Paris Shootings and Explosions Kill Over 100, Police Say

Reworded to avoid offence (hopefully): deaths are not irrelevant, but their exact precise number is irrelevant. What matters is the scale of the security failure, compounded by the fact that they suffered a similar one less than a year ago and they were currently on high-alert (because they've only just started bombing Syria).

The knowledge that a network could carry out such a widespread and well-coordinated attack without being preempted, in a situation of maximum alert, will heavy on the minds of any French citizen regardless of whether victims were 118 or 119. Basically, the French security system has been revealed as completely ineffective. That is a huge problem.

No, the number of innocent killed people is never irrelevant. Every single dead person is one dead person too much. Full stop.

Edit: no need to further downvote as parent has changed his statement. Thanks parent poster.

Not all craziness is preventable by a security system.

It's relevant to the families and friends of those killed.

Of course. But by the same reasoning, there is no difference if there were 1 or 118 victims, which is my point. It's not about keeping score.

You could probably phrase that first sentence a little better.

You're right, but attacks that require supplies (especially supplies that aren't dual use, like guns) and coordination between many parties, are the types of attacks that the modern security apparatus is optimized for preventing.

> Basically, the French security system has been revealed as completely ineffective.

How can a country possibly prevent these things while still maintaining a free society?

That might be the case, but this particular strain of craziness was well-publicised and even experienced less than a year ago in the same place. One would expect some antibodies would have been developed by now, especially considering that French foreign policy is not getting any softer.

> How can a country possibly prevent these things while still maintaining a free society?

You can't even prevent them when not being a free society. Its not like terrorism only occurs in free societies.

If you agree that the number is not irrelevant, it would be very kind of you to revoke that statement. It's an insult to the dead and to the families of the dead. Thank you.

Edit: no need to further downvote as parent has changed his statement. Thanks parent poster.

By making the secret services work for their money on real problems, instead of fretting about tapping media pirates and suchlike. By having a foreign policy that does not rely on military intervention at the drop of a hat. By not starting fires all over the place. The list is long and well-known.

> Basically, the French security system has been revealed as completely ineffective.

As an aside, strong suveillance laws were voted earlier this year.

https://translate.google.com/translate?sl=auto&tl=en&js=y&pr...

They can't; even the not free societies - think prisons - are not safe. People that want to do Bad Things will do them. Even if they didn't have guns or weapons, they could've - for example - get enough people into a dinner party or restaurant, have everyone grab a fork, and start stabbing people in the eye.

Terrorism doesn't need weaponry. The only deterrent would be to read people's minds, and you've probably watched Minority Report and other such dystopian scenarios. It's something that needs to be solved at the root, and TBF I don't believe it can be fixed.

> Basically, the French security system has been revealed as completely ineffective. That is what matters.

The attacks are horrible and a security system which effectively prevents them would be just as horrible.

This problem won't be fixed without a major shift in paradigm on either side. Perhaps not in our lifetime but oh how nice it would be...

Yes, I agree. Immense tragedy and I fear the numbers will go up before this is over.

Exactly. Fat lot of good it did to them. Clearly the whole approach is simply wrong.

This is not such a bad idea. Unfortunately, it won't help in controlled places like a concert hall (as tonight) where patrons will be scanned at the door. If not today, undoubtedly they'll start doing a lot more of this.

On the street and in restaurants, that's another story.

If you see and hear everything, you will know nothing.

I don't think any secret service could prevent any isolated individual to make at home, say, Molotov cocktails, and throw them by car in a crowd.

Or carrying concealed could be allowed there too. Scanners didn't stop this.

This kind of thinking led to the War on Terror, which led to a rise in extreme Islam which led to...

> The former eastern Bloc had no terrorist incidents.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Terrorism_in_the_Sovi...

Depends if the French are as disposed to shooting each other as Americans are. Over 10,000 Americans are killed by gun violence every year. This is excluding ~19,000 firearm suicides. Since 9/11, the number of U.S. citizens killed in terrorist attacks each year has never surpassed 75.

The problem is that the 'foreign' policy is irrelevant. The 'foreign' policy is made to appear the state is 'doing something' while MOST of the problem has been in the country for many, many years. Most of the problem is that the youngsters of immigrant stock have not been integrated, and have nothing else to do than turn to crime and/or religion, so are just RIPE for radicalism...

And there's little the state can do about THAT. they can't send war planes to the banlieus -- it's a lot easier to play tough and send warplanes somewhere else, ignoring the local problem of the ghethos.

And I don't have a proposal to make it all better either. It was an unsolvable problem already in france when I grew up there, and there's very little that can be done that hasn't been tried already.

But these weren't isolated individuals. This was an organised network with grenades and assault rifles and the training to handle them.

This is not a Breivik, or a "Shoe Bomber" Reid; this is '70s-style, organised, cross-border terrorism -- the sort of which "we" were supposed to be good at handling by now.

> The former eastern Bloc had no terrorist incidents.

Yeah, the whole Eastern Block was one big terrorist incident All the terrorists in the world combined have nothing on Stalin's death count.

Of course craziness can explode in many ways, but denying that foreign policy is a huge trigger is just disingenuous. How many suicide bombers have you seen in Canada or Sweden? And they have a huge migrant population, larger than France in percentage terms, with various degrees of (non-)integration. But they don't set other countries on fire nor they usually bomb anyone, so they don't get hit by paramilitary networks.

It took Israel security services around 3 years, to stop most bombing and rifle attacks. They are better funded and staffed (forced conscription larger in scope than in France) and that didn't help either . Eventually a massive wall was built (ideologically neither party supported, which gave rise to opportunistic and most corrupt politicians) and as enough of the voters didnt approve with the results the army got approval for countless ground and air raids. The end result was a young generation filled with hatered torwards Israel, now finding other ways to attack.

My point is that to expect security forces to stop such attacks is reasonable up to a point. Escelation on one side builds escelation on the other and eventually its becomes an established norm. The problem Europe has is real, and difficult, tragic.

My heart is with those in Paris, France and Europe . I cannot sleep.

Usually in such a society the state is the terrorist.

HN is indeed increasingly pro-helplessness. My personal hypothesis is that it's actually merely a second-order effect. The community tends toward pro-specialization which leads to the tenet that personal security ought to be conducted by specialists.

I fail to see how arming citizens would prevent bombs from blowing them up.

What the hell is wrong with people, suggesting guns as a solution to unpredictable violent situations where guns wouldn't make any difference.

You arm citizens, now what? Shoot anyone that looks mildly suspicious? Hear a bomb go off, you take out your gun then scare the shit out of people surrounding you, then get shot by somebody else that thinks you're part of the bombing?

According to bjs.gov (Bureau of Justice Statistics), it's been around 11-12,000 gun homicides in recent years, down from around 16,000 a few years ago. Over half of those are black-on-black shootings, mainly gang related.

If you control for these gangland shootings, the per capita rate in the U.S. is about the same as Western Europe and Canada.

The U.S. has a socio-economic problem in the ghetto areas, not a gun problem per se, unless you want to argue that it's too easy for gangbangers to obtain guns.

Law abiding citizens with guns aren't doing most of the shootings. Suicides, that's a different story.

> This is bullshit and you know this.

Please post civilly and substantively, or not at all.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Fair enough; I think I should have said that it's not 'only' foreign policy that matters, it's part fo the factors of course. You can play with thought policies when you are not already crowded with a population of people who feel they are being dealt (rightly, or wrongly, or perceived, or real) the wrong hand.

The real sad thing is that it puts a lot of other people in the wrong sort of focus, all the people who ARE integrated, who made the efforts, who overcame the hurdles of segregation and racism; these are the 'visible' people who'll get in trouble in the next few weeks/months in the daily lives, and perhaps make them wonder if it was such a good idea to identify and 'join' a population that is just angry and looking for a soft target.

The Eastern Bloc had plenty of terrorism, as well as organized crime -- who do you think was supplying all those black markets?

Being a police state is one thing; being an _effective_ police state is something else, much harder (at least in the pre-computer era). In the Soviet case, it didn't help that they didn't really care much about crime...

I'm a bit more optimistic, I think it can be fixed but it will take many years (decades).

They already failed to prevent 600 common murders each year. You could call that completely ineffective or you could call it diminishing returns on investment in security. You can't prevent all of them without an unacceptable number of false positives or harsh restrictions on freedom.

Anyone who's upset by this and doesn't have a personal connection to the victims is not being rational. They should be upset by all other killings - the vast majority which don't get into the international news, let along HN. Those are far more prevalent, and perhaps easier to prevent because they're done by amatures.

I suspect law abiding black citizens in gangland ghettos aren't doing most of the shootings either. What you've done here is to subdivide the whole American population into a group of "not many shooters" and "Higher proportion of shooters". Of course you can always do that, and always find a more specific group that dominates the statistics for any type of crime. But there's a worrying implication that we should somehow allow non-gang members to have guns but ban them from gang members. Or allow people in rich neighborhoods to have guns but ban them from ghettos. Or even, dare I say it, ban them from black people.

Really we need to ban guns from shooters. But there's no way to identify them without catching a lot of harmless people up in the same net. Even poor black gang members can be harmless.

No terrorism that you'd hear of anyway. But the former USSR was anything but the solid unified entity you might think it was. There was tons of strife and occasional acts of terrorism as well as attempts by states to break away from the mothership, all of which were characterized as acts of terror by the leaders. One mans terrorist is another mans freedom fighter, and the former USSR had plenty of the latter.

Plenty of terrorism? USSR funded and commited plenty of terrorism, but I've yet to hear of any terrorist incidents prior to the perestroila..

Soviets did have some organized crime, but they were well, Russians.

GDR, Czechoslovakia, etc, somewhat less inept countries had very little crime and no organized crime to speak of.

There were active shooters in this instance.

Not much you can do about bombs, see Timothy McVeigh.

What was the cost of that "safety" ? There is no such thing as a free lunch it seems

Please give an example of a US terrorist attack on a theater/school/whatever when the citizens stopped the attack.

>> Please give an example of a US terrorist attack on a theater/school/whatever when the citizens stopped the attack.

-----

Here are 12.

http://controversialtimes.com/issues/constitutional-rights/1...

And this is the point I'm trying to make. Adding armed citizens into the mix will just shift the method of killing.

I've seriously considered the "arm your citizens" argument, and honestly can't think of it helping, at all.

These guys aren't your run-of-the-mill muggers; they're actively thinking about inflicting the highest casualties in the most efficient manner.

Today it's shootings since most people wouldn't be armed, tomorrow it's something else that guns won't prevent.

At the very least you have some form of self defense. Do you assume all gun owners to be incompetent oafs? I probably shoot more than most police.

> Plenty of terrorism? USSR funded and commited plenty of terrorism, but I've yet to hear of any terrorist incidents prior to the perestroila..

While the regime exercised strong control of information prior to glasnost, and had plenty of motive to repress information that would indicate weakness of the regime, there are numerous known hijackings, the 1977 Moscow bombings, and others. (While reliable information about responsibility for some, and any broader organizational responsibility that might be behind those clearly responsible for others, is hard to come by, there does seem to be a disproportionate link to Armenia among the known incidents, with some specifically linked to Armenian nationalists.)

If those gang bangers are felons, it's already banned.

It's also illegal to murder someone, yet that doesn't seem to stop those that commit said crime.

Former Soviet national here...

In the Soviet case, it didn't help that they didn't really care much about crime...

What gives you that idea?

Why? Is the death of a loved one any more, or less, tragic because it is one among a hundred?

So citizens carrying guns doesn't stop, or even reduce, the level of crime. The only impact on society is gang warfare and more effective suicides. That sounds like good evidence to ban guns to me - the benefit (fewer deaths) would far outweigh the cost (freedom to own a gun that evidently doesn't protect you from crime).

Won't help you at all against a bomb.

As 'NotHereNotThere said, terrorists attack in a way adequate to the conditions. They have time to prepare, so whatever means of defense you have, they'll strike in a way in which those means won't help you.

"Or allow people in rich neighborhoods to have guns but ban them from ghettos."

You have articulated the opposite of what self defense proponents want. Here in AZ proponents of humans being able to defend themselves got a recent (partial) win with United States v. Verdugo-Urquidez. Talking large groups of people hostage is logistically extremely difficult when even a few % are armed.

And to those who say "they will use bombs instead of attacking armed people"... Should bombs be banned too?

  Terrorism doesn't need weaponry. 

Indeed. Even if you deem well-coordinated attacks with just edged weapons (like the fictional ones in "The Following") unlikely, note that the Multiple-Victim public homicide with the most fatalities in US history used not a single firearm.

(and I'm not talking about 9/11, although it could count as such as well)

Note that in the Pearl High School shooting (item #1), Assistant Principal Joel Myrick had to retrieve his gun from his truck parked off campus because it had to stay outside the "gun-free school zone". It's unclear how many of the 9 victims could have been avoided but for the "gun free school zone."

Ok, so there are some cases where it helped stop the attack. Going a step further, how many of those had AKs and maybe bullet proof vests? Should everyone have armor piercing bullets too?

How many of the attacks happened because it was easy to get guns in the first place?

A terrorist will always be able to procure guns. But what about an unhappy employee, an angry teenager ?

Arming people is no solution to terrorism.

Apparently, armed citizens can help in some cases. Three armed people stopped a nuthead shooting in train in France:

http://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/aug/21/amsterdam-paris...

These three persons were not armed.

My feeling (being a European) is that I would feel much more threatened by the fact than people I can see in the street can have a gun than I would feel safer because some random strangers could protect me with their guns.

From time to time there are some news that someone get stabbed because for having allegedly had a bad look on someone else. With guns, you don't even have the option to run.

Admittedly, I didn't know all the details of this story. It seems that they indeed stopped the attacker with bare hands when his gun jammed. Just shows how much luck they had.

There are civilians lawfully carrying guns in Europe, just not many of them, so be free to already feel threatened. I'm not saying we should give guns to every kid out there, but if 1% of citizens were armed, shooting up 100 people wouldn't be such an easy endeavor.

I think I misread your previous statement. I see you were saying that if we have armed citizens, the offenders will only use methods that don't get them shot, so bombings and other "assailant not present" offensives.

I think, however, that it's a bit of an absolute statement, as even skirmishes in the combat theaters still heavily rely on small arms from both sides. Perhaps it is possible for that to become the world we live in, however I don't see that being the case given past history.

Keep in mind the idea of an armed populace isn't a one dimensional outcome to only defend against terrorists, but as an equalizer against any assailant in a life or death situation, be they foreign or domestic.

I just want people to have the option to defend themselves if they choose. In this case, the French people did not and do not have that option. Gun laws in France makes NYC look like a paradise for gun owners.

> I see you were saying that if we have armed citizens, the offenders will only use methods that don't get them shot, so bombings and other "assailant not present" offensives.

I was saying that if we have armed citizens, the offenders will only use methods that don't get them shot before they strike. So suicide bombings are on the table. Compare with this attack, where the assailants must have known they're not walking out of that one alive.

> I just want people to have the option to defend themselves if they choose.

The core question here is - defend from what? Guns won't help you defend from a terrorist attack anymore than they can help you defend from an asteroid strike. Since we don't use extinction of dinosaurs as a pro-gun argument, we shouldn't use terrorist attacks either. Note that I'm not supporting pro- or anti-gun stance here, I only refuse to accept invalid arguments - from either side.

> defend from what?

From any assailant, be it a mugger, rapist, breaking and entering, "terrorism" (whatever that actually means), an oppressive state, etc.

Would you rather just do nothing and accept whatever comes your way as fate?

I'm not going into the other potential enemies because I recognize there are valid arguments for guns there, but we know that guns won't help you against a) terrorists, because they have the initiative, so they'll attack in a way that is effective, taking into account whatever defense measures targeted population may have, and b) oppressive state, because a state actor has trained troops (as opposed to untrained civilians) with weapons and motorized equipment.

Solzhenitsyn on Stalin, to be honest. _The First Circle_ is fiction, but I find it hard to imagine that he would have described Stalin as not caring about burglars unless that could be imagined of him...

Solzhenitsyn in general gives a sense that the USSR wanted to keep things more or less held together, but wasn't that concerned about people who fell between the cracks.

If you equate Stalin with "the USSR", you're wilfully excluding about 40 years of additional history--history that was very, very different after 1953, and certainly is not captured in gulag literature.

What do you know about crime in the Khrushchev and Brezhnev years? (A whopping 29 years combined.)