Hi CobaltBlue; Re: "Bilow's talking out of his hat again. Virginia is a concealed carry state. We take the right to bear arms very seriously here."
It's not a matter of the laws. People in places that have no concealed carry still carry concealed weapons. And in many places that have concealed carry laws, the people who carry don't want to "get involved". Hell, in New York City they may not even call the police when you're being raped and murdered in public. Concealed carry laws ain't gonna fix that broke.
But even that isn't enough. The real question is this: Will the citizens take responsibility for finding the sniper, or will they instead duck and cover?
What I pointed out was that the citizens of DC etc., were not making significant efforts to find the snipers. Sure they were willing to absolutely deluge authorities will useless information about white vans, but they were not willing to change their own behavior in such a way that would increase the likelihood of the snipers being found.
What they needed to do was photograph vehicles near sniping incidents. Cameras don't require concealed carry permits. Instead, what people did was to behave in such a way as to minimize their chance of being the next victim. And this was way out of proportion to the actual risk.
Compare what Americans did to what Israelis would do if faced with the same threat. In Israel, civilians would have grabbed their guns and started scanning for the shooter. What would happen in Texas would be somewhere in between Israel and Virginia.
My point is that we're simply not inclined to make a real domestic fight with Islamic terrorism. We are perfectly willing to send a few volunteers off to (slightly) risk their lives in Afghanistan or Iraq, but we are not willing to risk our own lives to stop terrorism here in this country. Hell, we're not even willing to undergo the simple solution of strip searching Arabs who want to get on aircraft. Instead, we're giving random searches to nuns and babies.
This is why our foreign policy is incompatible with reality. Reality is that we have no real reason to support Israel and piss off the Arabs. The Israelis do, we do not. Consequently, we're not willing to undergo the severe lifestyle changes necessary to effectively fight terrorism in the US.
So far, we've been very lucky that more incidents like the Islamic sniper haven't happened. If we push our foreign policy to more completely emulate that of Israel's, we will end up with terror problems more similar to those of Israel.
Like I've said before, the terrorists really haven't put much effort into terrorizing us as of yet. Osama bin Laden did, but most of the Islamics have concentrated on Israel instead of the US.
In the presence of terror problems similar to those of Israel, we will face the same choices that Israel faces:
(a) Militarize our civilians.
(b) Negotiate with the terrorists.
The option of continuing to do business as we've done it so far will be impossible. The snipers were only found because of their complete and total lack of professionalism. If we attract the attention of better run terrorist networks we will end up with problems more similar to the ones that Israel faces.
Since the pain of experiencing terrorism exceeds the pain of letting Israel fight without our assistance, we will inevitably choose the path of least pain. Israel doesn't have that choice because the pain of negotiation for them is too high for them to make realistic (i.e. acceptable to the majority of the Arab people) concessions.
-- Carl |
