Would defensive sidearms have made a difference in Paris?
By Dave Workman | Senior Editor
In the aftermath of the terrorist attack in Paris, several news agencies have been looking hard at French gun laws, with some suggesting that the slaughter of 129 innocent citizens was a failure of tough gun laws.
Republican front runner Donald Trump, during remarks in Beaumont, Texas on the day after the attack suggested that the outcome might have been different, had some of the victims been armed.
And a new Rasmussen poll, ironically taken in the two days prior to the attack, revealed that, American voters “remain less confident in their safety here at home than they have ever been.”
The same report noted that a majority of likely U.S. voters were concerned even a month before the attacks about the president’s plan to bring thousands of Syrian refugees to the United States. Seventy-two percent of those surveyed told Rasmussen that giving asylum to thousands of Syrian refugees poses a national security risk to this country.
Meanwhile, the New American observed that strict French gun laws not only didn’t work, but had put gun control proponents in a political corner.
“Much handwringing and declarations of vengeance emanated from French politicians who appeared to have been caught by surprise,” The New American reported. “After all, as recently as 2012 those very same politicians enacted even more draconian gun laws in order, they said, to keep this from happening again.”
That was a reference to a shooting spree launched by Mohamed Merah, described as “a French jihadist of Algerian descent” who gunned down seven people in a trio of attacks around Toulouse just five days after tough gun laws took effect in March 2012.
“Of course,” the New American story said, “common sense should inform us that it is not guns in the hands of the law-abiding, but civilian disarmament, that makes civilians more vulnerable to attack by armed terrorists — including the terrorists who were able to kill or wound nearly 70 people per terrorist on Friday night without interruption in Paris, where Frenchmen are denied the right to keep and bear arms.”
The Guardian, a popular British news organ, also reported on how the Paris attack would bring new scrutiny to gun control problems not just in France, but all over Western Europe.
And even a public relations news organ, O’Dwyer’s, headlined a story, “Paris Slaughter Puts Focus on Strict Gun Laws.”
Recently, Alan Gottlieb, founder of the Second Amendment Foundation and chairman of the Citizens Committee for the Right to Keep and Bear Arms, attended a conference in Europe about gun rights, and reported back that there is heightened interest in private gun ownership across the European landscape. The Paris attack undoubtedly will add even more energy, and urgency, to those concerns.
This happened just as momentum seemed to be building to make gun control a centerpiece of the Democratic campaign. Whether the debate now drifts deliberately away from that topic remains to be seen, but with various news agencies raising questions, and Trump’s intimations about having guns for personal protection, it adds a new perspective to a decades-old discussion.
In response to the attack, French bombers targeted ISIS strongholds in Syria. The Islamic State allegedly issued threats that it will strike back at any nation that participates in such bombings, and specifically mentioned Washington, D.C., according to Reuters.
