“I just hap­pened to glance over and saw this huge chain­saw rip­ping down the side of my door.”. “I just hap­pened to glance over and saw this huge chain­saw rip­ping down the side of my door.”

[…]

If the pur­pose of these raids is to take dan­ger­ous peo­ple by sur­prise before they can shoot back at police, how exactly does tak­ing the door down with a chain­saw fit that strat­egy? [The Agi­ta­tor]

As sev­eral peo­ple pointed out in the com­ments on that post, there is really noth­ing more ide­ally suited to mak­ing an armed cit­i­zen empty their gun through their front door than some maniac cut­ting through it with a chain­saw! As tac­tics to use against an armed drug dealer, I can’t think of any­thing more incred­i­bly stupid.

On the other hand, what this sort of thing is very good for is ter­ror­iz­ing a mother and her very young daugh­ter and mak­ing sure that they will never make the mis­take of think­ing they live in any­thing other than a hideously oppres­sive police state. That, I think, is the real pur­pose of these raids–they’ve got noth­ing to do with polic­ing, and every­thing to do with state terrorism.

Sadly, it could have been even worse. They’re not called the Fed­eral Baby Incin­er­a­tors for nothing.

Our New Terrorist-Tainted House Home­land Secu­rity Com­mit­tee Chief.

Rep. Peter King (R-NY) is the new chair­man of the House Home­land Secu­rity Committee.

This dude knows all about ter­ror­ism, since he has spent decades doing big-time fundrais­ing for the Irish Repub­li­can Army.

Muckraker/hell-raiser/freedom-fighter Will Grigg has an excel­lent piece on King’s hypocrisy on LewRockwell.com today.

[BOVARD]

It’s def­i­nitely appro­pri­ate, given the bla­tant hypocrisy of the Evil Empire, to appoint some guy who used to be Osama bin Laden for white peo­ple to this posi­tion. After all, this is the same coun­try that con­quered Iraq using ter­ror­ism as a pre­text, and then appointed a ter­ror­ist as pup­pet ruler.

Guns and Mum­bai.

India’s gov­ern­ment not only failed to pro­tect its cit­i­zens from ter­ror­ism, it wouldn’t allow them to pro­tect them­selves. Check out this para­graph from the Wall Street Jour­nal:

At about 9:45 p.m., two gun­men, slen­der and in their mid-20s, ran up the cir­cu­lar dri­ve­way at the entrance to the Tri­dent. They shot the secu­rity guard and two bell­hops. The hotel had metal detec­tors, but none of its secu­rity per­son­nel car­ried weapons because of the dif­fi­cul­ties in obtain­ing gun per­mits from the Indian gov­ern­ment, accord­ing to the hotel company’s chair­man, P.R.S. Oberoi.

On the other hand, at least some Indian offi­cials are tak­ing respon­si­bil­ity for their fail­ure, which is more than we can say about any­one in the U.S. gov­ern­ment after Sep­tem­ber 11.

[The Agi­ta­tor]

I’ve seen this sort of claim a num­ber of places, but I dis­agree, because this isn’t a case of an indi­vid­ual going postal in a shop­ping mall or a school. In those parts of the US where ordi­nary peo­ple can legally carry hand­guns, the per­cent­age who do so is very low–so low that there would be at best one or two peo­ple with a pis­tol around if some­thing like this hap­pened here. Real life isn’t like Die Hard–one guy with a pis­tol going up against a trained infantry squad is just going to die with­out accom­plish­ing anything.

For the peo­ple on the spot to stop a ter­ror­ist attack like this, it’s also nec­es­sary for the cul­ture to be such that all or nearly all of the peo­ple are armed at all times. That’s not the case in the US, and I know of no rea­son to think it’s the case in India either. In fact, the only inci­dent I know of in my life­time where an armed cit­i­zenry repelled heav­ily armed ter­ror­ists was in Soma­lia, when the city of Mogadishu drove off a ter­ror­ist attack by the Evil Empire. It was a costly vic­tory, though–thousands of Soma­lis died fight­ing about a com­pany of Impe­r­ial Stormtroopers.