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from the is-there-a-solution-that-is-less-bad-than-the-problem? dept.
If it seems like every week, there's another terrorist attack – well, you're not wrong. According to one crowdsourcing map, there have been over 500 attacks around the world since the start of 2017, with over 3,500 fatalities. For a period in 2016, ISIS-initiated attacks were occurring, on average, every 84 hours.
Despite improvements in methods and coordination among law enforcement agencies over the past 25 years, they're still hamstrung in a number of ways. With large public gatherings of people becoming more attractive targets for terrorists, what are the best strategies moving forward?
[...] But despite huge budgets and the presence of thousands of added security personnel, it's virtually impossible to prevent a determined terrorist, or guarantee absolute safety. While security efforts for events like the Olympic Games have escalated, terrorists today no longer wait for major events that draw global interest.
[...] The odds are in favor of terrorists. All they have to do is succeed once, no matter how many times they try. For public safety professionals to be fully successful, they have to prevent 100 percent of the terror attempts. It's a number to aspire to, but even the most experienced countries fighting terror – such as Israel and the U.K. – can't measure up to this standard.
[...] These days, it's necessary to consider any place where crowds congregate as vulnerable "soft targets" for the attackers. To better prepare for securing soft targets (and this isn't to say threats against "hard targets," like planes, buildings and infrastructure, have diminished) law enforcement agencies must improve coordination among one another, whether it's via intelligence, information sharing and training. And then there's the need for deconfliction, which refers to avoiding self-defeating behavior – from interagency rivalries and poor communication to insufficient coordination – by people who are on the same side.
[...] Given that there is no way to guarantee complete safety, and that the threat assessment expects more attacks, there are two more elements that ought to receive more attention: community resilience and community policing.
https://theconversation.com/how-can-we-better-protect-crowds-from-terrorism-78443
[Related]:
1996 Atlanta Olympic Games: https://www.britannica.com/event/Atlanta-Olympic-Games-bombing-of-1996
Secure Airport Design: https://skift.com/2016/07/04/how-smart-airport-design-can-make-spaces-more-secure/
Do you agree with this assessment of the security situation ? What do you think could be done to mitigate the effects of such asymmetric warfare ?
(Score: 5, Insightful) by julian on Monday June 05 2017, @12:29AM (8 children)
The issue in the United States isn't so much the guns themselves, as your Switzerland example shows, but the toxic gun culture in the USA. Gun ownership might be benign, even beneficial, if the majority of citizens are have a communitarian and peace-loving ethic, receive compulsory military training, and are strictly monitored for criminal or psychiatric problems. That's hard to implement if you are starting from the assumption that gun ownership is a right. That's always been our problem.
We should treat it more like having a driver's license. It's no great difficulty to obtain a driver's license but we do demand a level of competency which we test for, and if you break the laws enough times you can have this privilege taken from you for a period of time or permanently. Owning a gun is even more serious and potentially deadly than driving a car yet we have less restrictions on it because 250 years ago guns existed and cars didn't. The 2nd Amendment as it is formulated is wrong for our current world
I own guns, and I want private gun ownership to continue, but you won't see an NRA sticker on my car. Given the opportunity I would run away from my house before blowing away an intruder--the proper thing to do. It was too easy for me to get the firearms I have. I should have had to do more training to demonstrate my competency. If everyone who owned guns in the USA was like me then our stats on gun violence would look more like Switzerland's.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by Snotnose on Monday June 05 2017, @12:36AM (6 children)
How exactly is our gun culture toxic? If you're law abiding you can have guns. If you aren't you can't. If you aren't you can get guns outside the law. If caught you face heavy penalties.
I'm not seeing a lot of white supremacist folks using guns (see: Oregon asshole who used a knife). I'm not seeing open carry states having a surge in gun violence. What I am seeing is a lot of shootings in Chicago, where from what I hear it's damned near impossible to get a gun.
Guns don't kill people, physics kills people (wish I knew who to attribute that to, it didn't come out of my brain).
When the dust settled America realized it was saved by a porn star.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday June 05 2017, @02:17AM
Congratulations, you're the problem.
The gun culture is what prevents any sort of meaningful work be done in preventing people who are at a high risk of abusing firearms to have them. Limiting the kinds of firearms people are allowed to have and checking to make sure that people wanting to buy them aren't mentally ill, criminals or otherwise disqualified from purchasing them gets fought tooth and nail by the NRA and other gun rights clubs.
There's literally tens of thousands of people killed every year through suicide alone, not to mention the people who are accidentally maimed or killed and the people who are killed by criminals that obtained their firearms either through theft or by buying them on the black market.
Hunting and target shooting are the only legitimate reasons for owning firearms by non-law enforcement/security people. Self-defense is a really big tip off that a person shouldn't be allowed to own a gun and in some countries, you're required to have a reason for owning a gun and self-defense is not included in the list.
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Monday June 05 2017, @03:51AM (1 child)
Then you are not looking.
Dylan Roof - Charleston Church Shooter
Michael Wage Page - Sikh Temple Shooter
Alexandre Bissonnette - Quebec Mosque Shooter
Adam Purinton - Olathe Kansas Bar Shooter [heavy.com]
Allen Scarsella - Shot 5 BLM protestors [atlantablackstar.com]
And that's just off the top of my head, I'm sure I could easily find 10x that if I googled.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday June 05 2017, @01:37PM
HEY! You better stop poo-pooing the GP's alternative facts, or perhaps more appropriate, selective memory.
(Score: 2, Disagree) by VLM on Monday June 05 2017, @01:56PM (1 child)
We use them all the time, just perfectly legally for target practice and other completely legal sporting purposes. Its a valid hobby.
Also the logical operation of (not (hating your own race)) doesn't magically auto imply hates all other races under any system of logic. That guilt trip is only applied to white people. Black people not hating their own race doesn't imply magically they somehow magically must hate Samoans for example. Its a constant part of Hollywood propaganda. Much as they never make a mistake in their science and computer narrative naturally they never make a mistake in their characterization of white people who are not self loathing. The point of this is most white people who are not into self loathing are not necessarily white supremacists and generally don't hate any race, although they particularly do not hate whites, which is admittedly highly politically incorrect.
What you will see a lot of is 100 black dudes shot 100 black victims in Chicago last weekend, and some white guy in Texas climbed a university tower and shot a couple students back in the 60s, so logically the highest safety priority is to take guns away from law abiding white people. I mean, white people with legally owned guns kill almost as many people per year as lightning, its obviously a high priority (LOL)
And gun control is just a dog whistle for anti-white racism, what they always mean is we need to make it impossible for white people to legally own guns. Never hear them say "we gotta take all the guns away from the Jews" or "we gotta take all the guns away from the Koreans". Gun control is implicitly an anti-white racist topic. Only racists are "into" gun control. Its sorta like how pre-civil rights era only racists cared about implementing "poll taxes" and "voting tests" in the pre-60s post civil war deep south.
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Monday June 05 2017, @09:13PM
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2011/09/the-secret-history-of-guns/308608/ [theatlantic.com]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday June 05 2017, @02:52PM
An excellent 90's sitcom. [wikiquote.org]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday June 05 2017, @03:58PM
You mean Toxic Ghetto Thug Culture. In absence of guns they would use knives. Calling it "Gun Culture" is a slander to many upstanding, law-abiding, gun owners, who hunt and hobby shoot. You are trying to re-frame a debate which you would lose otherwise by changing up the definitions because you cannot argue against Switzerland example.