Think About and Prepare for the Unthinkable: It Can and Almost Certainly Will Happen Here

In case you haven't noticed, the government and its agents were incapable of dealing with just ten armed men until they had brought
the Mumbai, a city of about 14 million people that used to be called Bombay, to its knees. Several hundred people -- the number is still being tallied -- were killed and all activity in the city that is the finance and commerce section of the country was brought to a standstill for three days by fewer than a dozen ruthless attackers.

Despite prior and specific warnings,Law enforcement was unprepared and protected nobody. Police officers were completely ineffective. They mostly were nowhere to be seen, or, if anywhere in sight, they were among the first to be killed by the attackers. Mostly though, they fled or remained passive.

It would be comforting -- though an illusion -- to believe that similar carnage never could be inflicted upon us. Just think about the death and destruction that as few as a dozen armed, trained, and fearless attackers could cause in the New York City subway system, any large shopping complex, any major airport, or crowded sports arena to mention but a few examples.

And if you think our law enforcement would afford you greater protection than their Indian counterparts provided in Mumbai, think back to the ineffectiveness of the police in the past big city riots such as those in Watts or those that followed the Rodney King verdicts in Los Angeles.

In those cases, as in Mumbai, ordinary people were out there on their own. They were almost entirely defenseless because their governments make it difficult and inconvenient for individuals to obtain and carry weapons that make self defense possible. Government and public officials and members of our elites enjoy the protection of armed security personnel as they value their safety. But they consider ordinary citizens expendable. They prefer dependent and vulnerable potential and easy victims to self reliant individuals capable of defending themselves.

Forty of our states -- though not our most populous ones -- have learned this lesson as has Israel. They allow ordinary law citizens who have no criminal or mental illness records to carry concealed weapons and thus enable such citizens to take and exercise responsibility for their own safety as well as that of their fellow citizens.

Think about this and make your own decisions. Don't succumb to wishful thinking or passivity. It will be harder to reject the role of potential victim and to assume and prepare to exercise responsibility for your own safety if you live in one of our more densely populated nanny jurisdictions. But even there the decision still is an individual one -- when the time comes, would you prefer to be tried by twelve of your fellow citizens or carried by six them?