Stopped? No, of course not. Mitigated in at least some circumstances (like people shooting up public places)? Yea.
Indian media report: hostages tortured before they died and also, unsurprisingly, some of the terrorists were executed on the spot by Indian soldiers.
A senior National Security Guard officer, who had earlier explained the operation in detail to rediff.com, said the commandos went all out after they ascertained that there were no more hostages left. When asked if the commandos attempted to capture them alive at that stage, he replied: “Unko bachana kaun chahega (Who will want to save them)?”
Holy fuck that is terrible.
I grew up in India (Hyderabad) Given the sectarian tensions and traffic, giving Indian citizens access to guns would be a most successful population limiter.
A sub-continental mob is an ugly ugly thing. Given the death tolls they can reach without guns (10,000 or so in the anti-Sikh pogroms after Indira Gandhi’s assassination, a few thousand in the Gujerati anti-muslim pogroms, a few million at Partition) giving them guns - ugh
So you’ve gone from “thwarted”, which is what you said when you decided to jump into the thread, to “mitigated”. I can’t quite figure whether you’re a gun nut or just have a poor grasp of vocabulary. Although, to be fair, there’s no reason it can’t be both.
Particularly when you say the training of the gunmen in India “wasn’t very good”. I’m not sure whether your definition of “very good” is off in la-la land along with your definition of “thwart”, but I’d wager the state of the Indian/Pakistani relationship in the near future will be evidence that their training was exactly as “good” as it needed to be. Along with the number of casualties, of course.
-Tom
But you think an average citizen with a gun would react better? The psychological reactions to combat aren’t an unknown quantity, it’s why armies spend a lot of time drilling people in basic training. Untrained people with no leadership facing a real life combat situation will panic, flee, cower and generally do nothing of resistance unless literally cornered, no matter how many guns they have.
Thankfully, neither was as successful as hoped for. It appears that India may be content with some diplomatic measures of disapproval (military retaliation has been ruled out, unofficially and officially). They aren’t stupid, they would far prefer a weak civilian government that is trying to reconcile its differences to a nuclear-armed Taliban-style theocracy on their border. And the terrorists brought enough ammunition to kill 5000 people, so there was some good fortune there as well.
What Lum said. This could’ve gone down very differently if they were militarily trained.
I’m not even sure what you’re arguing here. But, I guess I’m a gun nut, because being lectured by you on gun control is a lot more entertaining then a vocabulary lesson.
There’s no way to tell. I don’t think you can say with confidence one way or the other. Firearms training is a matter of practice. A lot of CCW holders with their carry weapons can probably outshoot military officers with their service sidearms, because most CCW holders go to the range regularly for fun, while the military officers don’t. And unless you’re talking about rangers, special forces, etc, most peacetime soldiers have not had very much training where they simulate real combat… except when you’re going to JRTC/NTC, most FTXes are very abstract simply because lots of simulation is expensive. Moulage is expensive, extras are expensive, etc.
Sharp you owe me five bucks.
Lum didn’t argue that the attack wasn’t “sophisticated” and that they weren’t “well-trained”. You did. But I see now you’ve adjusted your comments to “militarily trained”, just as you’ve decided an armed population wouldn’t “thwart” them, but might “mitigate” them.
Mostly that you don’t know what you’re talking about and furthermore seem to have a hard time expressing it in writing.
-Tom
Yeah, great, but we’re not talking about target shooting. When faced with an extraordinarily high-stress event like armed killers shooting at you while your only thought a second a go was about commuting to work people will, without training or leadership telling them otherwise, panic and flee. Or panic and cower. Or panic and fire wildly at whatever looks like a threat. Except that they won’t aim for shit since they’re, you know, panicky so they’re not gonna hit a target reliably even if it walked right up to them and slapped them in the face. And, hell, there’s no saying they’ll even be able to identify a good target in that state of mind instead of firing at shadows or loud noises in general.
That, I can say with confidence.
One of the bank robbers committed suicide with a shot to the head after he was hit by a police bullet.
Sure - they had training, but they weren’t SAS. They probably spent a couple or three weeks in one of the militant training camps in Pakistan-occupied Kashmir.
They were also backed by a substantial “ground game” (to channel Obama for a second). They clearly had a good bit of aid and assistance.
As for the security forces - yeah - you are very unlikely to survive close-quarter room-to-room combat. My instructors have always said you put them down -hard- in close quarters. No chance for sneaky grenades, pistols or explosives that way.
That’s great! Too bad both of them are killed easily by a pair of guys who already consider themselves dead, who happen to be carrying assault rifles instead of near-useless pistols.
Pistols are pretty useful against targets not wearing body armor. The psycho terrorists weren’t wearing any.
It looks like there are more reports coming out about the extent of the torture and mutilation of the hostages. Many of whom were young women.
This was definitely not a Muslim act. Even in the most gruesome of executions in the Middle East and in Eastern Europe by terrorists, victims are decapitated with a machete and although this takes a few seconds longer than a shot to the head, death is relatively instantaneous because prolonging a victim’s suffering isn’t on the agenda of religious warfare.
It’s looking more and more like the killers were a group of sociopathic sadists with a minimal of training and a lot of brazenness to actually carry out the act.
AND WITHOUT A RIFLE AT THE READY. Jesus, you guys. There’s a reason infantrymen carry rifles. It’s because they’re better than pistols. WAY better.
Muslim as in adhering to the tenets of Islam? Or Muslim as in not an act of politically motivated Islamic terrorism?
Matt, Sol Invictus beat CoD4 on the highest difficulty setting. I think he knows a little something about firearms.