Vox Day
December 1st 2008
The analysis of the massacres at the Taj Mahal hotel are just getting started. It's still not yet known exactly how many victims there were or how extensive the attackers' preparations were. Some experts believe the al-Qaida bogeyman is to blame; others suspect religious elements of the Pakistani security forces, while India's martial preparations would appear to indicate suspicions of the Pakistani government itself.
But the one thing that is obvious regardless of precisely how the attacks were planned and carried out, it is that governments and their professional agents are totally incapable of assuring individual security against terrorism. This was true in the 1970s when the Baader Meinhof gang was killing businessmen and the Japanese Red Army was shooting up airports. It is just as true today. Not even completely comprehensive surveillance and security is capable of preventing the actions of individuals who do not fear legal consequences; if the reverse were true, there would never have been any crime committed in the totalitarian states of the Soviet Union or the People's Republic of China.
Because the government agents responsible for responding to terrorist threats are not machines but individuals who quite reasonably value their own lives, government reactions are always going to be either more widely lethal than the terrorist actions themselves or constrained to a slow process of containment. While the Indian government could have brought the recent incident to a speedy end by ordering the Indian air force to bomb the entire section of Bombay where the attacks took place, the cure would have been worse than the disease. The only alternative was the response that Americans have seen on their televisions time and time again: A small army of police encircling a building while unarmed citizens are slaughtered before their useless show of force.
Even a physical police presence prior to an attack is no insurance of security. Military studies have shown that as many as 70 percent of trained soldiers will not fire their weapons at another human being even in wartime, so the probability is that most police officers will not either. Hence the anger of a photographer who had one of the train-station attackers in his sights, but no weapon more lethal than his camera:
But what angered Mr. D'Souza ... were the masses of armed police hiding in the area who simply refused to shoot back. "There were armed policemen hiding all around the station but none of them did anything," he said. "At one point, I ran up to them and told them to use their weapons. I said, 'Shoot them, they're sitting ducks!' but they just didn't shoot back."
The stories of the Bombay survivors tell of helpless victims hiding for hours before being hunted down and murdered. There were nearly as many people hiding in one toilet cubicle as took part in the attack. If even a tenth part of the unarmed masses in the area had been armed, the siege would have been brought to an end in hours rather than days, saving hundreds of lives. But instead of relying upon themselves, they relied upon the government to protect them and in doing so paid the ultimate price.
The truth is that no one will protect you – not the police, not the part-time security guard, not the staff of whatever business you are patronizing and not the national armed forces. You must take responsibility for protecting yourself, and the only means to do that is to ensure that you are appropriately armed whenever you intend to go out in public regardless of what the local laws might say.
The law cannot abrogate one's right to self-defense; to the extent that it attempts to do so, it is inherently illegitimate and should be ignored. Don't fall for the false assurances of police and others who would prefer to possess a legal monopoly on the means of violence. They exist only to contain the damage and provide the allusion of security as well as post-facto deterrence. They are not there to protect you. No one is.
Source---
Read the embedded article.
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