify themselves.

There are three reasons they might not have come forward:

1. They have left Seattle and live and work outside the web of modern news and are unaware of any interest in them in spite of wall-to-wall coverage by American and international television, print media and web. Their photographs are now almost everywhere in the world, with perhaps one exception.
2. They have chosen, for whatever reasons, some of which may be completely innocent, to not talk with the FBI. There are people who prefer not to.
3. They live and work in Seattle but get all their "news" from the Post-Intelligencer, which has chosen to not print their photos. Readers of the P-I are apparently the only people in the world who have to be satisfied with the paper's decision instead to describe the two as "what look like two Middle Eastern-looking men," a description which may not fit the facts.

In the most fully self-aggrandizing comment of the week, the managing editor of the P-I described the paper's role as,

we get to decide what is news and what isn't, and what is fair and what isn't.

Wow, I thought his role is to decide what to print in his paper in the hope that his customers would find it to be news.

Of course, if your readership is in the tank, and potential customers treat your paper less as a serious purveyor of news and more a source for bad poetry, well…

That's news.

RELATED LINKS: MSM Refuses to Help FBI; Paper Refuses to Publish Photos of Two "Unusual" Ferry Passengers

New Season TV Premier: "24: The Reality Edition"

In an effort to capture a larger audience, Fox announced today the premier of its newest show, 24: The Reality Edition.

24: TRE melds the drama and tension of 24 with the realism of Survivor.

Starring: You, yes you, as one of three audience participants chosen at random by Roger Ailes.

Setting: Islamofascist terrorists have smuggled into this country three Soviet-era tactical nuclear warheads. Though with a yield of only 100 kilotons–small as such things go–each warhead can nevertheless destroy the downtown core of any American city.

They have chosen your city as one of the three. They will detonate the bombs within 24 hours.

Preface: You've called CTU, Los Angeles for help. They've explained that Jack Bauer is busy, but that Division will send you help.

Plot: Division sends over Harry Reid (D-Ritz Carlton), Senate Majority Leader, to help you out. Harry's never operated in the field before, but he's got years of experience doing slimy things. Division hopes he can help.

Your Role: Decide what path this reality show should take, keeping in mind that the terrorists and their bombs are 100% real and that at the end of 24 hours up to three U. S. cities will vaporize, yours amongst them.

Your Choices (rule: pick only one, then stick with it!):

• Work with Harry to understand the terrorists and your role in creating their unhappiness. Ask him to negotiate with the terrorists in order to dissuade them from choosing your city.

• Flee as fast and far upwind as possible, keeping in mind the loss of friends and relatives, job and home that will result from the detonation. Also keep in mind that you don't know which two other cities are at risk and where that fallout may land.
  

• Call Dick Cheney, apologize for each bad thought and every nasty joke about him you ever entertained and beg for his help to intercept the terrorists before they kill you. You hope and pray that all the bad things you've ever read about him are true.
  

• Call your doctor and ask for a fresh prescription of sleeping pills for immediate delivery. Go back to reading The New York Times.
  

This is not a test. This is real. Armed terrorists really are coming for you and they're bringing every weapon they can. It's only a question of when the clock stops. Your life and the lives of your family depend on your choice. Good luck.

Welcome, Freepers. While you're here, scroll down the page to review a selection of interesting items.

Ask yourself, which politicians take most seriously the war we're fighting? Is it more likely that you'll die from a terror strike, or global warming?

MSM Refuses to Help FBI; Paper Refuses to Publish Photos of Two "Unusual" Ferry Passengers

The FBI has taken the somewhat unusual step of requesting assistance from the public to identify two men photographed recently observed "behaving unusually aboard several Washington state ferries."

Washington state ferries are generally regarded as a "high potential" terrorist targets, both for the possible economic disruption as well as for the terroristic potential of a strike against a Pacific Northwest icon.

The FBI has been trying to identify the two men for weeks, using normal law enforcement channels, to no avail. The FBI is not accusatory, it says there is no specific threat and that it only wants to identify these men in order to clear things up.

Special Agent Robbie Burroughs acknowledged "that the FBI rarely publicizes information from an investigation, unless investigators are seeking a suspect wanted for a crime," and she added that the decision to publish the photos came from "an abundance of caution." Passengers and crew members have reported the two as "overly interested in the workings and layouts of the ferries." The FBI would like to identify the men as quickly as possible and by doing so, resolve whether or not any threat exists.

But Seattle's Post-Intelligencer has chosen not to publish the FBI-supplied photographs of what the paper described as "what look like two Middle Eastern-looking men."

The paper defends its decision not to publish the photographs because "neither man is considered a suspect nor has either been charged with a crime."

Now that's helpful. The same could be said for participants in the Sea-Fair parade, the crowds at the baseball games, or the dozens of other photos the paper runs each day.

While it might be difficult to drive a truck onto an airliner, it happens a thousand times a day on the Seattle ferry system. An explosion on a ferry in Elliott Bay would be visible from the P-I's editorial offices. In fact, the paper's writers might find it prudent to stand back from the windows until this is resolved, one way or another.

The P-I retired from the battlefields of the war on terror a long time ago. Now it refuses to help, even at its own front door.

Terrorists in America Switching to "Plan B"?

The Department of Homeland Security has refined its analysis of the domestic threat posed by al Qaeda. DHS now believes that the terror network in America will emphasize a larger number of quick hit-and-run strikes rather than the more spectacular but infrequent attacks favored by Osama bin Laden.

Examples of the "new" approach they fear include this week's attempted car-bombing of London nightclubs and the Glasgow airport.

According to a recent report by Robert Block in The Wall Street Journal, How Terrorists' Goals May Be Melding, government security specialists worry that al Qaeda will "encourage local Muslims to join their jihad and kill however they can," while "(a)t the same time, their chief planners continue to plan and work for 'the big one.'"

Block points out, "Mr. Zarqawi rose to prominence in Iraq by carrying out a sustained campaign of simple attacks against lightly defended targets."

According to an unclassified DHS report, Speculating on an al-Zarqawi Campaign against the Homeland,

"They (Zarqawi-type targets) do not require experienced operatives and can be planned and executed in a matter of days or weeks, versus years. His targets are ones of opportunity—accessible and vulnerable—and his methods of attacks include suicide car bombings, improvised explosive device attacks, kidnappings and assassinations."

Block wrote,

"(The DHS report) said if Mr. Zarqawi were to lead attacks against the U.S., the campaigns would likely involve fewer operatives, shorter planning time lines and focus on soft targets. The plots would, by their very nature, 'be more difficult to detect during the planning stages and more difficult to prevent during the execution stages.'"

Block asks whether DHS resources should continue to focus on potential catastrophic attacks or should they refocus on the "more likely attacks on, for example, shopping malls using a homemade gasoline bomb or legally purchased firearms?" (emphasis added)

The challenges that this change creates for our existing protective structure are obvious. According to the Los Angeles deputy police chief for counterterrorism, Michael Downing,

"The need to disrupt an ever-wider range of plots, and to investigate suspects who at first might ony seem peripheral, puts a major strain on our resources."

Too many government workers have succumbed to the temptation to engineer an American Maginot Line, a static defense built around government responders, who despite their best planning and intentions will almost always arrive too late for anything but recovering the bodies.

We've seen over and over again that victims who rely on others for defense can suffer horrific losses. Virginia Tech comes to mind, where a single gunman with neither support nor sophistication was able to kill dozens before taking his own life. Or the Columbine disaster, where two teenagers killed or wounded nearly three dozen students and a teacher in just 16 minutes and then strutted through their conquered kingdom for half an hour before, again, ending their lives.

Contrast those cases with the Appalachian School of Law shootings, where the death toll was held to three when two students retrieved a gun and ended the carnage. Or, the Trolley Square rampage by a Muslim teenager, where five were killed before an off-duty, out of uniform police officer from a different jurisdiction ended a Valentine's Day date with his wife and the killers spree by drawing a concealed handgun and confronting the teenage shooter.

Only rarely amongst the mass killings in the last ten years has on-duty police caused the end of the killing. Termination has been either a) at the hand of the killer, or b) through the intervention of civilians.

It is unrealistic to expect that any government, no matter how effective, will be able to protect all of America's soft targets. The federal Transportation Safety Administration currently spends $6B annually to protect fewer than 600 airports around the nation, or about $11 million per target. That's larger than the total budget of most elementary and secondary schools and would impose an unsustainable stress on most malls, sports stadiums, cathedrals and other major terror opportunities.

Israel has had to deal with terror attacks for almost four decades and they've found a combination of steps that have very substantially reduced both the frequency and the severity of internal terrorist attacks:

• They've secured their borders.
• They've hardened their targets.
• They've educated their civilians on what to watch for.
• They've armed their civilians and encouraged them to take responsibility for their own safety.

Can we, should we, do less?

I suspect that DHS and Block are right, that the next series of attacks within the U. S. will be small scale, ad hoc, and appear to be amateurish. As was Virginia Tech. As was Columbine.

For that matter, so was the shooting at Los Angeles International Airport, the attempted bombing at the University of Oklahoma and the massacre at the undefended offices of the Jewish Federation of Seattle.

We can pray that we'll learn quickly that while once may be an accident, twice is a problem and three times is a pattern.

I'm reminded of one of the attacks in Israel a few years ago, where an Arab terrorist was shot dead by an Israeli shopper.

"How did you know you weren't shooting an innocent man?"
"He sizzled."
"Excuse me?"
"He tried to self-detonate. There was a malfunction. I saw smoke. I didn't want to take a chance on there being a second trigger. We were in a supermarket. Women and children all around. I drew and and shot him in the chest."

Or, another one, in Jerusalem:

"(A) shoe salesman was eating dinner with his wife in a Jerusalem nightclub, when a terrorist opened fire with an automatic firearm. William Hazan grabbed a pistol out of his wife's purse and shot the Palestinian, thus ending the terror. The gunman had explosives strapped to his body, but was effectively prevented from detonating the devices."

The day will soon come when we in the U.S. tell similar stories. The folks who are most likely to make the difference, to prevent horrific loss of life, are the citizens who have learned from 9-11, who accept that more than three is a pattern and understand that the police can't possibly get there fast enough.

They are less likely to become victims themselves and by doing so, will help you and I as well.

What about you? Shouldn't you be helping out?

Related Links: "Experts" Hawk Old Answers on Campus Security
Is Virginia Tech Education's "9/11"?