by Dave Workman | Senior Editor
If caught in the middle of a terror attack on American soil, could an armed private citizen make a difference?
There are millions of legally-armed citizens carrying defensive sidearms these days across the states. For example, Texas and Florida each have more than one million active carry licenses in circulation. More than a half-million are also reported in Washington state, and that number is creeping closer to 600,000 by the month.
In a dozen states, people don’t even need a license or permit to carry, and the open carry movement is slowly growing in some regions. John Lott, founder and president of the Crime Prevention Research Center, recently estimated that there are some 15.7 million citizens with carry licenses. While the odds once might have been astronomical against a would-be terrorist being confronted by an armed citizen, those odds might be tightening up.
Call it incredible timing of two unrelated events, but the drill brings home the realization that even in parts of the world several time zones apart, the potential for danger seems never far away.
A Washington State ferries spokesman suggested that such preparedness has a direct link to the Manchester massacre.
“It’s just one of the ways we prepare to make sure something like what happened in Manchester…doesn’t happen here,” Ian Sterling of Washington State Ferries told KIRO.
The Evergreen State is not unique in that state ferries are part of the state highway system. But Washington has lots of ferries, aboard which thousands of commuters and tourists travel every day. The terrorist attack in Manchester, Engkand, may have been a wake-up call that acts of terrorism can happen anywhere, even on the waters of Puget Sound.
The KIRO story noted that the US Coast Guard conducted the recent drill to train local law enforcement about how to respond to threats aboard a ferry.
There was something missing from the KIRO story: Response time. On land it’s tough enough for police to be immediately on the scene of a crime. On the water, that problem can be compounded because marine units could be miles away, if they are even available, depending upon the jurisdiction.
The story noted that “there are also security measures you don’t see.” The ferry system would not elaborate when contacted by TGM.
In addition there might be Coast Guard escorts and dogs that sniff explosives.
And that leads to another missing component: The armed private citizen. It is not out of the realm of possibility that in an incident on a ferry, a law-abiding citizen might be forced by circumstances to be the proverbial “first responder.”
Washington State Patrol Sgt. James Prouty told TGM that training does take that potential into consideration. They train to sort out the good guys from the bad guys.
The last high-profile terror incidents on American soil were at Ohio State University, a nightclub in Orlando and a shopping mall in St. Cloud, MN. In two cases, the perpetrators used knives to slash victims and in Ohio, the man rammed a crowd beforehand with a car. In Orlando, the killer used a gun to mow people down in a so-called “gun-free” building. All three men were fatally shot.
While it may not be possible to prevent acts of terrorism in the US, it is possible to fight back. With incidents like Manchester to keep the threat of terrorism fresh on everyone’s mind, it may fall to an armed citizen to stop it before police arrive.
