As Americans, we are, appropriately, slow to anger. We do not fight in a rage, and we do not rush to judgment. After last night's Jihadist attack on an LGBT night club, it is time to be angry, it is time to rage, and it is time to pronounce judgment on our enemies.
I have very little to add to the dozen or so posts I've written on this exact issue over the past several years after similar attacks on Western civilization. We are at war, whether we are willing to admit it or not. Our enemy targets unarmed citizens, women, and children. We have done almost nothing to harden soft targets, and we continue to live in denial when it comes to the overall goal of radical Islam. We are paralyzed, not in fear of the enemy, but in fear of global condemnation should we, finally, decide to wage a total war against these savages. We have, most likely, forgotten how to even wage total war. We continue to deconstruct, we continue to play games with the words and, not surprisingly, we are still losing.
There is absolutely no way we can defeat radical Islam by killing one Jihadi at a time. Focusing on stopping lone wolf or wolf-pack attacks is like trying to stop a river with a fishing net. If it is not part of a broader strategy, it will result in more American deaths. The only way to stop Jihadi attacks is to completely eradicate their radical ideology from the planet. We must inflict such carnage on the populations supporting these attacks that, after the war, to whisper a Jihadist thought results in instant exile or death in the community.
We must make the ideology illegal and ban its practice. While it is illegal for an individual to make a terrorist threat, it is not illegal to practice an ideology whose foundational tenet is the destruction of America and the West through acts of terrorism. For whatever reason, our leaders prefer to curtail the civil liberties of all Americans to targeting, disrupting, and prosecuting those who are most likely to commit acts of Jihad. That simply cannot be the case if we want to be serious about defeating Jihad.
We also must harden ourselves individually, and harden all soft targets. As I've said before, we protect our money better than we protect our schools. It is no coincidence that Jihadis attack unarmed people and poorly guarded locations. Terrorist tactics by definition require the attacker to inflict the maximum amount of emotional and physical damage on the population before being killed. A lone wolf or a pack of wolves would be immediately killed if they targeted a police station. The attack would fail. If you want to deter an attack, you make sure that the attacker is killed in the swiftest most efficient way possible. That means using firearms. There are only several ways to deploy firearms in the public in such a way as to quickly respond to attacks: have police squads on every corner, deploy the military, or mobilize the citizenry. Deploying the military is unconstitutional and it would be literally impossible to employ and train enough police officers to stop every attack.
So we must harden ourselves individually. We must accept as Americans, first that we are at war; second that the war is being waged on our soil; third that we cannot bargain with our enemy; and fourth that we can either fight back or die. Jihadism can be defeated if our leaders will come to terms with their own fears. In the interim, we as individuals can accept responsibility for our own safety and the safety of our families and communities. Jihadis and other evil men will always have guns no matter what laws we pass. If you do not believe that, look at the Paris attacks. Fortunately, we have the right as Americans to defend ourselves from Jihadis with similar guns. We have the right to learn how to safely store, retrieve and use those guns. We have the right in most states to carry those guns. If enough Americans are willing to make themselves hard targets, terrorism will be rendered a far less effective tactic.
We will not always be at war. We will not always be as vulnerable as we are today. We can mourn the victims of this atrocity today, but tomorrow we must resolve ourselves to exterminate the enemy.
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