News reports tell us that officials in our major cities are looking at how they would respond to a Mumbai-style terror attack. One hopes they realize that whatever measures they take to prevent such an attack their measures may fail, and they need to ask themselves, what then? One lesson to take from Mumbai is this: The carnage was high because the victims were completely defenseless. Had at least some of the guests in those hotels had access to firearms the casualty toll may have been limited to dozens instead of hundreds.
An unarmed population is a gift-wrapped present to terrorists. An armed citizenry, licensed and trained, presents a much more difficult challenge for those bent on mass murder. If terrorist planners knew that they would be likely to encounter armed resistance in Mumbai they may have considered the chance of success too low to be worth the effort. As it was they knew that, once they attacked the police station, killing civilians would be like shooting fish in a barrel. And it was.
Here's video of the capture of the one terrorist who was taken alive. Good thing they don't have an ACLU in India. Some of these guys would be in a spot of trouble. Also watch the Sky News segment on the "Snapper who captured the carnage on film". As you watch imagine that someone in those crowds of victims had been in a position to return fire:
One wonders how many of these horrors it will take before "moderate" Muslims, if such there be, become so embarrassed at what's being done in the name of their religion that they start screaming from the top of their lungs for their co-religionists to stop besmirching Islam. It's hard to imagine that these terrorists can undergo months or years of training without other Muslims catching wind of what's going on. Their silence makes them complicit even more than those German citizens who stood silent during the holocaust were complicit. The average German citizen had no recourse to authorities who would stop the genocide. There was nothing the citizens could do to stop the killing. That's not the case with Muslims who overhear talk in the mosques of preparations for a terrorist attack by people they know.
RLC