The repeated attacks, heavy immigration of refugees...I'm hoping for the best, but I feel like there is a powder keg here. Whether or not it is based in any fact, how this is handled and plays out is a serious concern.
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Not hard to get, but when you're talking about dozens of assault rifles, someone somewhere will know what is going where. If your intelligence people are worth their salt, of course.
> whether some of those people were let in under the guise of "refugees".
Yeah, because it's extremely effective to drop your people for months in a Turkish refugee camp, hoping that 1) they will survive in shocking conditions, 2) they will be processed and sent to France, or 3) they will jump on a dinghy and make it to the other side (when chances are that they will just sink), or 4) they will walk through half a dozen borders on high alert and across unsympathetic countries. Pure tactical genius.
More likely, these people had good passports and went through friendly airports smelling of roses. Once on-site, they were armed by existing networks that the French security apparatus still doesn't know how to infiltrate effectively. That's so much easier than leaving people to their own devices across two continents and hope they'll somehow manage to make it to la Gare du Nord at 10 o'clock on Friday morning.
http://www.cbsnews.com/news/europes-small-arms-plague/ (1998)
https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/europe/getting-a-gun-le...
And many many others, unfortunately. It's a very nasty thing and it will take an extraordinary effort to put this genie back into the bottle.
Open borders has been a blessing in many ways but at the same time it has caused a whole bunch of un-intended side effects and this one and cross border heavy crime are two of the not so nice ones, to put it very mildly. We now have actual gangs with heavy arms in Amsterdam which was a fairly peaceful city not all that long ago.