Mumbai photographer: I wish I’d had a gun, not a camera. Armed police would not fire back

This a headline and pictures that are been published around the world. Terrorist attacking the  Chatrapathi Sivaji Terminal railway station in Mumbai, India, doing their deed completely unchallenged and the the sad lament of the photographer who realized he could do nothing more than being a good witness instead of stopping the massacre.

Although we hope an attack like this never happens in the US, the sad truth is that we cannot depend on hope and wishful thinking. And we cannot depend on government to save our lives. The terrorists in Mumbai initially targeted anything that was uniformed or visibly carried a weapon and then started on the civilians so the government sponsored “protection” was neutralized at the beginning of the attack. The rest was just a literal excursion into finding the most appropriate/desirable/random victim to be executed on the spot.

When I saw the first picture, my first reaction was of surprise at how nonchalant the terrorist were behaving. But it makes sense when you realize that they were unopposed in a target-rich environment. The second thought that went through my mind was: “Shooter, Do you understand the Course of Fire? Shooter ready, Stand By! (beep).”

For the benefits of those who got lost in the last sentence, that expression is the final questions & warnings that an IDPA shooters hears at competitions just before engaging targets.  And although we shoot paper targets that do not shoot back and these idiots were carrying & shooting AKs, they were easy prey for any IDPA, IPSC, ICORE, SASS or any competition shooter with barely six matches under his or her belt.  Somebody with a basic training in sidearms could have stopped two islamofacist in their unholy tracks.

Yet we hear that our leaders want to make all areas of mass transportation Gun Free Zones and not just those deemed sterile by federal law. In other words, they want to increase the tract of unprotected, target-rich environment for terrorists under the pretense on making us safer. If they have not figured out with Mumbai that those regulations beacons that attarct the criminal and the derranged, we will be facing many more of these government-sponosred massacres in the future.